Author: Andrew Huey

Phone fun

I bought a 2GB MicroSD card for my SLVR this week. I don’t really need to use the phone as a music player, since I already have an iPod Nano and a regular iPod, but the card was cheap, so I figured I’d give it a try.

The phone only syncs with Windows Media Player, while I usually use iTunes, so I had to pull some music into WMP first. I just pointed in at my iTunes library, and it managed to pull it all in without any trouble.

Of course, it ignored all the Apple DRM’d files. It also ignored the non-DRM’d iTunes Plus songs too, which isn’t surprising, but was a bit disappointing. There ought to be a way to pull those into WMP, but apparently it’s non-trivial.

I attached the phone to my computer, and WMP detected it fine, and saw that it had a 2GB card. I allowed WMP to just shuffle a bunch of random songs out to it. The first attempt at syncing failed for some reason. I’m giving it another try right now, and it’s working, but it’s going slowly. I think part of the reason for that is that it’s converting MP3s to WMA files on the fly as it syncs. (At least, I *think* that’s what it’s doing.)

While I’m waiting for that to finish, I’m watching Apple’s 20 minute iPhone tour. It looks pretty good, but I’m still not buying one, until it works on a faster network and costs a bit less!

Here’s a link to some fun iPhone coverage on Engadget, and more on Gizmodo.

asp.net books and tools

I haven’t had much spare time for .Net books lately, but I decided to try and make some progress on Rocky Lhotka’s Expert C# Business Objects book last night. I’d read the first two chapters a while ago. I just started into chapter three last night, reading through his material on .Net remoting. Interesting stuff, and a reasonably understandable explanation. There’s a DNR TV episode featuring Rocky that I should probably watch too.

Meanwhile, a consultant I’m working with is encouraging me to check out SubSonic. I played around with an earlier version of this awhile back. It looks like they’ve made some progress on it, and it seems to be gaining in popularity. I wish there was a book on SubSonic, or at least some organized documentation, but I guess I really just need to download it again and play around, and maybe look through the forums.

My problem is that I really don’t have any time for “playing around” during the work day, and I usually don’t have the mental energy to mess around with this stuff at home most nights. (Well, I guess I just have to work on that! More caffeine, maybe?)

Inbox to zero?

I’m down to 632 messages left in my Lotus Notes inbox! I think I’m doing a pretty good job of categorizing things (for reference), getting rid of unnecessary stuff, and culling out the actionable items. It’s taken me a while though; I guess I started working through my inbox about a month ago.

more GTD

There’s a good new article on GTD over at money.cnn.com.

I like the think I’m doing OK with GTD at work, but I’m definitely NOT stress-free. I think I’m managing my time better, and getting more stuff done, but there’s just so much chaos around me that it’s really hard to get that “mind like water” thing going.

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’!)