Samsung SCH-i760

Well it’s been a while since I’ve written anything. I’ve been busy but I decided to drop in and make some updates.

I recently (3 weeks ago) picked up a Samsung SCH-i760 PDA phone. I’d been back and forth changing my mind about picking one up. I haven’t had a PDA phone in about 5 or 6 years. The last one I had was an ran on Palm OS and was HUGE.

The Palm phone was cool for about a month then it’s newness wore off and it was just a cumbersome phone to carry around. I was really afraid the same thing would happen if I got the i760. So far that assumption was wrong. It’s only been 3 weeks and I’m not sure how I lived without it.

The i760 is much smaller then I thought it’d be. In fact the size is what finally sold me on it. After teetering on the edge for about a week I decided to stop by my local Verizon store and see if they had one I could look at. They did and as soon as it was in my hand the first thing I noticed was how much smaller it was then I expected. It was about the same size as my Motorola v325 if you count the antenna. I hate carrying a holster or anything on my belt so a phone that fits comfortable in my pocket is a must. The i760 fit just right. It’s a little bulky depending on the pocket but for the most part it fits just fine.

The hardware and phone itself is very impressive. I really like the number pad on the front of the phone. It’s nice to be able to dial without having to dial on the touchscreen. There’s something about tactile feedback that’s nice. All the buttons are laid out well. Some people have complained about the layout of the talk and end call buttons, but I’ve only accidentally hit them a few times. After using the phone for a few weeks moving around all the buttons feels pretty natural to me.

This phone is my first experience with Windows Mobile. It runs Windows Mobile 6. I’ve heard a lot of nightmare stories about Windows Mobile but it was a must for me. Being a developer and a .NET convert, the allure of the .NET compact framework was just too much. I looked into developing for my old Palm phone when I had it, but bailed because it was too much of a pain. I’m not saying it can’t be done, just that it took more effort then I was willing to put into it. Especially for just hobby coding.

I’m finding that a lot of the complaints people had about Windows Mobile were coming from people who aren’t computer people. A lot of the annoyances/issues can be fixed with simple tweaks. I won’t deny it has it’s issues, but so far I’m pretty pleased with it.

// stak

EA skate. Annoyances …

First off Ea skate. is an awesome game. I’d probably give it a 8.5 out of 10 if I had to rate it. Even with Halo 3 out now I still give skate. plenty of play time. After an evening of killing baddies I usually like to finish my night cruising around on my board looking for new sponsors and owning spots.

However as awesome as skate. may be there are a few things that I find a little annoying and one thing that drives me to the brink of insanity. Even with these annoyances though the game is just too damn fun to put down the controller.

Here are a couple things I find slightly annoying.

1. Sometimes it’s not really clear what to do. Sometimes I feel like an idiot when I finally see it, but sometimes it’s tough.
2. It can be had to pull off some of the advance tricks using the flick controls. I know that’s kind of a week complaint. It’s really just a matter of practice. It’s not really an issue except sometimes when you have to pull off a specific trick for a challenge.
3. Every now and then the camera angles can really get in the way and be frustrating. Especially on the races. A lot of times it’s hard to see what’s in front of you. I’m really not sure of a solution though, so I’m not too upset about them. It’s just one of those things. Plus it’s not so bad it ruins the game or anything.

The one thing I find extremely annoying, pedestrians! It don’t mind that they’re in the game. That’s cool. However it seems like they gather like zombies in droves around anything you’re trying to trick more then once or twice. Especially when you’re trying to “Own a spot”.

I don’t know if it’s the way the game engine is built or what, but if you’re trying to hit the same spot over and over they just keep coming and coming. In some sense I guess it’s kind of realistic. If a guy is trying to 360 kickflip and grind the top of a bus stop people are probably going to gather around to watch. However they’re probably not going to stand in front of the fucking ramp!!

There’s nothing cooler then coming down a huge hill popping a quick kickflip to clear the curb an transition straight into a 180 360 flip over a stair gap.

I think being able to set a marker and return to that maker with the click of a button is one of the best feature ever put into a skate boarding game. Usually though it goes like this:

1. Kickflip onto the curb and miss the gap … return to maker
2. Kickflip onto the curb into grandma who’s now walking by … return to maker
3. Kickflp onto the curb into grandma who’s still trying to get up from being hit the first time … cuss … return to maker
4. Kickflip onto the curb just missing grandma but running into one of the three other people who are now waking by … cuss … resist from throwing controller … return to marker
5. … and so on

I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll try to own a spot about 5 to 10 times and if I don’t get it, I just go skate somewhere else and wait for the pedestrians to disappear at the spot then come back.

Maybe it’s just me. I don’t know. Over all, even with the few annoyances, the game is still bad ass.

// stak

Amazon.com’s “DRM Free” Mp3 Store

Amazon.com has opened their beta Mp3 store to the public.

http://www.amazonmp3.com

One of the best things about the store is all the Mp3’s are DRM free. Which means once you’ve purchased them you can burn them to CD, put them on any Mp3 player and pretty much play them on anything you want. DRM free music purchases! Sounds good to me.

I remember a while back I signed up for www.audible.com. I was doing a lot of driving at the time so I figured it’d be nice to purchase and download audio books to listen to while I was on the road. After a very frustrating first purchase I canceled my account and moved on. Their DRM killed it for me. It was completely ridicules and made things unnecessarily obtuse. You could only download books you’d purchased in a proprietary format and play it using their special player. In order to put it on your Mp3 player it had to be “registered” as a valid device by them to insure you only put your purchased files on it and nothing else. I don’t even remember if you could burn the files to CD or not. It seems like you could but only through their software and you could only burn it once. Anyway it was a huge frustrating mess. That was probably 4 years ago so it might have changed since then.

I could go on a DRM rant all day. However I’ll get back to Amazon.com’s Mp3 store.

After reading about the store I was intrigued and decided to give it a try. I do a lot of purchasing on Amazon.com and a major online retailer offering DRM free music almost sounded too good to be true.

Most of the individual songs cost 89 cents. I’ve purchased a few songs from the site and everything went smooth. You purchase the song, checkout and download the Mp3, simple as that. You have two download options. You can download directly by saving the Mp3 file using your browser or install and use the Amazon MP3 Downloader.

When doing a direct download you have to purchase each song and download them individually.

When using the downloader you can purchase multiple songs and download them all at once. In fact if you’re going to purchase an entire album at once you have to use the downloader. It’ll also has a few other features such as automatically adding downloaded Mp3’s to your iTunes library.

I wish I had more information on the downloader but I haven’t installed or used it yet. When I do I’ll update this post with my thoughts on it.

So far I’ve only found a few drawbacks to the service.

1. I haven’t found an easy way to redownload the songs you’ve already purchased in the event that you lose them. It may be there but I haven’t found it.
2. While they have a lot of Mp3’s there’s still some missing. For instance I was going to purchase the new Foo Fighters album but they didn’t have it.

The lack of some content will probably be remedied as the service matures and more record labels realize the benefits of offering DRM free music. Don’t get me wrong though, there’s already a lot of music availably on the site already.

I can’t compare the service to iTunes. I have an iPod but I’ve never purchased a song through iTunes. I was really close once but I had flash backs to the hell I’ve been through before with DRM music purchases.

Altogether though I’d say the service could turn out to be promising. If anything competition is good, right? Especially when it’s DRM free competition!

Hopefully with Amazon.com jumping on the DRM free music bandwagon some of the record labels and other music outlets will start to take notice.

I love the idea of purchasing and downloading my music instantly without having to leave my computer. However if I have to jump through hoops to listen to it after I’ve purchased it, forget it. DRM just leaves a sour taste in the mouths of your customers and is only a minor inconvenience, at best, to the people stealing music. That point has been stated over and over again. Maybe they’re starting to realize it. We can only hope.

Update:
I found a good write up comparing Amazon Mp3 vs. Apple iTunes.
http://gigaom.com/2007/09/25/amazon-mp3-vs-apple-itunes-whos-better-now/

// stak

VZW Mobile Sudoku Game …

A while back I posted about wasting all my useless free time on Sudoku puzzles. The Sudoku puzzles I’ve been playing are on my cell phone. Verizon Wireless has a couple of Sudoku games available through their “getitnow” service. The one I chose was the Verizon Wireless exclusive “VZW Sudoku”.

I haven’t tried any other mobile Sudoku games but I have to say VZW Sudoku is pretty much everything I’d want in a mobile Sudoku game. First off Sudoku puzzles translate very well to a mobile phone because the 1 thru 9 number scheme fits perfect with the number pad on any phone. I’m guessing mobile Sudoku game controls are pretty starndard. You move around the grid and press the number you want to place.

VZW Sudoku offers 6 different levels of puzzles. It also allows you to enter manual puzzles. So if you do the Sudoku puzzle in your local paper every morning you could enter it in your phone and take it with you. You can save up to 10 manual puzzles.

The game has some nice mobile features which are pretty standard in mobile games by now, but still a nice touch. For instance if you close your phone or get a call or text in the middle of a game it will pause/save your progress and when you come back to the application, you can resume from where you were.

The game also has a leader board for each difficulty. Which helps keep things interesting. After a while you’ll find ourself playing competitively against yourself trying to beat your previous times.

There’s not much else to say about it really. I’d suggest this game to anyone who is a fan of Sudoku puzzles. It’s $6.99 for an unlimited purchase or $3.49 for a monthly subscription.

// stak

Doug Stanhope Show …

On September 5th I went to see Doug Stanhope live in Charlotte with a group of friends. He’s one of the comedians I’ve wanted to see live for years. I kept telling myself if he came within 5 hours of me I’d go see him. There are certain comedians you can just tell will be special live and my assumptions were correct, he was one of them.

I was glad to find out the venue he was preforming in was a a small wine bar in Charlotte. I don’t live in Charlotte so I’d never been there, but when I found out he was going to be there I tracked down there website. I knew the small intimate environment would make for a great show. Since we were coming from out of town and didn’t want to arrive late we were the first people to show up at the show. It worked out great we sat in the second row of tables about twelve feet from where he was preforming.

I’ve been a fan of Doug’s for a while. I’ve heard, and own, most of his recorded material. I’d read in interviews that he absolutely hates to repeat himself and do the same show over and over and he wasn’t lying. I honestly can’t think of one bit during the entire show that’d I’d heard before. A lot of what he talked about was current events that had happened in the past week or so. His material was fresh and funny as ever.

Doug is a true stand up artist. They guy is naturally funny. His unforgiving honest view of the world, people and the events that take place on it are hilarious. His care free non prepared approach is great. It’s hard to even call it a show because there’s no act. Everything you get is him and who he really is. He was rummaging through folded up legal paper to pick out bits he’d just written. At one point he even called his girlfriend back and put her on speaker phone. I’d go into more detail about the show but you really just need to go see him to get the full effect.

The band, The Mattoid, was touring with Doug. The music and comedy pairing was a good one. The Mattoid opened up with a very interesting style of music. I really don’t know how to explain it. Half of our group liked it and half didn’t care for it at all. About halfway through one of my friends looked at me and said, “I feel like I’m part of an inside joke that I don’t get.” I can honestly see how he felt that way. I ended up buying one of their CD’s after the show. I actually found them pretty entertaining.

After the show my girlfriend asked Doug if he discovered The Mattoid at a corner bar somewhere and he said no a friend of him set him up with them and he really liked them.

If Doug ever comes anywhere near you go see him. You will love every second of it, especially if you’re already a fan of his work. If you haven’t seen any of his work you should check out his most recent Showtime special, “No Refunds”.

Check out his website for his tour schedule.
http://www.dougstanhope.com

If Doug comes anywhere around here again I’ll go see him in a heartbeat.

// stak

Kidney Stones > Death

Yay for Kidney stones ..

As I write this I’m laying in my bed doped up on Percocet trying to pass a stone.

If you’ve ever had a kidney stone my condolences go out to you. People often use the phrase, “I’d never wish that on my worst enemy” and it sounds cliche at times. With that being said, I sincerely mean it when I say, “I’d never wish kidney stones on my worst enemy”.

Kidney stones are absolutely brutal. I’ve been plagued with them for about 6 years now and I’m currently working on passing my 7th or 8th stone and it’s been the worse of them all so far.

My first kidney stone was probably the scariest because I had no idea what was going on. I was at work one day when suddenly I was hit with a crippling pain in my back. The pain only lasted about ten minutes. Which was still ten minutes too long!. The pain was unlike anything I’d ever felt before. It really freaked me out because unlike a bad cut or a broken bone where you can look down and see what’s wrong, it was coming from inside of me. I couldn’t even imagine what could have possible been wrong with me to cause so much pain and since I couldn’t see it all I had to go on was my imagination. So of course I imagined the worse!

The pain came and went over the next few weeks, but it never did stay very long, maybe twenty of thirty minutes at most. At the time it was really weird because I’d go a week and be perfectly fine then suddenly get hit with the pain again. After going to two different doctors and being diagnosed and unsuccessfully treated for a urinary track infection both times I was finally referred to a specialist. The first thing the specialist did was take x rays of my abdomen. He looked at my x rays and immediately saw a kidney stone stuck in the middle of my ureter. Fortunately he was a specialist and knew what he was looking for because I would have never picked out the tiny little stone if he hadn’t pointed it out to me.

My urologist told me about my options and gave me some pain medication. Finally something to help me deal with the pain! He told me he felt like it could pass on it’s own and told me to drink lots of water and take the pain medication as needed. If it didn’t pass in a week to come back and we’d readdress it.

Now that I finally knew what was causing all this pain and more importantly why it was reoccurring and wouldn’t go away, it was time to start reading up on kidney stones. After doing a little research and talking to my specialist I finally understood what had been going on the past week. My stone was large so it was getting stuck trying to travel down my ureter from my kidney to my bladder. However it wasn’t causing a complete blockage so my kidney hadn’t swelled, etc. This is why I was able to go weeks with only a few random bouts of pain. When the stone was stuck and not moving there wasn’t any pain at all. It was only when the stone started to move again that I was hit with crippling pain.

Seven days passed and I hadn’t passed the stone so I went back to the urologist for a follow up. He suggested a treatment called Lithotripsy. Based on some of the other treatments, one consisting of the doctor going through my urethra and plucking the stone out (no thanks!) I was all for Lithotripsy.

The quick version of Lithotripsy is this. You’re sedated and put on an x ray table. The doctors x ray your abdomen to find out where the stone is. They place the lithotriptor machine against your body where the stone is. The lithotriptor then blast sound waves through your body breaking the stone. They x ray again to see where the stone has moved to, and blast again. Since you’re sedated you never really feel anything. They say the blast feels like being popped with a rubber band though. After my procedure when I woke up I was groggy and had a baseball size bruise where they blasted.

Immediately after the procedure I passed several pieces of the stone that broke off when the stone was blasted. About three days after my procedure I passed the stone. I’d recommend Lithotripsy to anyone suffering from a kidney stone as long as it’s a viable option for you.

Every stone I’ve passed since my first stone I’ve passed naturally. Well naturally on pain killers but without any other intervention.

I was hit with another stone a little over a year ago. I went to the urologist and they did a CT scan on me. Turned out not only did I have the one stone, I had five more waiting in my kidney!! Unfortunately the stones were too small to show up on an x ray which meant I couldn’t go through Lithotripsy to take care of them. So I’d just have to play a waiting game with them.

I believe I’ve since passed most of my stones, but to be honest I’ve lost count. I’m really hoping this is the last.

I’m so paranoid of getting hit with a stone and not having my pain pills that I literally bought a mini pill fob to go on my key chain so I have my pain pills with me at all times. Believe me it’s already paid off!

This post is probably a biggest incoherent mess you’ve ever read, but I don’t have the time or the energy to proof read it right now. Sorry …

I’m really hoping my current stone will pass today, but I’ll just have to wait and see. All I can do is drink a lot of water and wait …

// stak

Well I’ll be damned, I finally like beer …

Yeah yeah I know half of you read that title and said, “WHAT?!”. Yes it’s true. I guess I finally got my man card back.

For the longest time I didn’t like beer. Don’t know what it was but I couldn’t stand the taste of it. I was a liquor guy. Give me some Gin, Whiskey, Vodka or Rum any day (well mostly Gin) and I was happy, but I couldn’t do beer. Everyone kept saying it’s an acquired taste but I thought I’d never grow up. Although Gin will put some damn hair on your chest so I don’t want to hear it!

Well several months ago I started getting into wine. I’d tried some wines in the past, but never really cared for them. My girlfriend had me taste a Riesling wine (semi-sweet white wine) and I loved it. After finding I liked the Riesling wine I went a little crazy and started reading about and buying up all the wines I could find. Obviously I started with (and still for the most part sticking to) the cheaper wines.

(I’m sure at this point you’re thinking this is supposed to be about liking beer. Bear with me)

After drinking white wines for a while I still didn’t really enjoy many reds. I liked them with a meal but not by themselves. A month or too passed and my wine obsession continued on. I soon found myself shifting to liking red wines over white wines. I begin drinking Pinot Noirs, Merlots, Shiraz, etc around the house. As time passed and the more reds I drank the white wines started to taste, as my girlfriend loves to put it, like sugar water.

Here’s where wine ties in. I honestly believe acquiring a taste for wine greatly helped in acquiring a taste for beer. It wasn’t a path I intentionally took to become a beer drinker. However it worked out!

A while back I was determined to learn to like beer. Beer is everywhere, sporting events, concert, etc. You can’t always get a good Gin and Tonic but you can almost always get a bud light.

I’d tried a bud light every now and then at the bar, or during a game of beer pong but really didn’t like it. And let me tell you when you hate beer, beer pong becomes a fucking olympic sport!

Once I even tried to force down a pint of Guinness while the whole bar laughed at me. The thought process behind it was, “If I can drink one Guinness any beer will taste like water afterwards”. Which MIGHT have been true, but I couldn’t even make it halfway through the pint before I gave up.

	A few weeks passed and the next thing I knew I left the gym one night and stopped by the bar to hangout with some friends for a bit and for whatever reason I ordered a Michelob Ultra. I don’t know what it was but I just wanted a beer! Maybe advertising does work and seeing as I’d just left the gym I felt like a Mich Ultra was the right way to go, who knows.
	I still haven’t branched out too far from Mich Ultras. I’ll have a bud light every now and then. However I do find my self coming home or going out at lunch and just wanting a cold beer. Frosted mugs just make it that much better.

Who knows, maybe I’ll eventually move on to darker beers, but for now being able to get a bud light at a baseball game and enjoy it is good enough for me. Now I just have to make sure to avoid the beer gut!

So long story short if you’re trying to acquire a taste for beer and you’re not making any progress, you might want to try the wine route. It unintentionally worked for me. I guess it’s possible it was just coincidence. Hell if anything maybe you’ll find that you enjoy wine, which in and of it’s self is a wonderful thing.

Cheers!

// stak

Balls of Fury …

Last night a few of us went to see Balls of Fury. After about thirty minutes my girlfriend looked at me and said, “I can’t believe we paid to see this!”. I just smiled though because because Mr. Walken hadn’t taken the screen yet and I knew that would change things. At leasts a little. I mean come on Christopher Walken is the reason we went. Walken even with a cameo can carry about any movie. He just has that kind of presence.

Once Mr. Walken made his appearance and had been on screen for about five minutes, I turned to my girlfriend and said, “Now do you remember why we paid to see this?”. She said, “Yep!”

The movie really wasn’t horrible. I mean it was exactly what we all expected. Some in the group even said it was better then their expectations. I’m not sure how people give a serious review to movies that clearly don’t take themselves serious.

Sure I like well written movies, great acting, production value, etc, but sometimes going with a group to a dumb movie, when everyone knows what to expect, can be fun. Not every movie has to have 8 Oscar nominations or be an instant classic.

I really didn’t set out to rate or review this movie when I started this post, but if I had to rate it, on a scale from 1 to 100 I’d probably give it a 65. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t enjoyable. You just have to know what you’re watching and take it at face value.

I’ll leave you with a few screens from the movie.

Dan Fogler was hilarious.

The man himself!

Balls of Fury probably isn’t worth going to the theater to see unless you’re just going for the hell of it. It’s probably worth a rental though when it comes out but you’ll have to be in the right mood … or high.

// stak

Bob Saget HBO Comedy Special …

Well I missed the premiere of Bob Saget’s HBO comedy special Saturday because I was watching UFC 74. I’d been anxiously awaiting the comedy special. Last night as I was flipping channels, just before Weeds came on at 10pm, I saw that HBO Comedy was running the Bob Saget special at 10pm. I decided to watch Mr. Saget from 10pm until 11pm and catch Weeds and Californication from 11pm to 12pm.

Let me start by saying I’m a huge fan of stand up comedy. Now with that being said I’ll continue …

Perhaps I was expecting too much, I don’t know, but as much as I hate to say it I was not impressed at all with the special, or what I saw of it. I actually only made it through 30 minutes before I decided to filp over to Showtime and watch Californication at 10:30pm.

Profanity doesn’t bother me and I’m not opposed to shock comedy (in fact I find it hilarious when done well). However it seemed like Mr. Saget thought Danny Tanner saying fuck repeatedly and talking about fucking animals and fucking Kimmy Gibbler would carry the show. It didn’t. Or at least I didn’t think so. That premise might have been good for a 5 minute skit but not an entire comedy special.

Don’t get me wrong. The vision of Danny Tanner getting high, having sex with prostitutes and giving old men hand jobs in alley ways for drug money is hilariously. In cameos but not for an entire hour.

After about 20 minutes of watching it my girlfriend looked at me and said, “He seems like he’s not even comfortable with his own jokes.” And she had a point. He did seem a little uncomfortable. Maybe that was supposed to be part of his stage presence, I don’t know. It was the first time I’ve seen Bob Saget doing stand up so maybe I just didn’t know what to expect.

I know he’s been doing stand up for a long time and I commend anyone who has the balls to write something and get up in front of a theater full of people and preform it. I also appreciate comedy is an art form, and just like other art forms what I like other people might not and vice versa.

A few weeks earlier I watched the Doug Stanhop: No Refunds comedy Special on Showtime and laughed my ass off. I thought it was one of the better specials I’ve seen. Then again I’ve been a fan of Doug’s for a long time so I knew what to expect.

In Bob’s defense I didn’t watch the whole thing. I’ll rarely start a comedy CD or show and not finish. It just happened at the moment I had something better to do. Maybe the last 30 minutes of the special is where he shined. Who knows? Perhaps sometime I’ll catch the last 30 minutes and give the show another chance.

I ran across his wikipedia page and it doesn’t seem like I’m the only person that wasn’t impressed with his comedy special.

David Bianculli

“Let the record show that on this new HBO standup special, disappointingly unpolished by the standards of both the comic and the network, Bob Saget Was Not Funny.”

David Bianculli’s full review

Tom Shales

“Maybe one reason that Bob Saget’s new hour of stand-up on HBO is so dreadful is that Saget is aiming for a place or two in the Guinness Book of World Records: fewest actual jokes in a one-hour comedy special while also logging the most uses of a certain infamous four-letter word.”

Tom Shales’s full review

DVDTalk.com

“Perhaps the object lesson here is that Bob Saget works best in small doses — whether it’s five minutes in a documentary or 22 minutes on a TV sitcom. Whatever the reason, this is a failed attempt at funny that suggests Saget isn’t nearly as cool as he’d like us to think he is. That ain’t right? Try that ain’t all that funny. Skip it.”

DVDTalk.com full review

// stak

Looks like EA’s Skate demo skate.reel is still having issues …

Well it appears EA is still having issues with it’s skate.reel on the www.skate.ea.com site. I did finally manage to create an EA profile and login. After logging in I was sent to this page:

http://skate.share.ea.com/nosubaccount.aspx

The page explains 2 ways for you to link your xbox live gamertag to your EA skate profile, neither of which work. As much as I’d like to see the upload skate.reel in action, the game isn’t out yet and it’s still in beta so I’ll cut them some slack. However I really hope they resolve these skate.reel issues before the official game launch on September 12th. I feel pretty confident they will though considering the replay editor is a major selling point for the game. Although the game play alone has me sold.

There are also several threads on the official skate forum about the issue if you’re interested.

I’ll keep trying it every now and then and post an update if I have any luck or anything changes.

I can’t get enough of this demo. It looks like Skate will be the first game I’ve picked up in a while. I know I know, what about Bioshock, Metriod Prime 3, etc. While those games look bad ass, I just don’t have the kind of time to play them. Skate will fit well into my “play for 30 minutes every now and then” lifestyle.

My impressions of the Skate demo can be read here.

// stak