Goodbye RAZR, Hello (phone with much less sexy name)

Posted on by grahams

I have given up on the Motorola RAZR. After my third phone started doing the same annoying GSM waveform buzzing during calls (which both sides could hear) as well as turning off on it’s own again. Cingular had a few different phones I could exchange it for, and I ended up choosing the Samsung D807. It’s similarly sized (a bit thicker), but feature-wise it blows away the RAZR in just about every aspect (including LESS BUZZ-ITUDE!). The only downside is apparently Samsung didn’t implement SyncML properly or something because it is unsupported by iSync. So that really sucks, but I figured out a workaround (export my whole address book to a vCard file, use a tool to split it up until individual files, and send them all to the phone over Bluetooth. It’s not syncing, but at least I have my contacts on the phone now.

The camera is much nicer on this phone (1280×1024 vs 640×480), and I posted a few pictures to my Flickr Photostream from it. This is one thing that is much easier on the new phone. The RAZR didn’t do EDGE, so its data connection was really slow, but even worse, you couldn’t close the phone or exit the MMS sending screen until the message had fully been sent, or else the phone would just cancel the send. So if I wanted to send an email or a picture, I had to keep the clamshell open for a minute or two, which was pretty damn annoying. The new phone, I send it, close it, and throw it back in my pocket, making it much easier to send random pics as I walk around Boston.

Wow

Posted on by grahams

Cheston is right, it was weird going to bed on Election Night and not biting my nails or pulling my hair out. It’s good to see some balance restored; I’ve been telling myself for 6 years now that it is all cyclical, and eventually things would even out a bit, but it was starting to feel like a pipe dream.

It’s also great to see Deval Patrick take the governorship here in Massachusetts… Kerry Healey exuded pure evil..

Halloween 2006

Posted on by grahams

This year’s Halloween Party at Sean & Kelly’s was as awesome as ever.  It’s always great to be able to able to see so many of my friends since we’ve all scattered away from Rochester.  This year’s party was a bit different than years past, with Master

[info]sophusalexander

now present and accounted for.  Other friends of Sean and Kelly’s brought a young child as well, so a “Swear Jar” was instituted (the proceeds of which go to christmas presents for the children who we damaged).  At the end of the party, I believe there was nearly $90 in the jar (with the typical “fine” being $1).  Not too bad for a bunch of foul-mouthed drunks…

[info]adamfletcher

created the above time-lapse video of the party, starting Thursday night (before

[info]coco_b

and I arrived) and continuing until Sunday morning when people began to depart.  I believe he said that he kept 1 out of every 400 frames, which (if my math is correct, is one frame every 13.3 seconds or so).  You’ll see the perspective change as we moved the camera on Friday morning to a corner-mount on the wall.  I don’t know how much work he put in to preparing for this, but it went off without a hitch.  Yesterday he put up all the raw DV files up on a server, as well as a ~100MB WMV “rough-cut” just so people didn’t have to download a few gigs of DV.  Anyway, I downloaded it all yesterday and cut together a version to stick up on YouTube as well as burn to a DVD.  Other than the “title cards”, everything else you see is Adam’s (all the “real” work).

BSG OMFG

Posted on by grahams

Spoiler-free: The past episode of Battlestar Galactica may have been the best of the series. It blew my mind with just how awesome it was… That is all about that subject.

Saturday (after we gave up on the door fiasco) I caught loudQUIETloud: A Film About Pixies, which was great. It’s strange to see how dysfunctional that band is dysfunctional in a completely unconventional way… Tim came out to watch the flick too, which was good, as I don’t get to see him much anymore. Sunday we caught The Prestige with the film club last night, which was pretty good.

God damn I hate home improvement.

Posted on by grahams

Saturday afternoon we ripped out the old bathroom door, which was less traumatic than I expected..  Didn’t really do any damage to the walls removing the trim and ripping out the old door jamb/frame.  It seemed like everything was going to be peachy, I nailed the small lengths of 2×4 we purchased into the opening to make it a standard-er size, we started attaching the jamb to the frame and making sure it was square, level, and plumb.  We nailed it in on the hinge side in two points, and then shimmed it out on the lock side to give it a test run… And the door struck the jamb at the top lock side of the door.  Not only that, but I drove the nails in all the way, so we had to mar up the jamb getting them back out.  We playedaround with raising the sides and all kinds of things, but no matter what we tried even though the jamb was square/true/plumb/everything it just didn’t matter.  We worked on this whole project for about 5 hours and eventually gave up for the night.

Sunday, we procrastinated as long as possible and started anew.  We were just about to start when Corinna had the flash of genius to call her stepfather for advice.  He is retired now and doing lots of the construction on the addition to her parents’ home in Michigan.  We mentioned that we padded out the space to make the opening “the right size” with six short pieces of 2×4.  We explained that the old 2×4 that formed the hinge-side of the existing frame was completely cockeyed and we were using shims to correct for it.  He provided the (now obvious) suggestion of getting a single 80″ 2×4 to run the entire length of the hinge side, and shim that as necessary to make sure it’s plumb, etc.  Using one long board eliminates discrepancies in plumb/true/squareness between the 3 separate pieces of 2×4.  He also suggested using screws instead of nails, because you have more fine-tuning available by tightening/loosening the screws, plus if you screw up you can easily back them out.

With this knowledge in hand, Corinna ventured out to Home Depot (knowing how much I hate going to that store), got the 2×4, we had it up and shimmed out in 20 minutes, and less than an hour later the door was hung and swinging freely.

So I guess the moral of this story is that installing a pre-hung door probably IS easier than fitting one into an existing jamb if you know what you are doing and do appropriate prep work.

Update: Re-edited this to remove some nonsense sentences (I “repurposed” this text from an email I sent to my dad).