doh
February 22, 2004 by Eric Richardson
Tonight, getting out of my car at church,I heard a sound of gravel as my feet hit the pavement. It was dark and raining, and I thought the sound to be just some loose stones underfoot.
In reality, the sound was my phone hitting the ground.
At the start of the trip I had been on the phone with Kathy, figuring out where to pick her up. I had eventually placed the phone in my lap, it being awkward to put it back in my pocket while seated. There it had stayed until my arising bounced it out into the cold and wet outdoors.
I found it sitting there when we returned to the car. By that point it didn't surprise me. I sort of figured that had been the case. My phone was lying on the ground, face up, button-illuminating lights shining but nothing on the display. I picked it up, removed the battery, and set it down in my car.
The parts of the phone I can touch feel pretty dry now. When I put the battery back into the phone and press the power button, it does indeed turn on, find the network, alert me that the time needs updating, and can even tell me that I'm receiving a call. As of yet none of the buttons work, and it doesn't seem to want to vibrate.
August of 2001 I got pushed into a pool with an Ericsson T28 World in my pocket. It vibrated as I hit the water, then went dead. I got out, toweled it off, and gave it a shot. I think it vibrated as if it were turning on, and that was it. The next day I went and got a new phone.
The T28 wasn't done, though. A day or two later I tried it again, and it went a little farther. A couple days after that, it would start up completely. Eventually the phone ended up working just as well as it did before, and a friend used that phone for months.
Hopefully the T616 shows the same resilience.
fun fun and taxes
February 21, 2004 by Eric Richardson
So I did my taxes today. My taxes are made infinitely more complicated than they should be by the fact that I have a little contracting income, and also have income in both Michigan and California. I used H&R Block's free service to do my federal, which made life a bit easier. I did the states by hand, though.
Good to have it out of the way. It's not that I'm really this ahead of things (last year I definitely mailed them on April 15th), but I need them for a USC financial aid deadline next week.
big room, little crowd
February 21, 2004 by Eric Richardson
Getting out to Ground Zero last night to see Saucy Monky reminded me how hard it is to run a successful music room in LA. Sure, GZ may get packed out a few times a year, but most of the time it's just as it was last night. There were probably around 20 people there most of the night, in a room that's sized to accept 60 sitting or who knows how many if it was standing-room. I get the feeling GZ doesn't know if they're a big room or not. The main seating (that people choose to use, at least) is a bunch of couches, but these couches are a good 25 - 30 feet from stage. So you end up with the few people you do have sitting far away from the stage, and nobody else up front. If I were in charge I'd take those couches 15 feet closer to the stage, turn down the mains and run the place like a coffee house instead of a rock club. But I'm not in charge...
Saucy was good, as usual. The sound guy was in love with reverb, possibly wanting to cancel out the effect of the dampening tiles in the ceiling and bring out the room's natural cement qualities. The band played some stuff that I don't think I'd heard before, which is always cool. Hopefully the next time we get them back to USC it'll be under much better circumstances. I really want to see them play one of the spring noon-time concerts that we have out in front of Tommy. I think they'd really be able to catch some walk-by traffic.
music comes to me
February 19, 2004 by Eric Richardson
Saucy Monky, an LA band I get out to see whenever possible, is going to be playing a show at USC's Ground Zero Coffee House tomorrow night at 9pm. It should be a really good time, and it's free, so if you're in the area definitely check it out.
mapping wifi, but not really
February 19, 2004 by Eric Richardson
Alan wrote today about Google's new search by location and how you can use that to search for wi-fi access. Theoretically, that may be the case, but results for my area show that things are far spottier than they appear in Grand Rapids. Let's look at this search for wi-fi near 90007:
It's a cool idea, but yeah... Not really functional yet. It looks like having a lot of addresses on the same page just throws it for a loop. It's google, though, so I know they've got people a lot smarter than me trying to figure this out.