Author: matthew

New of the weird: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080227/D8V2OQ1G0.html

Come on. You know you wish you thought of it first. Steal 100 tons of Nutella? Yeah, that’s a serious craving.

Update: Today, October 14, 2008, a Digis repair tech came out to make sure they’d taken back their antenna from off our house as a result of this blog entry. He actually had a copy of the discussion with him, and informed my wife that a Vice-President had received a copy of the email chain entitled “[Motorola II] 5.2 freq dishing?”, looked up the linked blog entry (this one), and become very unhappy.

The truth hurts, Digis. If you were to modify your overbearing bandwidth-throttling policy to match twenty-first century needs, you would serve your customers better.

As many of you know, I recently moved from Tooele, UT to Riverton, UT. These two homes are, in fact, less than seventeen miles away from one another, but require approximately one hour to travel between due to the intervening mountain range.

Someone should build a tunnel.

My wife and I had been happy Comcast customers for two and a half years since ditching Qwest, who withdrew more than $300 from our bank account for phone service we didn’t have. Although their upload speed was crap, Comcast had the bandwidth necessary to make our Vonage line run without any glitching, and also provided some QOS measures to ensure that even if we were downloading something or watching a video from the ‘net, we could still use our phone.

In hindsight, I guess we were living in broadband nirvana. Our VoIP phone just worked. Our internet connection just worked. We’d had a problem the first summer with overheating in the network gear in the switching cabinet down the road due to a string of 100+ degree days, but it had not recurred the following summer. My kids could watch Flash cartoons on the ‘net, send emails, surf web sites, and so forth, while I could download ISOs for the latest Linux distribution and my wife could listen to our voice mail in her inbox. Every so often, we decided to sit down and watch fully-legal streaming movies or TV shows from iTunes or Netflix. I caught up on all of “Heroes”, even though I never sat down in front of my TV to watch, by watching the show from my Netflix player on my computer.

I think this is fairly typical use for a modern broadband-connected household. We have not used P2P file-sharing apps in our home since I got a Cease & Desist from Universal for downloading The Hulk in 2003. We’re not bandwidth pigs, but the home broadband market of 2008 is a whole lot more bandwidth-intensive than the home broadband market of 1998, and we’re along for the ride.

After our move, I called Comcast to ask about service in my area. After a lot of questions — mostly involving “which development is your new home in?” by clueless salespeople who couldn’t understand that our new home has been here since 1991 and there was nothing around when it was built — and a truck-roll from Comcast, we were told that service was not available to our home. And that, because we live on a private road, service would not be available unless we arranged an easement and payment for running the line.

Well, crap. That option is out the window. A few of our new neighbors are opposed to making our private road a public road, and the city of Riverton seems more than content to continue charging us taxes for services like secondary water that we can’t use unless we work with our neighbors to get an easement for the service. Alas. I need to meet all my neighbors this summer and see what we can do about getting this dirt road paved, with easements in place for various utilities, because the current arrangement isn’t ideal.

I set about investigating broadband options. These were quickly reduced to three possibilities:

1. Qwest DSL. My mother had this. It was fine, it was reasonably fast, a little expensive. If I didn’t have an intense distaste for Qwest due to the aforementioned bank-account theft, I’d have just picked them and been done with it. I can have my choice of ISPs on DSL for an additional fee, so there’s some choice there.
2. Hughes broadband satellite Internet. I used to sell Internet based on this service when I worked for Interactive Satellite Internet Service back in 1995. There’s something they don’t tell you in the TV ads: latency is killer, and often uploads are quite slow. At around half a second round-trip-time, this kind of latency in broadband is fine for streaming video and typical household uses, but I do remote-console work and online games as two of my main broadband activities. Nope, that one is right out.
3. A little ISP called “Digis High-Speed Internet“. The ads looked great. They had referral deals, reasonable costs for the equipment rental, a bit of a high initial set-up fee, but it wasn’t Qwest. I read the Internet FAQ on their web site, and became aware that they throttled connections after a certain amount of usage.

All right, I think I found our service. The throttling was of no concern because, as a fairly typical family with an Internet connection, our usage wasn’t like those people who leave BitTorrent going all day to seed infringing videos and stuff. My mother is involved in trading stocks, so maybe her ticker will suck up some bandwidth, but that kind of usage is very typical these days.

We installed the service. I eventually put in a call to tech support because my uploads seemed to be throttled (they weren’t, I just had to re-set QOS on my router), and everything seemed perfect for about a week. Fast up, fast down, working as expected. Wow, this is a great alternative to DSL!

Then one day, our phone sounded choppy. I wondered about it, but it cleared up the next morning. Callers said that we sounded fine, but on our end we couldn’t hear them. Then randomly, again, it went choppy.

I’d seen some behavior like this on Comcast if I hadn’t prioritized packets well on my router. I double-checked my QOS (Quality of Service) settings. They were in order. Why was I getting this random choppiness?

One four-hour call to Digis tech support later, and I learned that I was hitting their bandwidth throttle every day. According to Digis, typical usage of their service is less than 500 megabytes, so they throttle once at 500MB, reducing performance from 5 megabits down/2 up to 512kbps down/256kbps up. Again at 1GB transferred in a 24-hour period, they shut your connection down to 256kbps down, 128kbps up.

This throttling arrangement — whatever hardware they are using — does not honor QOS for VoIP. Which means that if you’re getting throttled, your Lego Star Wars video is getting in the way your conversation with his great-grandmother. In our case, since QOS is working right at our little router, she can hear me perfectly, but all I hear from her is out-of-order gibberish.

This type of throttling is not gentle traffic shaping like I’m used to. It is a punitive degradation of service. And I strongly suspect that Digis sets their caps this low in order to mask very real problems they have with their uplink and Canopy deployments: namely over-selling available bandwidth. It’s the most logical explanation for such diminutive throttle levels. They lack the capacity to handle peak loads from subscribers, so they throttle to ensure that their under-sized pipe is not overwhelmed.

It’s basic ISP capacity planning, but in this case, execution is faulty. In the first place, bandwidth has gotten so cheap that you should simply purchase enough bandwidth to handle your peak loads, rather than squeezing the customer because you don’t want to invest in your infrastructure.

I have not experienced performance this slow since I was on dialup. Seriously. I used to have two phone lines and use SLIRP (with the endorsement of my ISP) to join them so that I could get 108kbps connections. That old connection that I did in like 1995 seems faster than Digis when I’m throttled.

Now, the reason it feels so much slower is pretty clear. Whatever the throttling product is they have in place seems to follow a “first in, first out” algorithm. If you are just surfing the web, there is not a substantial loss of service. However, if you have a download in the background — like Windows Update, the last one of which was over 300MB for my aging Windows XP computer — that download ends up taking priority over any other traffic because it was the first thing going, and the part taking up the majority of the connection when it’s otherwise idle. Subsequent pages actually time out because it takes so long to retrieve them with a background download going on.

I tried negotiating with them: “Can you just prioritize VoIP traffic so that my phone doesn’t get all choppy when you throttle?” Short answer: no, “bandwidth is bandwidth” said the tech after an hour on the phone and even more time spent talking to his supervisor. “Can you implement QOS so at least my incoming telephone traffic is not waiting on the throttle to open so that I can hear callers clearly?” The tech’s less-than-helpful response was to tell me that if I needed more bandwidth, they could provide unrestricted bandwidth for the first (if I recall correctly) 12GB per month, with an additional $5 per gigabyte cost after that.

Hmm, let’s think about this. A VoIP call is somewhere near 100kbps. That’s bi-directional, so a total of 200kbps/sec. That’s around 90 megabytes per hour, plus overhead. Admittedly, one would have to be a heavy talker to hit that cap on VoIP alone, but an hour or two per day on the phone is pretty typical for our family. That’s about five and a half gigs per month, just telephone traffic. Which would leave only four and a half gigs available for everything else we do on the Internet, until we start paying extortionate prices.

If I wanted some other plan than the “attach a vacuum cleaner to your wallet” one proposed above (last month’s total transfer would have bled us of a total of $135 using that brilliant ploy), according to this tech, I needed to purchase a “business” level of service. He transferred me to the voice mail of the business services rep. This rep called me back a couple of hours later, told me that business service was around $100/month, and that it still throttled connections. In this class of service, however, it throttled them after your first gigabyte of transfer. The second level — the punitive “Dear lord I wish I were on dialup” setting that can’t handle background transfers — kicks in just like the personal plan, but at 2GB per day.

Yeah, that’s useful. Crank your business customers down to ISDN speeds. If Digis stakeholders ever read this blog, here’s a clue why your “business” class of service isn’t selling well: it’s not business-class service to expel your bandwidth-policy diarrhea on your customers the moment they transfer a total of 2GB of data. I could lease a business T1 line in downtown Salt Lake City for prices similar to your “business class” service, and be guaranteed 1.644Mbps both ways, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with a bandwidth cap of around 537.51 gigabytes per month. That happens to be the theoretical maximum throughput of a T1 for a 31-day month. This would be a better option than your service, and equally cost-effective.

Take, for instance, this web site. I transfer somewhere between 4GB to 20GB every single day between several web sites. This is a reality of living in the twenty-first century. And usage is only going to continue to grow, not stagnate at 1998 “a hundred megabytes per day or so, max” levels. Right now, the Digis cap means I can’t watch an entire Netflix movie without it invoking the cap somewhere in the middle. My daughter can watch perhaps an episode or two of her favorite anime before the throttle is invoked, causing lag so bad she has to go do something else for half an hour while her show is paused so that she can actually watch it without constant sputters.

For the near term, I think I should save my $5 a day and downgrade my service to their “high speed” instead of the “ultra high speed”. I hit the throttle threshold halfway through the day anyway, and I may as well save some money rather than paying for “ultra high speed” internet that, truly, is anything but.

Digis, I’m pissed off at you.

Almost enough to be very nice and ask Qwest to come back to me. But like an abusive girlfriend who’s bad with money, if I took her back, she’s not going to have access to my checking account again.

Almost.

OK, this past week an irritation of mine finally came to a head. I loaned my car to someone who is much shorter than me, and she high-centered the vehicle on a snowbank due to not being familiar with the vehicle. Although there were a number of things that could have been done differently, this one stood out to me:

The side-view mirrors were positioned so as to be totally useless!

One of the side effects of purchasing my Honda Insight in 2002 was that, due to poor rear visibility, I had to really learn how to use my side-view mirrors for the first time. I’d never realized how much I ignored them and relied on glancing over my shoulder rather than keeping my eyes near the road and using my side mirrors as they were intended.

Purchasing a tiny, efficient, light-weight economy car transformed me as a driver. I realized that with only 1800 pounds of car underneath me, I needed to be as aware as possible of my surroundings or I was going to get squished by the legions of sport utility vehicles and 18-wheelers on the road.

In short, I needed to learn to think like a motorcyclist.

So lesson ONE in my defensive driving course: adjust your mirrors correctly.

Most of us learned to adjust our mirrors the same way: “leave a slice of your car in the side-view mirror”. This is utter baloney! I mean, think about it: what is the goal of your side-view mirror? That’s right, to see vehicles at angles behind your field of vision. Most people have around 100 degrees of stereoscopic vision, with nearly 180 degrees of peripheral + stereoscopic. The goal of your mirrors is to make you aware of the 180 degrees that you can’t see at any given time.

If you leave a big slice of your car in the rear-view mirror, that’s wasted space that could be used to reduce the size of the blind spot on that side of the car.

Now, I know you can go to Cartalk and use their advice: pull up next to a line of parked cars, and ensure that when the headlight is disappearing from the rear-view mirror, it’s appearing in the side-view mirror. Meh, whatever, that’s too much hassle, particularly if I’m borrowing a car. However, the principle is sound: I want to see some portion of any vehicle behind me in my rear and side-view mirrors.

My method for setting side-view mirrors: 1. Ensure my rear-view mirror has as good a view as possible of the area immediately behind me. On my Insight, a combination of a very small mirror plus a sharply reduced amount of visibility due to large aluminum beams means the rear-view just isn’t as useful as it should be. One day, I must replace it with a wide-angle rear-view mirror. Preferably one that has a thermometer, directional indicator, and the voice of KITT.

2. Cock my head way over to the left, and adjust my left-side mirror so that I see perhaps the top 1/4 of the mirror looking at sky (this is just so I can see when climbing an incline, and very tall vehicles), and a tiny sliver of the back of my own vehicle. Now, note, when I return my head to vertical, I can’t see my own vehicle in the rear-view mirrors at all. This is good! It means that I’m covering more area with my mirrors and can be more aware of what’s behind me.

3. Cock my head over to the right, and do the same for the right mirror. It has a wider angle, which is nice to cover the bigger blind spot on that side of the car.

Congratulations! You’re done! It takes some getting used to, but once you stop robbing yourself of visibility lost to the “keep a slice of car in your mirror” myth, you can do things like: * Change lanes with only a quick glance of just your eyes over to the right to ensure a vehicle isn’t beside you… because you have no blind spot! * Back up with confidence without having to spin around in your seat and stare out the back window (which, in many trucks, doesn’t exist!). * Easily verify your position versus all other vehicles in your area, without having to turn your head and take your eyes off the road in front of you for long.

Next Defensive Driving tip: why driving too far below the prevailing traffic speed isn’t usually “defensive driving”, but can be reckless disregard for the welfare of your fellow drivers. Stay tuned!

In other news on an otherwise slow Sunday, Pakistan broke the Internet.

This year we filed our income tax return, and wonder of wonders, we’re getting a substantial refund. The reasons for this refund are pretty clear: we paid cash for Christy’s schooling last year, refinanced our home to take advantage of relatively low interest rates, and had a number of non-reimbursed business expenses. But it’s still not something we try to plan on in our budget.

Anyway, we had decided beforehand to split the refund the same way we’d done in previous years: 50% for family funds (pay down debt, add to our budget buffer, emergency fund, whatever), then the remaining 50% is split between the two of us. This means I got a bit more than in previous years, and more than enough to finally afford the replacement synthesizer that I’ve wanted to get for the past month.

So here’s the tally:

• Alesis Fusion 8HD, “Sweetwater Edition”, 88-key synthesizer. I got it from http://sweetwater.com/. As much as I love to support local businesses, nobody could touch this deal. $999.99, includes the maximum memory upgrade ($200 value), all of the Hollow Sun sound packs pre-installed, and the latest Hollow Sun “Nebulae” house/trance patch set ($50 value) included free. This puts Sweetwater very close to or better than eBay sellers for this 88-key synth, so I went with the company that could give me the full manufacturer’s warranty on the instrument. You gotta realize, I’ve never actually owned my own synthesizer. The closest I’ve come is computer-based soundfonts and some VST plugins for Cakewalk. I’ve wanted a synthesizer since I used to play on Quince Orchard High School’s old Yamaha DX7 and Ensoniq SQ-80. Now I’m finally getting my own seventeen years later, and I’m thrilled.
• Alesis Sumo 300 amp. Originally retailing for $500, this budget amp puts out around 150 watts RMS, has some decent built in effects and stereo pass-through, and a 15-inch woofer for resonant lows. And I picked it up for $200 with free shipping. There are some complaints about it online, and they boil down into two categories: if you drive the amp too hard for too long in a warm place, it will shut down, and it isn’t as loud as a 300-watt amplifier should be. Yep, the problem here is they rated it by its max wattage, not RMS. I figure it will be fine for a stage monitor as long as I don’t turn it to 11 and leave it there, and will pump out plenty of volume for rehearsals and solo venues where it can serve triple-duty for a mic, guitar, and keyboard.
• A couple of extra MIDI cables. I already own two 20′ MIDI cables that I bought years ago, but I figured it was time to buy some new ones.
• Four 10 foot balanced cables. Now that I finally understand the difference between a TRS balanced 1/4″ cable and an unbalanced cable, I’ll be paying more attention to my wiring to keep noise out.

Now, I also picked up a Proteus module a few weeks ago. I thought it was a good deal at $90. Well, unfortunately rather than the pop/rock Proteus/1, I ended up picking up the Proteus/2 due to not knowing the difference. The /2 only has orchestral sounds. I’m pretty sure I can figure out a way to use it, but I’m also pretty sure I can pick up that whole 4MB sample set for cheap and put it into my Fusion, then re-sell the Proteus to someone else. That’s what I get for not doing my research!

I also have a 49-key MIDI controller keyboard, and I just installed “Ubuntu Studio” on a spare laptop in hopes I can find a good replacement for my aging Cakewalk Sonar recording setup. I want to get off the upgrade treadmill a bit and stabilize for a few years with a setup that won’t need to change.

Things I still need: * A good 4-place mobile rack. 1U will be the slide-tray for my laptop, 1U will be the surge suppressor, and the other 2 slots are for future expansion (synths, reverbs, whatever). I think I found a good deal on one locally for $75 when new it’s $240 for this SKB rack. * A DLS Rotosim. This is the reason I want to be in stereo on stage, for a wailing Leslie effect. I don’t want to haul around a heavy real rotary cabinet, and this little pedal has to be heard to be believed. I previewed it at a local music store, and if I had an extra $300 I would have picked it up.

I’m like a kid at Christmas.

I looked at the calendar. I was certain the day was approaching, soon.

You see, in March of 2006, the little company I work for — let’s call them “Spittle Systems” — was acquired by UltraMegaCorp, LLC, Inc. BFG. That same month, I was required to relinquish my Blackberry in favor of something supported by UMC.

Now, my venerable Blackberry was not a bad device. It had a reasonable color screen, excellent email capability, and worked fine as a phone. Of course, like many of the smartphones of the day, you were best served by a headset if you wanted to talk on the phone, because the idea of holding a hunk of plastic roughly the size of a sub-compact car to the side of one’s face doesn’t appeal to everybody.

I was a glutton for punishment, and enjoyed the eventual permanent grease stain from my face on the screen. I felt that it gave some polish to the otherwise matte-finish of the screen, and besides, it gently discouraged random strangers from wanting to borrow my phone.

Him: “Hey, man, I need to make a call, can I borrow your phone?” Me: “Sure, dude, here you go”. (oil drips from the screen as I pull out a phone big enough to drive a small family around in.) Him: “Huh, uh, OK, I think I’ll borrow someone else’s phone that hasn’t been dipped in molten Crisco and converted into a Studebaker. Thanks anyway.”

Plus, I developed some enormous muscles on my right arm from lifting that brick to my face and putting it back again. Save the rude jokes. If I haven’t developed enormous muscles on one side of my body since the age of 10 from doing THAT, I ain’t gonna.

Anyway, I disliked some of the PIM functions of the Blackberry, but I admired the intuitive little scroll wheel, one-handed operation, and total lack of any need for a stylus with the device. Plus, the unit worked well to block the sunlight when wedged in the window of my car, though the car developed some suspension problems and a pronounced lean to one side as a result of this frequent use. Despite being generally satisfied, I did long for the ease-of-use of my old Palm (some model of which I’d used continuously since 1998). Some things worked better.

Well, after much research, I decided on a Sprint PPC6700. I was excited! It had a ton of features: wifi, bluetooth, web browser, email, PIM functions, camera, and expandability via a mini-SD slot. I waited with great expectations for the arrival of my new phone. And finally, a large UPS truck pulled up and unloaded the box containing my new phone.

I charged. I read forums. I found the nifty hacks. I tethered. I liked the phone a lot, and thought it was fantastic.

For three days.

Then reality began to sit in. And now I sit, two years later, having done my level best to learn to like this piece of … plastic. But those efforts were in vain. The phone, operating system, and synch software SUCK.

PPC6700, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

1. Duplicated appointments. Just this morning, I synced the phone to find that my sole appointment for Friday morning was synchronized twenty-seven times. I now have over two dozen of the same appointment sitting on my phone waiting to be deleted. Yay.
2. As a result of these duplicated appointments, every single attendee of our Friday morning meeting has those twenty-seven appointments in their inbox. Except now, I appear to be the organizer, instead of the project manager who’s supposed to handle it.
3. Hardware reliability. I have replaced this phone three times under Sprint’s hardware replacement program (that $7 a month really came in handy…).
   • Phone #1: Worked OK for a while. I used it heavily. Then some keys stopped working after a few months. I worked around it. Then it began butt-dialing everybody in my contact list just for fun, even when it was locked. And finally, one day I reset the unit because it locked up, and it never turned on again.
   • Phone #2: I had it only a few weeks. The joystick stopped working, and I use the stylus as little as possible.
   • Phone #3: This little phone could not figure out its alarms. It would miss ringing an alarm, and then the next time I pressed the power button, every tone from every missed alarm would ring simultaneously, resulting in approximately five minutes of absolutely blaring cacophony. Of course, several of my alarms are set to repeat if I don’t acknowledge them, so they repeated the requisite three times. Worse, if I reset the unit to try to shut it up, the moment it booted up it would feel it was necessary to begin said alarms anew, and include a few from previous days which I may possibly have missed prior to the reboot. And… replaced.
   • Phone #4: This is the one I’m using now. It quietly does its job, but has many of the same problems I list elsewhere.
4. Contact list duplication. Do I really need every person in my contact list listed THREE TIMES the moment I sync? And the moment I sync again, do I really need all of those duplicated contacts I so painstakingly deleted from my phone put back again?
5. Contact list sorting. Why is my brother Jay listed in several times, one time under “Barnson”, and another under his wife’s name, then a third time with a totally blank contact entry but the full information available if I edit it?
6. No “alphabetize by X” available. Some of my contacts are alphabetized by their first name. Some by the last name. Others by company. There are at least two that end up listed as “Firstname (Utes)” in the contact list because the first line of the Notes field was “(Utes)”, referring to club members. Some others are organized by category, like they are named “Business” or “Personal”. And as far as I’ve been able to figure out — or any of my co-workers who have similar phones, for that matter — there is no way to change this preference either by contact or for the whole list.
7. Duplicates in my task list. Why do I have “Call John re: lunch Tuesday” duplicated five times in my task list, when yesterday it was only there once? And the task is complete, how come these new five copies say I haven’t called him yet?
8. Multi-clicking. Here is the procedure to enter a new task:
   • press Start button
   • Press the “down” joystick button thirteen times to get to “Programs”, then click.
   • Press the “down” joystick button six times, then “right” one time, then click to select “Tasks”. I don’t know why this isn’t a default drop-down item like “Messages” or “Internet Explorer” (which has five different ways to get it launched from this phone, no less), but it’s not.
   • Press the left shoulder button to select “New” to enter a new task.
   • Since I dislike using the on-screen keyboard, slide the keyboard out to type.
   • Start typing. A few characters in, of course, I realize that in “Task” view, if I slide the keyboard, even though it LOOKS like “Subject” is still the focus, it’s not. I need to press the joystick down once, then back up again, to get focus. Or else break out the stylus.
   • Finish typing. Look for a way to associate this task item with a Contact so that I can have a one-click method to know who I’m supposed to contact when I complete this Task. Oh, that’s right, I can’t. Bollocks. In the “Notes” field, I type in the name of the person and pray to the heathen gods that I can find the person when I complete this task due to the contact sorting problem listed above.
   • Click OK. Right, that was easy.
   • Oh, look. Once again, I completed some mundane task, and the screen won’t refresh. Looks like it’s time to reset the phone again.
9. Too many lockups and resets. Look, I realized a long time ago that I really can’t use third-party applications with this phone without it turning itself into an expensive, non-functional brick. So now I don’t. But just using the default applications, an awful lot of the time the screen won’t refresh and I have to reset the unit just to get it working again.
10. On-again, off-again DUN. Sometimes, tethering the phone via Bluetooth or USB just works. Yay! Other times, it refuses to recognize despite multiple resets, and shows up as an “unrecognized USB device” on my computer, or it will randomly lose its Bluetooth binding to my computer and I get to set it up all over again.
11. Although there’s a nifty “add attendee” item to add people from my contact list to a calendar item (yet not a Task, why?), never once has the phone attempted to notify those ‘attendees’ in any way, shape, or form I could gather.
12. For every other function on the smartphone, if a drop-down list is shown, selecting the drop-down category and pressing the “down” joystick direction results in a display of available options. Not so, the Calendar application! If you select the time and press “down”, it takes you down to the end time, or perhaps the “All Day?” field which responds the way it should.
13. I just discovered that if I change a meeting and have an attendee, the phone tries to notify attendees. So first you have to create it, then you have to change it, and then it notifies everyone. Twenty-seven times. Unless they are on a different system than the shared Exchange system you’re using, in which case it lets you think that the attendee is notified without actually doing anything.
14. Once you launch an application, it never exits unless you go to System-Settings-Memory-Running Applications and kill it. Yeah, I know “magic button” fixes this… I used Magic Button for months before getting sick of the fact that it only works half the time and, as a third-party application, causes its own set of freezes and screen corruption which requires a reset to overcome. Anyway, there is not enough memory to run all these applications, so the phone gets slower, and slower, and slower until finally you reset it out of frustration if you don’t know the specific path to clean things up.
15. MP3 playback hiccups. For a device which is having a lot of trouble being a PIM, maybe it could at least do multimedia halfway decently? It is not to be, MP3 playback is only seamless if everything else on the phone is turned off, you don’t have any calendar or task entries, the phone itself is in “flight mode” so that it doesn’t check in with the cell towers, and the amount of free storage is huge. And then… periodically it will hiccup anyway. Even with the latest firmware.
16. Every business I ever call requires me to navigate a phone tree to get the person that I want. Why do you shut off the number pad once my call is in progress? That’s just silly.
17. I can change my color scheme, sure. But it only changes the “Today” screen and the borders, so everything else still has that same default shade of blue regardless of theme.
18. The “camera” in this “camera phone” sucks. The only way to get a good, non-blurry picture is a still-life in the bright outdoors, with the camera resting on a solid surface and absolutely no motion or wind.
19. No stereo Bluetooth.
20. More butt-dials per hour than any other phone unless you lock the screen.
21. Funky headphone connector that nobody else uses. Meaning the only place you can buy headphones that fit is the Sprint Store.
22. How many ways do I really need to launch Internet Explorer? Do I really need a side-button, Start Menu button, Audible Player link, GetGood launcher, PocketMSN launcher, Windows Media album art link, and Software Store link to be able to get there? Really? We all know you can use the Internet on the phone, it’s about the only thing that works reliably and consistently.
23. Storage bloat with Sprint crapware, leading to frequent “almost out of storage memory” errors.
24. Huge delay loading MP3 ringtones. If I have an MP3 ringtone for someone, I better pick it up fast or they have already gone to voicemail.
25. If I set an alarm, I expect it to keep ringing until I acknowledge it. It’s there for a reason. I don’t expect it to shut off after 30 seconds, come back 30 seconds later, shut off after 30 seconds, come back another 30 seconds later, and then give up with just a dialog box on the screen telling me I missed my alarm.
26. Some keyboard keys get stuck for no reason, notably “caps lock”.
27. I cannot double-tap “caps” to turn off caps lock. I have to hold down the little red dot key and press Caps at the same time. And, as mentioned above, sometimes that simply doesn’t work.
28. Battery case cover breaks easily.
29. Holster doesn’t hold the phone well. It’s more of a “let-go-ster” than a holster.
30. It’s thick. Really thick.
31. I can’t turn off the sound of clicks when I do things like open the start menu, or selecting a menu item, without also turning off the sounds for Events. Which means I don’t hear things like warnings when the battery is low, attachment to a wifi network, or missed all reminders.
32. I can’t set the volume for things like those annoying system clicks separately from other events, like inbound calls. Basically, I don’t want my phone making noise when I’m using it unless there’s a call or a game or something that requires noises, but I do want it to be noisy when I need to hear it! Palms make this easy: System events, games, program events, and calls can all have their own sound schemes and volume levels indepent of one another.

For all its faults, it did stream XM radio pretty well using Musicdock, and the web browser was the first mobile browser I’ve used which didn’t totally suck. EVDO is fast, and the phone sounded fine. The vibrator would kick on when a new call came in, which eventually was all I relied on because the MP3 ringtone loading time was so awful. It charged from USB pretty well. And the Messaging/email stuff was pretty much OK, though if you wanted to get email more than once or twice a day your battery would run dry pretty fast. The Blackberry’s push-email was much better in this regard.

Another upside? The “self-portrait” mirror on the back of the phone was pretty handy. As a plus, that part worked fine even when the rest of the phone was a brick while I was repeatedly waiting for replacement phones from Sprint.

My urge to drop-kick this phone into the nearest swimming pool is at odds with my desire to have something for the two years of pain I’ve endured. I think I should put the phone up on eBay and give someone else the exquisite experience of having the crappiest Smartphone experience on the planet.

If you want a phone, go buy a real phone that isn’t running Windows Mobile. If you want a hunk of plastic that will let you surf the ‘net while sitting on the john and occasionally receive phone calls if you pick up in time, buy my Sprint PPC6700.

So I’m at the Live Blogging Thingy 2008. Entertaining, sad, funny, gross, and every so often poignant. once I am back at a computer rather than typing on a freaking phone, I will link to FiddleyGomme’s blog for the event.

Pete Dunn’s comments @ : http://twitter.com/FiddleyGomme (note: you may need to go back in the history if you’re viewing this after 2007-02-17).

A few photos (though the lighting is weird and they are kinda’ fuzzy): http://fiddley.com/iblog (once again, go to the history for today if you’re reading this much later).

Yeah, I have not seen this kind of cable for ten years. Seriously, the last time was when I was working for Las Vegas Computers, circa 1997 or so.

What we noticed first was a small leak under the stove. Then it disappeared. Next, there was a slight swell to some boards, but not enough to notice. Then one day, we walked into the kitchen, and there was a “holy cow!” moment as we realized there was a big hump in the floor, and that immediately above the tub in the basement was a spreading stain of yellow with a moldy spot in the center.

Yep, we had a leak.

Now, this wasn’t just any leak. I’m used to pressure-side leaks in a house. There’s a steady drip from some appliance or spigot in the house, and you just need to track down the cause of the wetness. I cut open the ceiling in the floor below the leak, and couldn’t clearly see where it was coming from. I could tell, however, that this leak was OLD… I pressed against the sub-flooring with my finger and was able to push straight through.

Gross.

Anyway, we filed the insurance claim and the demolition guys came out. It turns out it’s a sewer-side leak behind our kitchen sink, and it’s been there for YEARS. The mold was so well grown that it was stringy strands connecting boards over a foot apart. The smell was awful.

So right now, we’re living in a house without a kitchen, and the place we’re trying to rent out (price reduction coming soon! The market sets the price, and we’re above market, apparently.) simiultaneously has a tarped-up roof and no siding due to a windstorm.

When it rains, they say, it pours.

Well, in my case it’s a slow drip and a heavy wind. But I get the idea.

I think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They have the virtue of fortitude or they would not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot afford to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as that would give advantage to their many enemies; and they have not like orthodox sinners, such a number of friends to excuse or justify them. Do not, however mistake me. It is not to my good friend’s heresy that I impute his honesty. On the contrary, ’tis his honesty that has brought upon him the character of heretic. –Benjamin Franklin