Recently I upgraded phones again, this time the blackjackII. The quick review on this is that the battery life is more than acceptable for the type of phone that it is.. listening to an online radio station for 40min did show a bit on my battery meter, but a lot less than expected. Additionally, so far this has not felt sluggish in doing any task.

My “real” objectives with the phone are:
* Make/receive phone calls without hassle - so far so good
* Sync with my google calendar and be my PDA/scheduler
* Check mail for work and home
* Read blogs when waiting around at appointments
* General media player - share funny video clips & songs
* GPS (now that this phone has it) - see what’s around, especially when not in a car

My “want” list:
* GPS phone tracking so others can see my location (when I want them to)

The nice thing about where these phones are today is that software is inexpensive to add, and usually works quite well. Here’s what I’ve found so far.

Software for everyday use:
Facade - home screen with better scheduler view
PocketWeather - Weather for various cities.. works with Facade to display it all on 1 page
Phone Alarm - program to automatically go into quiet mode at night, also makes the alarms repeat
OggSync - Syncs to my google calendars
Opera Browser - Better than IE (nothing is as good as browsing on a PC)
Slingplayer Mobile - Watch my TV/cable from anywhere (must own slingbox for this to work)
Sprite Backup - Backs up your phone to a .exe on your storage card.. a MUST HAVE
zaTunnel - tunnel outgoing mail back to my server so it can send correctly
Google Maps - show where I am and where everything is near me, traffic, etc too
MS Live Search - Similar to google maps type of functionality
IMOV messenger - AIM/ICQ/Yahoo/etc, slightly better than the built-in versions
Fizz Bill Now - Split bills and figure out tips

Occasional use software:
GPS Test - Utility to show how well GPS is working, how many sats it can see, etc
GPSID Settings - Utility to make the GPS show on COM4
Keep Recordin’ - Utility to make recordings of any length (large wav files)
Minimo - Firefox for smartphones, sorry - IE and opera both work better on non-touchscreen models
PHM Registry editor - For those of us who like to change things we shouldn’t be playing with
PocketTV - Media player

There are people that I’ve encountered that have a mental block when anything with “technology” comes up. This block has nothing to do with people’s financial class or exposure to technology. I’ve seen this in people who are near genius level and in the “average joe”.

Most of the time I encounter these blocks when working on people’s computers with them. Telling someone with a technology block to point at a square on a screen results in a blank stare. Any computer or technology related discussion needs to be repeated a number of times using different explanations each time before the person with the block can understand, regardless of how simple the concept is. To continue with the previous example, ask one of these people with the technology block to point at a square on a piece of paper and they might even be insulted by being asked to do a trivial task. The same task when on a computer screen becomes an incredibly difficult task.

I would love to know if there’s a term for this problem. I’ve encountered it for a long time and I think this may only get worse as technology gets forced into more and more areas of people’s lives.

Recent events reminded me about this because of an issue where someone in a position of authority was not flexible or willing to take advice when making decisions of a technical nature even though they had no information from which to base a decision. To make items worse, they also have the technology block, so they found it frustrating to listen and digest any information given to them.

So, after our cable box finished receiving a firmware update, I went surfing to see what was on and found a Dr Phil show about Cyber Bullies. I have a few things to say.

The coverage of the Megan myspace case from Missouri I don’t really have much to add to.
For the coverage of the “bad joke” I think they left one thing out that I’d have liked to know.. was the joke posted as the person (personal e-mail) or using their work account.. that would be a valid point they left out.

The rest of this post was inspired by the gamer in the show, but not a direct “response”. The situation was that an online gamer was getting upset by the threats against him and his family by other players. He was also unable to get the manufacturer and host of the online game to handle the complaints. Sadly, nobody has made a good reference that has been adopted worldwide about online scenarios and how to react to situations like these and how to protect yourself online that have made it to the mainstream. I’m sure a few references exist.. and if you know of one, feel free to post it in the comments here for others to know about.

To protect your anonymous identity online and be “safe” while playing X-box or other games, one of the important things to remember is to not give people identifying information. Don’t use a name that you use for AIM and every other service if you don’t want people tracking you. Don’t post any personal information or give out anything you don’t need to, especially to other players. This little bit of protection in itself make the other players’ threats empty ones. If someone doesn’t know who you are, their threats are nothing more than words.

The online gamer also was concerned about letting his kids online.. both in case the people who made threats against him and the people who will be talking to his children. Firstly, if precautions are made with some basic limiting of information, using different names, etc as listed above, nobody will know who the dad is, so we can assume that threat is limited. The issues with children online range from harassment, introduction to sexually explicit situations and other adult content exposure to stalking. A few precautions will solve most of these problems:

• Don’t let kids play adult games (or any really) without supervision
• Explain to your kids that similar to real life, you CAN (and should) ignore people who harass you. Don’t engage them and if it gets to be too much.. TURN IT OFF
• Don’t (you or your kids) give out personal information
• Don’t join location-based chat (ie: #sandiego-kids on IRC would be a bad choice)

One other very important thing about being online is to realize how fast friendships can be created and dissolve. Giving out your home phone number to someone you’ve known for 2 hours wouldn’t make much sense in real life.. and likewise you shouldn’t do it online either. Rather than retyping a previous post, I’d recommend a read of this.

After noticing some friends have their resolutions online, I feel compelled to do the same..
This year.. NONE.

I like the way I do most things. I like the attempts I make to continue improving myself on a personal, work and other levels. I have nothing that I feel needs to be tracked with a final “goal” at this point, nor do I want to.

Yes, there are things I can do better, ways I can improve, things I could do differently.. and yes, I am working on them.. I will continue to work on these things until the end of time. . but I do see that I am always improving, and I can live with this and sleep comfortably at night.

With the speed of the Internet, a change in how people relate has occurred. For some unknown reason, I feel the need to post about this. Before going into the online/off-line worlds and the relations, I need to define “friend”. For the purpose of this post, a friend is not someone who sends you an online message and says “lets be friends” or someone you added as a friend on myspace. A friend in this post is someone who would understand that a difference of opinion is acceptable, someone who you can talk to if you’re having a problem and would not make fun of the situation or tell everyone who doesn’t need to know. So, now that we’ve covered that, here we go..

It used to be that a “friend” was someone who you got to know over time.. may see every few days or was a friend of a friend who you got to know better over time. Recently, thanks to online chat networks, gaming and other online activities relationships live and die faster than ever before. There’s both good and bad to this, but I think that the “average user” really never takes the time to consider the difference in how relationships are established online.

One on one relationships in real life take a while usually.. you meet regularly, may be involved in a project and work side by side for a while.. and over time a friendship (or hate) is developed. In the online world, you can do projects with someone for a short time while typing back and forth and think you’ve met your soul mate after 3 hours of chatting. I’ve seen this happen repeatedly in virtual worlds.. someone wanders up to someone offers help to a new player and lends a hand.. lets say the new player needs a house.. so they build together and talk.. and are “friends” after 1 night. This friendship is no less “real” than a friendship built over weeks off-line, however it is so sudden that there will be things the 2 people don’t know about each other which could make or break the relationship over time. The ability to be semi-anonymous may also play a part in this depending on the mindset of the individuals involved.. but that’s for another post ..the relationships are more fragile due to the speed they happen at - often they escalate to hardcore relationships or immediately fall apart.

Group relationships are probably the most difficult to maintain long-term online. The first part of the problem is the one on one relationship being more volatile thanks an off-line relationship already. Groups are also more difficult due to people in groups not always agreeing and getting along.. plus with online communities, many people belong to a number of groups that they try to be involved with at the same time which either takes time away from the other groups or they attempt to combine the different groups into 1 larger community.. and there is more conflict than they expected. The community part gets more complicated when “friends of friends” are involved and the community attempts to set a direction.

I realize that this post sounds negative towards online relationships, but it’s not meant to - just wanted to point out that these relationships are more difficult usually than off-line ones. I’ve had the pleasure of being in positive versions of both personal and group relationships online. My wife is the best example of the personal version. We are two people who met and had a shared interest who eventually fell in love (over years). I have a few groups of friends online too.. most are unorganized groups at this point who stay in contact as a group yet have separate interests and groups they spend the majority of their time with.

Posting this for family/friends curious about our safety and the San Diego fires.

The summary:
On Monday, October 22nd at 4am the smell of smoke in the area woke us up. We turned on the news and didn’t see anything regarding our area and attempted to sleep. About 5 minutes later we decided to give the news another try and did see our city listed as an area of concern. We decided that the smoke was so bad that we should evacuate anyway.. upon going to the livingroom we realized that about 200ft away we could see flames at the end of our parking area at the base of the closest hill. We packed the car with the pets, belongings and headed out. It took about 10 minutes to actually exit our community due to the other 4,000 residents who also decided it was time to leave. The 3 hour drive to Los Angeles took 5 hours, but we made it safely to my parent’s house and everyone is ok, except Tashie’s foot which she broke while packing the car.

The other details:
Tashie prepared our suitcase in advance and had made checklists, etc. As we were doing the last minute of preperation in the house before we started moving things to the car, we had a neighbor bang on the door to alert us to the danger. When we made it to the parking lot, everyone was honking on the way out to alert the other neighbors to evacuate immediately. While rolling one of the suitcases to the car, the smoke and ash in the air made it difficult to see and Tashie tripped and fractured her ankle. There are over 4,000 residents that live in our small community and we have 2 actual exits to a main road. One of the exits was blocked by fire. Five hours after we evacuated and were safe, we received the “reverse-911″ call letting us know that it was time to leave.

We believe the house is still standing. The night before we left, I hooked up a webcam to watch the house and a 2nd camera pointing in the direction of the fire. The webcam was online for another 8 hours after we left, which means the fire did not continue toward our house at the time. We know that power is out in the neighborhood, so it’s possible that the power outage killed the feed. Friends of friends have been in the area and believe our house was unaffected. Also, at this time the posts of destroyed properties do not list our address as destroyed, however those reports are incomplete.

Our plan for returning to San Diego depends on power being turned on, roads between Los Angeles and San Diego being open and the mandatory evacuation being terminated. The plan will be for Tashie and I to return to San Diego and clean the ash/soot, clean the ruined food out of the refrigerator and put a good air purifier in place. Once we feel the place is clean enough and the air quality is ok, we’ll take a follow-up trip to move our pets back.

Updated 10/25/07 - Heard that our place is ok, had a neighbor call. Won’t have power for a few days though.
Updated: 11/6/07 - Probably should have updated this earlier.. we’re back, no damage just smoke smell.. all’s well, although 4 houses in our neighborhood did burn and we have destruction in any direction within a few blocks, definitely feeling lucky.

For a while I was quite addicted to Second Life. When you find a good group of people to chat with and can create scripts, objects and be creative it is really fun. I was able to also be a DJ, run a small lottery and explore creating a lot of toys inside the Second Life world.

Problems with Second Life have definitely made me loose interest. First off, they are a BETA product, not a “final release” so there are a lot of errors. For some reason they don’t like to actually advertise this which would help us with our expectations of their product, but instead they simply hide their “we might have times where we’re unstable” in their terms of service. The problems are also not limited to their in-world issues but also goes into legal, billing, staffing and public relations.

BETA - a term used to explain software which may not be “finished” yet and is expected to have a problem here and there. Second Life staff never has appreciated when I’ve referred to their product as a beta, but instead likes to say it’s “bleeding edge”. I fail to see why it’s such a big deal, but having BETA on the front page would be a way to stop half of the complaints. When people buy inventory for their character or loose money, it would be known up front that there may be a problem.. but instead Second Life prefers to let their consumer think that this is a “rare” item.. although if you look through the Second Life blog, you’ll find MANY times that “inventory” and “lindens” (in-world dollar) are mentioned as failing. The lack of informing consumers that Second Life is beta software means that vendors and businesses in Second Life have to explain to their customers that they may not get what they pay for.. and it ends up creating a bad name at the vendor level when inventory or money does not make it to the customer.

Second Life is a legal nightmare. By having a US based company hosting everything in the US, it means that they are bound by US laws. This means that customers connecting from around the world need to be familiar with US laws to do business in this world. Additionally, Second Life’s terms of service were recently viewed as unrealistic by one court. According to the current terms of service, a resident can have their entire inventory, land and money taken away and no recourse for the user to reclaim them. The next item I expect to see will be Second Life policing of the radio stations on land. In the “real world” websites that give out a list of unlicensed stations are removed by the RIAA. Even though they are not “directly” broadcasting the music, they are enabling the illegal activity. Second Life can be held responsible for this same activity.

Billing for Second Life has been changed to a new company recently which was apparently responsible for triple billing many Australian users. This was never reported on the Second Life blog even though it reportedly had an impact on a considerable part of the Second Life user base. In our case we had to show all of the credit card statements to Second Life and it took over 1 full month to get this resolved. It also came up that one of their billings was done TWO MONTHS after it should have (April billing was done in June). During our experience with the billing department we also found that the billing page provided by Second Life in the “account history” area of the website is not even REMOTELY accurate. It did not list all of the charges or the refunds.

Staffing for Second Life has been an interesting set up. Initially they seemed to have a small company of programmers and then a volunteer staff to handle the public and support. As Second Life expanded the ability to find “live help” has been removed and replaced by the mentors who can answer some simple questions and a help ticket system which is available for paying users (non-paying can log certain types of tickets only). The staff themselves are not all that helpful. There are some staff we have found to really know their product and react in a responsible way, however the vast majority do not understand the product they support, some are flat out rude, others like to simply not respond at all. We’ve had staff tell us that our land suddenly having performance problems is due to items that have been on land for MONTHS and just happened to be the item that someone walked in to during the last lag spike. There’s another staff member who has only answered a help request once for me but spoke gibberish - and has never responded to any other IM or e-mail (8 attempts in all to talk to this one). Philip, the CEO of the company, has responded to ONE of my e-mails.. the ONE that complained about Nissan spamming on our land. Every other mail about stability, inventory loss and other questions has remained unanswered. Our attempt to contact billing regarding the triple charges for our land was plagued by a lack of communication back from the billing department. The “ok, we’ll call you back tomorrow” was not done and the resolution for the problem took a full month.

Public relations is a game that Second Life is playing which can be very dangerous. On one side they’re trying to win over the open source community with their browser project, they’re adding new features, they have corporate sponsors and even have educational institutions testing the waters. Unfortunately for Second Life, almost everything has backfired. The open source community want to see a server code released and to work on the stability issues of Second Life. The new features come at a time when stability is questionable at best. The features are listed on the blog as “coming soon” and albums of Torley’s pictures. People are outraged by the new features being worked on at all given the amount of stability issues with the Second Life product. The blog entries saying “look!” are full of comments complaining about “fix SL before adding new features”. The blog itself may end up being a large downfall for Second Life since it shows the massive amount of outages and gives the outraged public a place to comment. The blog has become very predictable; after a few outage notifications there are carefully placed announcements of new updates, legal clarifications and other information to push the outage notices out of the top items shown on the page. Some of the companies that have attempted to use Second Life for publicity stunts have also found that it can back-fire. An example would be NBC’s tree lighting ceremony which was badly announced (gave the land name of “NBC” which wasn’t available at the login screen), it exceeded capacity (all of the land they set aside for this was full and people could not get in) and the feedback was not all positive.

Second Life’s future is uncertain at best. The company likes to release the huge number of subscribers, the numbers of people who were online in the last 90 days, etc.. but even many users like myself skew those numbers.. I have about 6 accounts and I login once a month to clear my messages. The lack of copy protection for content, the problems with the stability, the lost inventory and funds, the billing issues, the staff incompetence and many other problems will probably plague Second Life for the rest of it’s existence. I hope that someone else does take the idea and do a better version someday. The idea is promising, the implementation and staffing remains a problem for this version.

Discussion of operating systems and platform are as bad as discussions about religion or politics. There are reasons behind someone’s choice to back one over another and 99% of the time you won’t change someone’s mind.

An example.. I’m a PC guy and use RH Linux for my servers and Windows for my workstations. I’m comfortable with Linux as my server choice because that’s what I started on. I know how to make it do what I want. Why RedHat? I tried them after slackware buggered up the glib support back on slak 4.0 and never went back. I really haven’t given the other distros a try recently since I’m comfortable with what I have. Likewise, with Windows.. I have XP pro on all of my workstations. I know how to keep it running in a way I’m comfortable with and I like certain software that only runs on Windows.

Better choices? Sure - my RedHat 9 machine won’t do a simple 2 command upgrade like fbsd and upgrade every program. It’s not as handy as other Linux flavors either. I’d love to have the support from OpenBSD to place firewall rules based on remote OS detection, that’s just plain cool. As for Windows “security”.. I’ve not had a virus, spyware or anything since moving to XP. Windows runs the programs I want to run.. for better or worse. Only time I’ve had the blue screen of death in recent years has been due to a hardware failure (power supply which also corrupted the drive)..

..so why would I want to change?

Sure, I like playing with technology.. so I will probably have a Mac someday. I really want to play with quicktime editing at some point.. so far that’s the 1 application I need a Mac to use (for specialized purpose). Chances are, once I go to virtual machines more, I will have a few virtual machines to try out other OSs.. but for my day to day work, I can’t see changing.

..and for those of you reading, I don’t expect that what works for me would work for you either.

A review/editorial/commentary of “Second Life”..

For those who don’t know, “Second Life” is an online world created by Linden Labs. It’s a virtual environment where you can do many of the things you can do in the real world and more. The environment is built by users.. each chair, building, outfit is created in-world.

I’ve been using SecondLife for a year now.. Tashie was the first to take a step with opening a store. She was tired of finding duplicate “free” items everywhere and wanted to make a one stop shop to find as many as possible without the duplicates. We decided we liked hanging with people and opened a club.. and this continued to grow. Currently we have our own “island” which we control. We have a 3-story mall, a club, the freebie store, amusement rides and tons more. We don’t make money on it, but it’s something fun to do. We’ve met some great people and we’ve enjoyed most of our time making this island our home away from home.

The concept of having a “second life” where you can be whoever you want, live in a different world and do things you can’t (or would never) do in real life is not new.. but making it happen is a challenge. When you give people the ability to do “anything” and make “anything” it can create technical problems.. how do you prepare for things you’ve not thought of.. and how do you add limits without stopping people’s ability to create? ..and it’s this major “flaw” that makes you feel like you’re using beta software. Every couple weeks they roll out more bugfixes and a few new features. Each new feature adds more bugs. The technology is simply not tested well enough before rolling it out to the users. There is a “preview” grid which is open to people and where you can test and report bugs.. but that’s not why most of us play. Linden Labs seems unwilling to create/develop a decent testing system. Most days with major rollouts currently have additional downtime as they find bugs and add quick-fixes.

Many see SecondLife as a “game” so they expect to come in world with some funding, they expect to go around, hang out, chat, listen to music and play games. The intended use by Linden Labs is a bit different. They’ve changed the economy to try to “preserve” the value of in-world currency but don’t seem to understand that the average user just wants to unwind online after a day at work, not to have to get a job in SecondLife or use real life money to buy additional in-game currency. For those who run things in-game, we also get to compete with Linden Lab sponsored events or sponsored venues (as an exmaple we had a staff member leave to a Linden-funded education venue because we could not compete with the pay). I feel the Linden’s choice to try to say some things in-game are more important and worth paying for than others to be a flaw in the system. If residents are happy to build/create/teach/whatever, they should find their own ways to make funds or just do it for the joy of doing it.. Lindens should leave the playing field alone to keep things enjoyable for all.

I have mixed reviews of the helpers (Linden employees) in Second Life. There are some who are the “front smiling face” of the company who seem to not have the technical understanding when you try to talk to them about problems, but they’re most commonly the ones answering the public questions from users. There’s some that seem technical but would like us to believe that our video drivers can crash 40 other people including the sim we’re on. There’s a few overly technical who are a pleasure to deal with.. thanks Jack, Cyn, Steve and Kenny.

Probably the best trick that Linden Labs did with SecondLife is make it addicting.. despite the flaws, the money, the excessive computer requirements to play.. you’re still willing to spend your time and often your money on this addicting waste of time. I completely admit I’m unable to just “walk away” even on days like today where I feel like I *PAY* them to beta-test their software, report bugs and watch the island crash.

Went today to Wild Animal park with some friends, 2 mini video clips to share

Lorikeets in action and asking for attention.