Update on the TouchPro2 ROM

I went home last night after work and thought to myself: “maybe the only thing I haven’t tried in awhile is putting some of my iTunes files on here.”

So, I went ahead and grabbed a few of the albums I’d most recently purchased from the iTunes Music Store and popped them onto my MicroSD chip. Lo and behold, they started playing immediately.

This includes both AAC files I have ripped from CDs I own, along with M4A files that I have purchased from the iTunes Store.

This has been one of the biggest points of contention between my phone and I, for a very long time. It has also been the biggest reason that I keep experimenting with alternative ways to play music, and between my Walkman, my old iPod, the old iPhone, and various means of streaming on the current phone, there are indeed plenty.

But sometimes, it’s nice to know that I can buy an album on iTunes, and dump it on my phone and listen to it while I’m walking around.

Right now, the phone has a 2GB memory card in it, and that’s definitely enough for average phone usage, I’m going to consider very carefully getting an 8, or maybe even a fantastic 16 or 32 gigabyte memory chip for the thing, so as to be able to fit more music on it.

June 28, 2010 | Tags: | No Comments »

Lady Gaga & Beyonce Present the Importance of Scheduling & Phone Etiquette

I was walking to work this morning, reveling in the somewhat gray skies, a nice break from my general refusal to wear sunblock, therefore the additional slight sizzling of my skin each day, when suddenly Telephone by Lady Gaga, featuring Beyoncé began to play. I love this song, so I naturally started to dance and jam out a little bit as I was walking. It occurred to me just how hilarious the song is, however, given my current interpretation of it. One of the lyrics reads essentially “You knew I was free, so you should have made some plans with me, I’m at a party now, so I’m not going to answer your call.” It strikes me for several reasons.

Firstly, calendaring and scheduling is increasingly important among people of my generation. I put just about every thing I do in my calendar, even if it’s not something I’m going to show anybody else, it just helps me keep track of where I was and where I am going to be. I’ve either reached an era, or an age, in my life where most of the people I know are doing calendaring of some sort, even if it just involves having Google Calendar send reminder-texts.

The second funny thing about Lady Gaga’s declarations is that she (in the universe of the song, at least) has some friends who (to use the wording of Ke$ha) are blowing up her phone-phone. Maybe there’s something different about phone etiquette these days, but I was always told that if somebody doesn’t answer their phone, what you do is maaaaaybe try again in a half-hour if it’s so important, but generally you call, get an answering machine (or voicemail box, these days) and then leave a message. I think part of it is that a lot of people my age (Lady Gaga is only 23 months older than I am) tire both of leaving and listening to voicemails. I know a lot of people within four years of my own age (both older and younger) who instead of leaving a voicemail, will hang up when they realize they’ve gotten that far, and then try calling back again in a few minutes. Not only is this annoying, but it has the capability to be a little bit creepy too, and I’m left uninformed about what’s going on that would prompt the call in the first place.

Which brings me to my next mild annoyance about voicemails: A surprising number of people do not listen to voicemails they get before calling somebody back about something. Frequently enough, I didn’t actually want to have a long phone conversation with somebody when I called them, so leaving a voicemail was a perfect opportunity for me to convey my information to them, and then be done with it. Instead, they call me back a few moments later, just to tell me that they didn’t listen to my message, wanting to know what was up.

There are some people for whom I either don’t leave messages anymore, or for whom I tend not to need to, just because these people are very avid about their call history logs. And sometimes, I’ve learned it just works better to send a text message, which is an option that I do exercise more now than I did on my previous phone, just due to the number of texts I’m allotted in a month having increased, and due to my not being completely aware of everybody’s schedules.

This brings up another issue. Lady Gaga mentions in another line in the song that her having brought the phone was indeed a disastrous idea, and that she should have left it at home. Should she have? Probably — if you’re going out to party and you’re going with some friends, I don’t see any real reason to bring it, at least not if you’re in the kind of social group that I imagine that Lady Gaga occupies, and especially if she was going with a few friends in case anything had happened. I personally always bring my phone with me places, and am definitely always checking on it, but I would be quite unlikely to take a call in a club or at a party, and admittedly would be quite unhappy if somebody kept persisting in calling me in that situation enough times that I eventually did have to answer the phone, in order to tell them to stop calling.

I am sure there’s more to the issue, but those are just a few of the things that ran through my mind as the song played this morning on my iPod.

June 25, 2010 | No Comments »

Jazz Band Hero

Recently I was at a friend’s home of mine, with a bunch of other friends, and the activity that came up was that we should all play a little bit of Rock Band. I have never played Rock Band, so naturally the first thing I did was to whip out the WorkPad Z50, which I had with me, to play a little bit of  Blogger Hero. However, I got bored of that fairly quickly, and because people were leaving, I decided to play a bit of Rock Band.

Before actually playing though, I definitely made the point of noting that I’d actually rather love to be able to play the various woodwind parts in the song, which led me to think about the various other types of Hero games that either already do exist, or might exist at some point in time. There is DJ Hero, Beetles Rock Band Hero, and of course I believe I’ve seen Flute Hero online. I’m sure there’s a Piano Hero game, even if it’s some sort of legit educational game.

All of that having been said, I would like to make it known that my personally preferred type of Hero game would have to be Jazz Band Hero. Like I said, I’d love to be able to pretend to play all of those woodwind instruments.

May 28, 2010 | No Comments »

I have Google Voice now!

The other day one of my supervisors sent out an email letting us know Google was running a special deal on google voice for people with @edu e-mail addresses, so I went ahead and signed up.

I now have a (425) number from Renton, WA whose digits spell out “CORY.” I can’t think of anything more fantastic for today. The number, in case anybody wants to call it on their phone, is (425) 243-CORY or (425) 243-2679.

May 17, 2010 | No Comments »

Daily Log

One thought that occurred to me this morning is that in the past year or so, I’ve been very lax on what used to be a very strong policy of mine to keep a daily log in some form or another. When I stopped using my Steno pad as an organizer and journal so much, the way I did in high school, I switched over to blogging on nearly a daily basis, one or two of the big events or things that occupied my mind on that particular day. After that, I went back to the Steno Pad again, thinking it would be easier and even was telling people I liked it because it turned on instantly, it had a huge display and great user interface.

After that, when I’d decided to try using my iPhone as a daily log, I pretty much stopped having one most days. Admittedly most of those days weren’t necessarily incredibly important, but it’s still nice to be able to flip through my life as it had been once in the past and see what I was doing and thinking about. Necessary? By no means, but it’s also a way for me to record thoughts, quotes and anecdotes to be used later on my blog, or referred to later while reminiscing, or whatever.

One of the things I tried to do with my TouchPro2 was to determine the best possible way to get take these notes in a digital format, as my desire to be dependent upon paper products continues to decrease. I love paper, but I hate buying it,  hauling it around, not having it when I need or want it the most, and the variety of other inconveniences it can pose, such as my inability to read my own handwriting,  the inability to quickly send any bit of the text to somebody else, and the inability to search it later on. I can’t just search my old steno pads for the text “Geometry the Musical” — unfortunately.

So far, there have been two solutions I tried on the TouchPro2. The first of which seemed the most obvious at first, synchronizing a “Notes from Phone” section of my OneNote notebook between SuperSlab and the phone. This produced a situation where I could pre-create notes for all of the days in the month, then write on them, hypothetically from either the PC or the phone, and then just bring them together with synchronization.

Unfortunately, OneNote is mired in problems with synchronization. It simply can’t sync, or it copies in an entirely new copy of your mobile OneNote notes if you do something like edit the notes on your PC when  you have made other unsynchronized changes on your phone. It can’t just keep a phone and a PC version of that page, it does up a copy of the entire notebook, leaving you to figure out what changes need to be merged manually. Additionally, my phone can be synchronized through either bluetooth, or by hooking it up to USB. However, changing the way you sync the phone actually creates a new notebook in OneNote, which means if I’m not paying attention, I could easily (and have) end up with a half dozen different notebook files with different versions of everything in it. There’s some very huge room for improvement here.

The idea of using OneNote was that eventually Microsoft was going to release the Office OneNote Web App, which promises to be just about as awesome as the OneNote desktop app, but accessible from the Web. There are a few ways this works. Firstly, you can use it in a browser, just like all other web apps. However, the real power that’s supposed to be available is the ability to create a notebook on the web from within the desktop app, and sync it either at an interval, when changes are made, or just on command. Then, you are purportedly able to sync your OneNote web notebook (or one of them) with your phone Again, either continuously, on-demand, as needed or at an interval. I know Office 2010 isn’t officially released yet, but this functionality would have made the beta way better. Way better.

Then, I re-discovered (or initially discovered, I’m never sure which it was) Evernote, an app that lives on the web and in a huge variety of desktop and mobile applications, and that does exactly what I wanted the OneNote web app to do. Except in a far more terrible fashion. The idea is pretty solid, and the execution is, I’d say, at least 70% there. The missing 30% though is the exact reason that I still can’t bring myself to use EverNote for in-class note taking. It just lacks the formatting capability and ease that OneNote has, which won me over to the program for notetaking and information gathering compared with a traditional word processor, outlining app, or text editor. So while Evernote is 70% “there” for me, OneNote is probably 85% so, just because despite some idiosyncrasies with synchronization, it lets me very easily create pretty flexible tables, insert drawings with a mouse or a tablet, and it has better note organization functionality, at least for me. I think the remaining bits of OneNote being suitable for note taking will be fixed by me either setting up a WebDAV server that OneNote can use for note synchronization

The other part of daily recording is willpower and remembering to do so. Part of why I remembered to write things down was that I had the thing in my pocket or carried it around, and a lot of people had this really weird interest in it, often saying things such as “Ooh, what have you put in it today?” or “Oh, can I write something in it?” Odd, but it helped keep me interested too. These days, there’s no real interest in somebody who writes everything down in a mobile phone, and the steno pad is a little bit too cumbersome, especially as sometimes I’m on my computer and sometimes I’m just walking around. I carry one around, but it tends to be for special use cases, like when I have an appointment where I need to take notes, or where I’m working on a specific project or information gathering task where I will need to write information down.

We’ll see what happens from here. I’ll probably continue to try to find new and interesting ways to record things that happen to me throughout the day. I may try doing things like becoming a more active user of Twitter or Facebook to record things as they happen, or I may continue to search for (and find) other notetaking solutions, maybe even choosing to have separate solutions for the phone (where evernote has all the formatting I’d legitimately need) and the computer (where the added complexity of OneNote is very easy to use and helpful) and even a physical note taking “platform” like provisioning a new steno pad for the fall 2010 semester.

April 17, 2010 | No Comments »
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