December

Can’t believe it’s been nearly a month since I updated last.  Life just kinda got away from me.  It’s been busy at work and busy at home.  My mailbox broke, of all things, so I spend a few minutes every day handing it back up on the wall properly.  Just as well, I suppose, it’s old and ugly anyway.

Zai texted me at work a couple weeks back and said our sewer exploded.  What she meant was that the floor drain in the basement is backing up.  Doesn’t seem to be to severe, but it’s making a nice little mess around it nonetheless.  I picked up some industrial strength drain remover from Menards.  There are dozens of warnings on the side, including, and I kid you not, exploding back out of the drain after I pour it in.  I haven’t used the stuff yet, but I’m pretty sure that if I meet an untimely end, it will be due to this stuff reaching up out of the drain and pulling me under.

I found out that I hate yardwork considerably less when it’s my own house I’m working on.  I’ve been raking every week until my green lawn refuse bin is full, then I save the rest for the next week.  It’s been working pretty well so far… although I’m not looking forward to shoveling the feet of snow that are sure to fall any day now.

For those hip on the latest Verizon news, we released the Motorola Droid (utilizing Google’s OS, Android) in November, with a fair level of success.  The upshot for me is that all the important people here upgraded to this latest phone, meaning I get to scavenge the discarded phones.  Obviously, when you’re in IT, most people ALREADY had the latest, to I managed to get my hands on an HTC Touch Pro 2, which is still one of the best phones out there, only a few months on the market.  It runs on Windows Mobile, which turns a lot of people off, but I personally love it.

While if you really want to know about the phone, you can visit a dozen news sites Google could bring up, here are the highlights of the phone:

1. Responsive Touch Screen

2. Tilt-Sensitive

3. Links contacts to Facebook, updating your contacts with pictures

4. Built in MP3 trimmer to make any MP3 a ringtone.

5. Built in photo editing.  Not quite photoshop, but nothing quite like doodling on a photo and sending it back to a friend.

6. Weather forecast, and if you’re in the calender, will tell you the predicted weather for the selected day.

7. Automatically goes to speaker mode when phone is placed face down.  On top of that, a built in noise-cancellation speaker makes it conference-call worthy.

8. Full keyboard

9.  And of course, built on Windows Mobile which means there’s lots of software out there to customize it.

But, of course, there’s a few drawbacks…

1. Not quite as efficient at sending texts.  Still pretty fast, but not what I’m used to with the Voayger.

2. The VZ Navigator (GPS) is fairly slow to load up and find routes compared to other phones I’ve had.

3.  I would liked to have seen an external button to trigger the camera, like the last two phones I had.  Instead I either have to set an internal button to bring it up, or navigate to the camera via the touchscreen.

4.  There is no CityID available for it, which used to tell me from what city a number was coming from.

But, given the pros and cons, I’m still loving this phone.  It’s pretty responsive, and most operations are quick.  If I could find myself a CityID application, I’ll be good to go.

Zel-kun out.