Author: Andrew Huey

out with the old (couch)

My old couch, which I’ve owned for about 15 years, is now out on the curb, awaiting tomorrow’s bulk pickup. The couch was a hand-me-down, and wasn’t in the greatest shape when the previous owner gave it to me, so it’s probably at least 20 years old.

The new couch should arrive tomorrow. This will be the first time in my life that I’ve actually bought new living-room furniture with my own money! I was originally going to get something relatively expensive, maybe from Crate & Barrel. I wound up deciding to go with something more modest: an Ashley couch from Crazy Deals, a small furniture store conveniently located right downstairs from my apartment.

more phone stuff

Okay, this is hopefully the last post on my phone for a while. (See previous posts for context.) I went out last week to find an adapter to allow me to use a normal pair of headphones with the phone, for listening to music on it. It turns out that a normal $5 Radio Shack adapter, plugged into the Motorola USB adapter, only allows sound to come through one channel. I’m not 100% sure why this is, but it’s annoying. For now, I decided to just give up, and bought a pair of Motorola headphones that plug directly into the USB jack on the phone. They cost $30 from Best Buy. The sound is pretty good, but the earbud design doesn’t fit my ears that well.

Looking around on the internet now, I think I could have just bought something like this, but I didn’t see it in either Best Buy or Radio Shack last week, so I’d probably have to mail-order it. I may still do that, though I don’t think I can return the earphones now, since I tossed all the packaging.

new monitor

My old Planar LCD monitor died this week, so I went out to Best Buy and bought a new LG monitor, a 19″ widescreen. This new monitor doesn’t have any more screen real estate than the old one, but the widescreen thing is interesting. I’m not sure I like it better than the standard aspect ratio on the old monitor.

I’m also thinking that I may not have got the color calibration quite right; I went through the whole process of setting it up, using the LG software, but it still looks a bit too pink. Maybe I’ll have to try it again. And maybe I need to look at the video card driver too, and see if anything there needs to be adjusted.

I dropped off the old monitor at the Somerset County Recycling facility today. Conveniently, it died just a few days before the monthly drop-off day. I’d never been down there to drop anything off before. It went relatively smoothly; I just had to wait in line behind a few other cars for a few minutes, then they just took the monitor out of my car and off I went. (On my way out, the line had gotten much longer, so I think I need to remember to get there before 10am, if I ever have to go back.) I was surprised at how many computers they had piled up there. I saw an old first-gen iMac, a blue & white G3 tower, and a big pile of beige/grey/black boxes of various models. I’m hope they’re doing something responsible with them, and not just burying them in a hole somewhere.

Phone follow-up

Okay, so it took almost an hour to sync just under 2GB worth of songs to my SLVR. I guess that’s not so bad if you’re not going to do it too often. The interface for listening to the songs isn’t great. Once a song starts playing, most of the screen is eaten up by a big V-Cast logo. There’s a little control panel at the bottom of the screen, but they don’t show the artist/album/song info anywhere. Weird. I don’t see where that would be too hard to implement, and it’s pretty obvious that you’d want that stuff on the screen.

Oh, and the phone doesn’t come with an adapter to let you plug in a set of standard headphones. It does come with an adapter that lets you use anything with a 2.5mm plug, but no adapter for a 3.5mm plug.

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.