Month: December 2005

Okay, actually I don't. I like the interface and having all my music in one place and how it works with the iPod. But there's the problem. ITunes only works well with the iPod, and vice versa. I wouldn't own a different portable player, but if I did I would want it to work with iTunes instead. And vice versa.

As a matter of fact I do have a different portable player – my cellphone. Which I'm using to type this blog entry actually. It happens to play mp3s, after a fashion (biggest problems being it uses Real player which has a slick but awkward UI, and it requires a different set of headphones with a tiny stereo plug.) But of course it doesn't synch with iTunes, unless someone makes a plugin.

Then again, if iTunes and the iPod interface protocol were open source, maybe Apple wouldn't have done so extraordinarily well selling the little bastards.

I don’t watch a lot of television, tho I’m sort of fascinated by them. I’ve actually owned a lot of televisions over the years, and nearly all of them I got for free – people upgrading, getting rid of broken (relatively easily fixed) sets, even a few that I’ve found sitting next to dumpsters that worked perfectly well – yay, obtainium! For a while I’ve had a “Tower of Television” (idea courtesy of Mikemikemike) with a stack of them, all running and connected to cable. But at the moment I only really have one (well, okay, two, but the other is a little tiny 13″ in the bedroom), a 32″ Sony I got from my brother-in-law, which had a fine tube but a transistor (or something) out somewhere; for $100 repair, it’s been a great set, though it’s heavy as hell any time I need to move it.

I haven’t been connected to cable for over two years, actually, and I’m sure I haven’t missed it. I do subscribe to Netflix (fheald at obtainium dot org if you want to add to my “friends” list) and I even rent dvds of series – Deadwood, Carnivale, even Lost – which I imagine is a lot better without commercials.

In any case, in the process of creating our living room, we decided we needed a TV armoire. So I popped onto Craiglist and (after a few days) found a nice one – real wood furniture, good drawers, etc. Measured it and the TV, figured it would be a tight fit but should work. We u-hauled it home, dragged it into place. Then tried to hoist the TV into place and…it didn’t fit. Measure again – TV 28″ tall, armoire just over 28″ tall. Try again, no joy. Apparently the TV was just slightly large enough to not quite fit.

But we liked the armoire better than the TV, so darn it all I had to buy a new one. Out to Best Buy, old-fashioned tubes aren’t very expensive. I was going to buy a Sony, just because. Becke liked the Toshiba, but I’ve got this feeling that Sony is a little better quality. But then as I was walking to checkout, I got to thinking about what Sony does with their DRM and proprietary stuff – the latest squabble involving CDs with rootkit code is just typical of their conflict of interest between content and devices. Sony’s always made really great devices with good ergonomics and visual appeal, but lately they’re always crippling them in the intrests of protecting the content and maintaining their revenue stream. Their boomboxes are nice but they don’t have a place to plug in my iPod, their cameras use a proprietary memory chip, and they keep trying to foist off ATRAC and minidiscs. Even their Palm series used special sync software that didn’t work with Mac. The TV of course had none of these, and had all the connections of a regular TV. But I decided, F- ’em. Got the Toshiba. Sony doesn’t care about me or my money, but at least I won’t have to look at the thing and think I’m financing their empire.

Nope, not a new phone number – fortunately, although there is a story to go along with that as well – but I finally made the switch from Sprint to Verizon. For 12 years with Sprint, all the way back to the “Pioneer” program (flat rate, 35c a minute, no monthly fee sounded great back then even if there weren't any towers) I've been putting up with their fair-to-poor coverage areas because their prices tended to be better than the rest – as well as the usual inertia. But the last straw was moving in to our house in Mt. Washington – about three miles from downtown LA – and not being able to get coverage. Often my phone would ring and I couldn't answer it – usually it just switched to analog roaming mode and the battery would die. Of course it didn't work well at work either, in the Arco building, tho it had been working okay in the new offices. It had gotten so I was used to not being able to get through an entire conversation without the phone hanging up on me. I even started using the (shudder) land-line phone (cordless, of course, but). Everyone I've asked as reported best coverage from Verizon, so that's who I went with. Wish these phone companies would learn that my #1 priority from a cellphone is being able to make and recieve calls – which means I require great reception and great battery life.

Of course, I still had a contract period with Sprint, for which the customer service people wanted to charge me an early termination fee. But I'm told in the store that that fee is waived if you can't get service at home, tho CS won't tend to admit it. Apparently it's a catch-22: if you want to cancel your service because of bad reception you can, but you'll lose your phone number. But if you go to another carrier to switch numbers, you get cancelled automatically and there's a termination fee. In any case, after calling support several times and visiting Sprint stores several times in search of a better solution, I dropped in to V and they got it moved in minutes. Called Sprint and they wouldn't waive the fee unless I had a store person make a note in my account. Which, amazingly, they were able to do. So until I get the bill, the assumption is I'm off the hook, so to speak.

But while I was at it, I decided to make the leap back to Palm and get a Treo 650. Tho it will never equal the Newton, the Treo is a damned good phone (as far as I can tell by 2 days worth of field testing). The phone works reasonably well (despite the tiny buttons), the bluetooth headset is great (tho it seems to sound pretty bass-intensive, and the controls – or lack therof are a little hard to decipher). But here's the thing: the phone sync's with my Mac. Not only that, but after some fiddling, it does it wirelessly, over bluetooth as well. So for the first time in my history of phones and cellphones – I can actually move my contact list from the phone to the computer, and back! Which means now I've got to actually go back and clean up my address book, and move all the contacts from my old phone on to the computer, manually.

It also takes pictures – fairly poor 640×480 resolution – and plays MP3s – not as well/as many as an ipod. Keeps a to-do list, if I bother. If it'll remind me of my mom's birthday, which I always manage to forget, it'll be worth it. And there are even some advanced applications – like one that records calls (if you have the space on tiny memory cards) or runs Skype to do VOIP calls; there's a (optional, haven't bought it yet thank you) navigation package that hooks to GPS as well. All in all seems to be a clever bit of kit.