new phone

I got myself a new Motorola SLVR a couple of days ago. My old phone was working fine, but it was several years old, and wasn’t compatible with Verizon’s Mobile Web 2.0. I had just gotten an e-mail from Verizon saying that they were going to discontinue Mobile Web 1.0, so I figured now was a good time to pick up a new phone. Plus, having a new phone (with a new contract) effectively prevents me from getting dragged into Steve Job’s reality distortion field, and blowing $600 on an iPhone.

I haven’t done too many exciting things with the SLVR yet, but I did manage to hook it up to my computer and transfer a song to it, using the instructions found here and with a spare USB cable. And I tried to get BitPim working, but didn’t have any luck. (I didn’t spend too much time on it though.)

I may pick up a 2GB MicroSD card for it, and load some more music onto it, but I really don’t need to do that, since I already have an iPod Nano.

Verizon iobi

A while back, I considered signing up for Verizon’s iobi service. I didn’t do it at the time, but I’ve been thinking about it again. I just checked the Verizon site, and some random blog posts talking about it, and realized something that wasn’t obvious the last time I looked at it: if you want to use the voice mail feature, you have to pay for that separately. So, instead of just being $8 per month, it’s more like $14 or so, depending on how much voice mail is. (I think it’s $6/month.)

That Cablevision VoIP thing is looking better and better. Most of the stuff you get with iobi comes free with Optimum Voice.

Dynamically Created Controls in ASP.NET

I was working on a project last week that involved dynamically creating a bunch of controls on an ASP.NET page, then trying to, um, do stuff with them. (For lack of a better explanation…)

This article does a good job of explaining something that I’d kind of missed at first: dynamically-created controls don’t stay on a page after postback, normally. The “Page” class is stateless, destroyed after rendering the page. I didn’t wind up using this guy’s solution; I actually realized that I didn’t need to be dynamically creating the controls at all. I’d copied my page from another page that *did* need to create controls dynamically, but after I looked at my own page, I realized I just didn’t need to do things that way.

I’ve been doing more ASP.NET programming than usual lately, because I’m trying to finish up a project for a big client at work, and it’s kind of tricky and time-sensitive. Because of that, I’m just doing it (mostly) myself instead of farming it out to one of the other programmers. I’m having some fun with it. Aside from the dynamically created controls, I’m also playing around with generics a bit. This article by Jesse Liberty was helpful for setting up a simple collection using generics.

12 Byzantine Rulers

For some reason, I was thinking today about an article I read some time ago, about a series of pocasts on some area of history. After a bunch of searching, I think this was the article. It’s about a podcast on the history of the Byzantine Empire. This series has been mentioned in a few different places, so the Times article may or may not be where I heard of it. Either way, it’s something different to listen to, whenever I get tired of tech and comic book podcasts.

I was looking around a bit today at the stuff on iTunesU, and some of that might be interesting too. I listened to parts of a few random lectures; most of them sound like… college lectures. I suppose that’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but it’s not compelling “daily commute” listening. I’m tempted to listen to this Data Structures course from Berkeley, just to refresh my memory on this stuff. Maybe I can find a class on design patterns. I’m too old to have learned that stuff in college; design patterns didn’t really take off until about five years after I graduated. (Gotta keep learnin’!)

Memory Almost Full

I bought the new Paul McCartney album, Memory Almost Full, from iTunes, the “deluxe” version for $15. Right after I bought it, I found out that eMusic has it too, though just the basic album. I could have downloaded it from eMusic under my monthly download allowance, and it would have cost about $3.25, given my current plan. I don’t really feel bad about paying $15 for it, though, since it’s a good album, and eMusic doesn’t have the extra stuff you get from iTunes.

Meanwhile, this guy doesn’t really seem too impressed with McCartney’s new album. I disagree with almost everything he’s saying here. I do think that there are a couple of really catchy songs on the album: “Dance Tonight” and “Ever Present Past” strike me as being at least as good as anything by Gnarls Barkley. And I think the album stands up pretty well as a whole. And I know it’s about the “art” and not the distribution, but I think it’s kind of cool that he’s on iTunes and eMusic and YouTube and all that.

Jott

I signed up for a Jott account today. Jott is a service that lets you send e-mail to yourself (or others) by calling a toll-free number from your cell phone. The email gets run through a speech-to-text translator, so you read it, or click a link in the e-mail to listen to it.

I stumbled across this service today while I was looking for something else. It might come in handy. Part of the whole GTD idea is to have a way to capture thoughts pretty much wherever you are. Jott could be useful for that, if I’ve got my cell phone on me, but no pen & paper.

And I’m hoping Jott doesn’t sell my cell phone number to anyone for marketing purposes. (I’m pretty sure they won’t; they do seem to be a legit company with a reasonable privacy policy.)