A carnival of technology

I’ve been baking a lot of bread lately. My first loaf was a disaster, but I think I’ve mastered the terrible secret and have been able to make some bread that was pretty alright. Baking bread has opened up some new problems. I needed a bread knife, of course, since it doesn’t come out of the oven sliced, and I needed to figure out where to get some yeast. Apparently it’s next to the flour in the store. It took me a while to figure that out. I figured it would be refrigerated, since it’s alive and all. I think my mom kept yeast in the fridge. That threw me off. I’d like to try a sourdough bread, though I’m not sure how I feel about letting things rot intentionally.

The bread is also exacerbating my problem of having too much homemade food around. I know I can freeze it, but I won’t; I don’t really want to go into it. I need to find a girlfriend to eat all the crap I cook. If any of you ladies out there like food, I’m available.

I bought my copy of Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s pretty thick. About this thick:

I’d like to think that I have some little bit of patience. I enjoy long movies. I even own copies of some bladder-busters like Lawrence of Arabia and Ben Hur. Sure, they have intermissions, and I can pause them, but they still constitute four-hour long thoughts that require a certain attention span in order to follow and appreciate them. I’ve read long collections of books, like Lord of the Rings and the Dune series, but the splits between those volumes seems to offer a sort of reprieve not available in single tomes. The longest single book I’ve ever read was actually V. 775 pages is a whole mess of pages. The great reading challenge starts on Tuesday.

My various attempts to read on the bus in the mornings have failed for a number of reasons, but I still try to get in some reading once in a while. Currently I’m working on Player Piano, Vonnegut’s first book, which I picked up after I heard of his death. I’ve read it before, and I figure that the day I can read that book without becoming totally depressed is the day I’ve completely stopped caring about humanity. It’s a pretty good book.

Apparently beets can make you piss red. I made some beet soup last night, and man, did I have a scare this morning.

I finally ditched that Peachtree Linux (popular in Scandinavia) thing and installed a Linux distribution that sees some maintenance once in a while. I installed Fedora core whatever’s latest, and it seems pretty alright. The music player is the main thing that’s been giving me trouble. I can’t seem to get tracks in playlists loaded in order even if the tracks have track number tags. I don’t get it, but I don’t care a whole lot, either.

Gravity’s Rainbow is novel by Thomas Pynchon that is widely held to be completely unreadable. Chris Lumens first introduced me to the idea of this novel, though this was not my first introduction to Pynchon. I’ll go more into that later. If I recall correctly, the Borders near Cumberland Mall didn’t even put Gravity’s Rainbow in the fiction section, instead banishing it to the dense mires of Philosophy. We joked about it sometimes, and sometimes expressed an interest in taking a shot at it, and when Chris moved to the frozen wastelands of New England, one of the parting gifts we gave him was a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow. We also included a cookbook with a Confederate flag on the cover, and I hope that he got more use out of that.

Chris has again brought forth the novel’s ugly head, this time in the form of a pact to try to read the thing. Like a sucker, I joined in.

Pynchon is considered part of the postmodern movement in literature. Postmodernism as a philosophy is a rejection of both rational and empirical knowledge in favor of a celebration of the banality of form as the expression of human existence. In other words, it’s complete bullshit. The pantheon of postmodern authors includes bullshit artists such as Joyce and Beckett, yet Pynchon stands apart from even these in the magnitude of his impenetrability. Chris posted a blogger’s review of Gravity’s Rainbow that seems to capture the attitude of anyone trying to read Pynchon’s works, and, though I’m too lazy to search for other reviews of this novel, for the sake of showing the parallels in attitude even among the literarily minded, I’m going to repeat a segment of a review of Pynchon’s last novel that I read in an actual newspaper (The Christian Science Monitor) while sitting on the crapper:

[Thomas Pynchon's] new novel, Against the Day, represents one of the few cases in which I’d recommend judging a book by its cover. A casual examination will reveal that (a) it’s massive (1,085 pages) and (b) if you stare at the blurry title for more than a second, it makes you feel dizzy and your head starts to hurt.

From the little I know of Pynchon’s works, that quote sums up the experience neatly. Gravity’s Rainbow is supposed to be his masterpiece of intertwined symbolism and confusing prose, and I can hardly wait for the start of this reading adventure. I’m going to pick up a copy tomorrow.

I’ve read V, Pynchon’s first novel, so I feel like I’ve had some training. I picked up a copy of V on the recommendation of Seth, one of dcantrell’s friends, after he asked me to use my university resources (which I didn’t need; I found it with Google) to retrieve a review of the novel written by George Plimpton for the New York Times Review of Books. The review was itself a beautiful creative work, describing a turbulent novel that, though perhaps flawed in its form of a series of seemingly disjoint stories, was reminiscent of the works of Kerouac and Heller and delightful in its encyclopedic volume of interconnected details and seemingly random bits of knowledge. I read the book itself fairly recently, and it was a pretty rough experience. Beyond the obvious obstacle of not having the requisite knowledge to fully appreciate the occasional passages written in French, German or Maltese, the disjoint nature of the novel made for a pretty confusing read. Overall, I’d say that V wasn’t bad and ultimately not very confusing—by the end of the novel, the most obvious of the symbols (everything that started with a “V”) were clearly explained into the plot (which became evident about halfway through) of the search for the mystery woman (though I’m not sure what she meant),—but what I’ll call the secondary symbols—the jeweled dentures, the jazz musician, the sexualized torture and death in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, the various attitudes of all of the other members of the Whole Sick Crew which the schlemiel, the ostensibly main character, became involved in—came and went rapidly, and the meaning of anything was always nearly opaque. V was basically a series of stories presented as a single piece that dared you to make sense of it in either context. I don’t know that I enjoyed it—the fact that I have to wonder suggests that I want to enjoy it more than I actually did—but it was in all a unique, and perhaps enlightening, experience.

From what I understand, V is Pynchon for beginners. Chris made it 60 pages into Gravity’s Rainbow, and I lack no faith in his persistence or tenacity in the face of something weird to be understood. This is going to be a hell of ride.

I saw two deaf people on MARTA today. Differently-abled people taking MARTA isn’t strange in itself, and I shouldn’t focus on people’s differences, blah blah blah, but I couldn’t help but watch these two. They were both standing up, carrying on a conversation in sign language and trying to figure out how to hold on to something at the same time. They seemed to be doing pretty alright at it, but there were a couple of rough spots. I’ve never really met any deaf people, so I found the way they talked kind of interesting. They were both moving their lips as they signed to each other but not really saying anything aloud. One of them was nearly silent, I guess subvocalizing whatever he was signing, and the other made some indistinct sounds. He was loud enough to hear at times, but it wasn’t words; just vowels. I wonder why they did that. Maybe as a habit from talking to hearing people? Maybe to provide enough to the other person to read lips as well as signs? I don’t know. I didn’t know if it would have been rude to ask, and I doubt they would have heard me anyway.

Trader Joe’s is now open in Midtown, which I think is the first Atlanta location not way out in the ‘burbs. They took over that building that used be a Save Rite on Monroe, and it’s the largest of the three Atlanta stores I’ve been inside. They’re also open to 10. There is no longer a Brewster’s next to this building.

The park that they built over the interstate looks a lot nicer than I thought it would. It’s not something that would make you stop and say, “that’s a park!” but it’s at least a nice break from the concrete and steel surrounding it. On either side of the bridge there is a low wall at the outside edge of the sidewalk followed by a strip of grass at the level of the top of the wall, and beyond that there’s a series of terraced walls with a variety of plants, ended finally by the fence and the inescapable view of the connector. Oddly, the fences didn’t look like they had the suicide curve to them. Maybe they think the walls are enough of a deterrent.

There are a lot more bikes in Midtown now than what I remember. It’s crazy. West Peachtree now has a bicycle lane along most of its length along with a lot of the side streets, but the lanes are completely useless. Cars park directly inside the lane, so there’s a constant danger of being run over or hit with a door for bikers that actually use the bike lanes. I suppose it’s a nice gesture, and I hope no one is injured badly as a result of it.

I don’t think I was meant to have plants. I had a couple of plants in the Smyrna apartment, one that died quickly and another one of those big corn plants that hung on to the very end, though it did look mighty rough before I threw out and moved. I have a much smaller corn plant now, and it seems to have a constant problem with the leaves turning brown. I assumed it wasn’t getting enough light and put it outside for a few days, and that caused a few leaves to look pale and burned. Maybe I should get fake plants next time.

I really hate shaving. I don’t have enough facial hair to grow a respectable beard, so I don’t have much an option, but I find it very unpleasant. The way my face feels after a shave is especially irksome: it feels too smooth, and like there’s a layer of junk on top of it. I don’t think this is the shaving cream, since I get the same feeling if I shave straight out of the shower without it. Maybe it’s that stupid aloe strip. Whatever the cause of this feeling, I don’t like multi-blade razors on principle alone. Crap gets stuck between the blades, and though the Razor Gator song is pretty catchy, I don’t think it can help. I’ve found other household items to fill the razor cleaning function, and the blades still dull quickly. Worse, the efforts of Gillette and Schick to find the upper limit of the number blades a single cartridge can hold drives up the prices of what should be a cheap piece of metal. There are still dual-blade razors, but I have an unfounded suspicion that the razor companies start making their existing product lines crappier with each new product release to encourage migration. Before I use the last couple of cartridges in the family size box of Gillette Sensor something or another I bought a while back, I’m going switching to one blade. I found an old-school dual-edge razor on the Internet, and I’m hoping that the lack of stupid features—the aloe strip moisturizing a face already covered in goofy lotion, the second blade there to cause clogs and encourage ingrown hairs—will be somewhat more comfortable. If nothing else, the blades are supposed to last a lot longer, and replacements cost about fifty cents.

I guess I should probably worry more about visibility when I’m on the bicycle. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve read The Art of Urban Cycling and liked it a lot, and the basic lesson therein is that your ass is your own problem. Even the drivers that aren’t driving like idiots are mainly looking for other cars, so invisibility is something that bikers just have to expect, and shiny plastic or blinking lights are not the panacea that everyone would like. Invisibility can sometimes even work to the advantage of an alert biker since in such a case a car will behave predictably rather than erratically reacting to an unexpected two-wheeled object. The fact that all of my spills have been a result of my own inattention to the road itself rather than cars hitting me doesn’t help to change my attitude that visibility isn’t much of a problem. However, I can see how it would help if people could actually see me once in a while.

My bicycle has several fewer reflectors than what is mandated by the CPSC for new bicycles. The reflector requirements are detailed in 16 CFR 1512.16 and enforced through the powers provided by 15 USC 1261-1278 (chapter 30 of that title), the Federal Hazardous Substances Act. This only applies to bicycles as they are manufactured and sold; it can’t be used to regulate how bicycles are used. Something about interstate commerce and all that. States have particular requirements for what a bicycle should have, and Georgia is one of the more lenient as far what needs to be on a bicycle riding at night. Georgia seems to have moved the online copy of their code into some goofy Lexis-Nexis thing that I can’t figure out how to use, but the relevant section is Official Code of Georgia Annotated 40-6-296 if you feel like looking it up yourself. It says that bicycles riding at night need a light on the front visible for some number of feet and a red reflector on the back visible for some number of feet. A red light on the back is allowed, but it does not satisfy the requirement for the reflector. I’ve removed all of the other reflectors, and I’m technically breaking the law when I ride at night since my rear reflector is blocked by the rear rack. I’ve been meaning to fix it, but I don’t think anyone really cares, and I’m not too worried about it.

The pedal reflectors were the first to go. I have clips on my pedals, and the extra bits of plastic get in the way of the little hooks provided for flipping the pedals over. I can think of ways that reflectors could be provided with pedals that overcome this problem, but my reflectors were tacked on as an afterthought in order to satisfy the letter of the law, and they’re way annoying, so out they go. The white reflector on the front was next. I won’t get into the arguments for or against the CPSC’s all-reflector system for bicycles, but I don’t think that the states that do so are unwise in mandating headlights. I don’t think I need a passive white light next to my active one, so it’s cut, too. The other reflectors that came with my bike were the ones on the wheels visible from the sides. These are the only ones that are actually dangerous to have—unbalancing a wheel is generally a bad idea—but I never did anything about them. They went in the trash along with my broken wheels back in January, and the new wheels didn’t come with reflectors. My new wheels have fewer spokes, so even if I did know where to get those reflectors, I don’t know if they’d even fit. I guess I’ll have to figure that out if I move to California or Massachusetts.

I bought a bunch of bike crap at REI this weekend, and the guy at the checkout mentioned some kind of reflective vest that I could buy and that he nearly gets run over every day while commuting to work. The latter statement confused me. I commute to work most days, and I can only think of a handful of incidents where I’d say a collision with a car was a risk. Maybe people expect too much of cars? I noticed a little placard at the REI bike shop summarizing the rules of the road for bicycles, and one of its points, directed at drivers, was that cars should give at least three feet of space to bicycles when passing. That’s a fine and dandy idea when there’s nice wide lanes and the bicycle is riding on the right edge line, but it’s just not feasible for all situations. Let’s take Roswell Road, for example. In the mornings, I putter uphill using a 26 tooth granny gear and somewhere around the middle cog, say 23 teeth. Math says I’m cruising at about 9mph if I maintain a 100rpm pedal rate, which I don’t. I’d be pretty pissed if I were forced to drive down Roswell Road at 9mph because of some jerk on a bicycle. Roswell Road has two lanes in that portion, but it’s not always possible to get over in the morning traffic, and the lanes are kind of narrow. I’m grateful if I get a full six inches. I don’t really mind that I could reach out and grab the cars that are passing me because that means that I don’t have angry people piling up behind me. I think the guy at REI just expects too much.

That little anecdote doesn’t have much to do with nighttime visibility, but I don’t think the full suite of reflectors would change much in the dark. I’m lit up from the front and back as required and recommended by law and common sense. Pedal reflectors would only add a tiny bit more as far as reflected light, and side reflectors would only help if I were going through an intersection where I should be paying more attention anyway. In the end, I can see the cars as long as they have their headlights on, and the little bit of light I scatter around me will hopefully be enough for the few surprises. The Art of Urban Cycling concludes that most nighttime bicycle fatalities are due to drunk drivers, which reflectors aren’t going to do much to help, so that offers some comfort. Chances are that I’m still my own worst enemy regardless of whether the sun is up.

Back to the buying crap topic, I finally replaced the remaining broken parts on my bike. For those of you keeping track, the original parts are now down to the frame, seat, drive train (minus the chain) and the cables I should replace sometime soon. I bent my handlebar a while back, before the January wreck, when I thought I knew what I was doing in the rain but really didn’t. I bought a new one from Roswell Bikes, and it turned out to be a surprisingly painless experience. I didn’t go with fancy carbon fiber or anything, just another piece of straight aluminum with a little rise, and Henry, the little dude, installed it right there. The whole thing took about twenty bucks and twenty minutes. The new handlebar came with a new reflector which I’ve since removed. The other casualty, this one caused by the January crash, was my panniers. In addition to that, I recently had some trouble with the rack. It turns out that I got what I paid for at Performance; one of welds holding the supports together snapped. Eh. This opened up an opportunity to get one of those racks with the little piece at the back to mount a reflector, so I guess this opens up a solution for my legal deficiencies, too.

I had planned to get the new rack at Roswell Bikes so I could use my 20% off coupon (using it on a cheap handlebar seemed like a waste, and a handlebar isn’t really an accessory), but the only one they had felt like it was made out of cast iron. No wonder it hasn’t sold yet. I instead ended up getting both the rack and a pair of panniers at REI, and I’m pretty happy with them, though it took me three tries to get it right. The rack I chose is pretty basic, but it was missing half of the mounting hardware. I ended up exchanging that for something similar that also has a height adjustment. The new one almost leaves a line of sight to the seatpost-mounted reflector, so I can continue to not care about that problem for a little while longer. As for the panniers, I bought a pair of the Novara Transfer something or another bags. They’re a lot larger than those Delta panniers I had, they have some external pockets, and it has a pretty cool mounting system. Instead of a series of clips to fiddle with, there are two plastic wedges that fit underneath the bar of the rack that are released with the push of a button. It’s pretty rad, but I broke one of the wedges on my first try putting the bag on. I’m going to hope that was a manufacturing defect instead of incredible incompetence on my part. I exchanged that bag for another one and got to have a nice conversation with the ladies at the returns desk in the meantime.

The bags seem pretty rad so far. The flaps covering the main compartments have pockets at the top, and I’m using those for the things I had stuffed into the side pockets of the trunk rack for the last few months: tools, a second spare tube and all of the junk I have in my pockets before getting on the bike. I was able to fit 30 pounds of food and food accessories into the bags, more than I would usually buy, without much trouble, and I can get them to sit far enough back that I don’t end up kicking them, a problem I often had with the Delta bags. I don’t yet know how they’ll handle weather. They claim some level of water resistance and also came with rain covers. I should probably try taking one of the covers out at some point to see how difficult it is to install. So far my only complaint is that the ends of the straps that hold the main flaps down are a bit long with light loads. I think I can live with that.

I bake cookies sometimes. It seems kind of goofy on the surface—I’m worried sometimes about being too fat, and I can’t think of any situation where I’ve decided that a cookie is the key to my well-being—but I find baking an oddly relaxing experience, and chicks dig it. I don’t know crap about baking. I’m not going to be creating any new delightful pastries any time soon. Maybe it’s the mechanical actions of following a recipe that appeals to me. At any rate, I bake cookies sometimes, and the people at work who eat my leftovers seem to enjoy them a lot. Maybe there’s something about that homemade touch that makes things especially delicious in the face of mediocre skill. Maybe everyone’s just being polite.

This weekend I searched the interwebs for a new recipe, and I stumbled across one for madeleines. Madeleines are really more of a cake than a cookie, but they’re eaten like cookies, so that’s close enough for me. The only reason I even know what they are is from my knowledge of that seven-volume Proust novel I’ve read. I’m not really sure what to think of basing my culinary decisions off of literature. I’ve made Hemingway’s bloody marys before, which produced a wonderful combination of restorative and intoxicant, but I don’t think that this was a result of Hemingway’s skill as a writer so much as Hemingway’s skill as a drunk. With the madeleines I’m not even working with an author’s recommendations but rather choosing a recipe simply based on its coincidence with an idea I’ve never experienced. I’ve probably made better founded decisions.

The first difficulty in my new cookie/cake venture was that I needed a madeleine pan. To me the best kitchen tools serve very general purposes. Pots and spoons and knives and bowls all suit a task rather than a food. The cutting board I use for chopping onions is the same I’d use for cutting up a chicken. I cut a lot of things, so I use my cutting board for a lot of things. Moving down the spectrum of generality there are things like a garlic press, a tool that seems redundant given a knife and some patience, but one that can still fit a variety of meals if not a variety of purposes. Waffle irons also live near this stratum, though I can comfortably accept them since they make waffles possible, not easy, and waffles are delicious. At the bottom rungs are tools like melon ballers and cherry mashers, which I think no person should own. I do not own a waffle iron. I do have a garlic press, and now I have a pan that can bake small, scallop-shaped cakes and nothing else. I haven’t really come to terms with this.

The recipe I came across described madeleines with a lemon flavor, and it accomplished this by adding two teaspoons of grated lemon zest to the batter. Until today I had no damn clue what lemon zest was. I had vague memories of seeing “zest” in the grocery store, but after failing to find it in my shopping, I decided to ask the Internet. I had assumed that zest was some kind of brand name for some sort of flavoring, and maybe McCormick or whoever just didn’t pay enough for shelf space at this particular Publix. It turns out that zest is the outer peel of citrus, giving foods the peel’s flavor without the bitterness of that white junk underneath. Is this some kind of specialized knowledge, or did I just sleep through the class on ways to use citrus? Zest seems like such a ridiculous word. “Zest” should appear in advertisements for cleaning products, not cookie recipes. I don’t trust it. The Internet also told me about a special tool, a zester, which can be used to peel that outer shell off of a fruit. I did not buy a zester. I did just fine with a cheese grater.

The madeleines came out pretty nice once I figured out how much to fill the shell-shaped holes on my goofy new pan. I guess now all I need is some tea and some temps perdu.

I’ve been working on my idea for a program to generate a static set of google map tiles from a KML input, but it’s been slow going. Of course there’s the usual obstacles to any software project I’ve taken on recently—I have a job that involves sitting at a computer all day, and riding a bicycle all day is probably making me dumber—but this idea presents some new challenges. The problem I’ve been stuck on, perhaps out of a subconscious avoidance of the geometry problems ahead, is converting latitude and longitude into pixels on a map projection. In short, floating point arithmetic sucks. I’ve generally viewed floating point calculations as a dark abyss of rounding and inaccuracy, and I’m to some extent running into that wall. I’m not sure if I can accurately reproduce the calculations done by the google map engine. Maybe I’m getting close enough, but the perfectionist in me wants more, and floating point math just isn’t designed for that. Maybe I should just decide on an acceptable number of significant figures (I’ve been using 7 for all the marta map points) and do everything with integers.

Way back in ancient times, I played a game called Descent. I mostly played adventure games back then, since I enjoyed the stories and puzzles of games like Monkey Island or Quest for Glory, and Descent was on the surface uninteresting as a pretty basic first-person shooter with regards to storyline. However, there were a couple things that made it totally rad. As far as gameplay, it was the first (as far as I know, and at least the most dramatically so) truly 3-D game. We had games back then like Wolfenstein and Doom, but those games were actually played in two-dimensional worlds. Doom was the better of the two in that it had some fancy tricks to create illusions of altitude, but true up and down movement was impossible, and if there happened to be a staircase that appeared to be going up, the game was limited in that there couldn’t be anything under that staircase; that particular part of the two-dimensional landscape was given a particular altitude, and you couldn’t project more than one thing onto it. Descent broke through a lot of barriers by putting the player in a spaceship with a full range of motion. The environment had no gravity and no restrictions on movement, so part of the difficulty of the game was breaking out of a flat mindset and learning to navigate the twisting spiderwebs of tunnels going any direction the designer could imagine. In this respect it was kind of like Ender’s Game played in a maze.

Another interesting feature, though one not visible to the casual player, was that Descent did not use floating point math. In projecting a three dimensional environment on a two dimensional screen it’s handy to have tools like cosines and radians and all that other crap you slept through in high school available, but math coprocessors weren’t widely available back then, so the programmers didn’t use any of that fancy stuff. The result looked incredible for the time, and you could play it on a 386. I wonder if I’m going to be stuck trying the same tricks if I can’t get google’s javascript engine and my C program to agree.

I’ve noticed that google recently added the ability to create custom maps, which seems pretty cool. It provides the same kind of interface I imagined in my point and line making maps, but it brings everything together nicely and lets you share maps or save as KML. I don’t think something like this will scale to ideas like the MARTA map, but it would have been nice to use for something like that bike ride I describe a while back. Maybe this is what Web 2.0 is supposed to be?

In other news, I think that Carlos, the singer for the Breeze Kings, is stalking me. He talked to me once at one of their shows since he wasn’t sure where he recognized me from, and since then he’s appeared the last couple of times I’ve gone to eat at Al Capri. Al Capri is an Italian place near my office that set up shop where Port City Java used to be, next to the army recruiting center and the halal butcher. They seem to be doing pretty well now, despite the crappy location; when I visited today, the owner, a half-Italian Moroccan dude, was still working in the kitchen, but he now has two waiters, and there was a pretty big lunch crowd. Carlos came in today about ten minutes after I sat down. I guess he must like those meatballs, too.

I like the idea of cellular phones. Telephones began with the idea of assigning a number to a place or a purpose, whereas cell phones assign a number to a person, and I like that idea. I can move outside of the range of my land line exchange or be traveling in a different state, and calling my phone still means calling me rather than calling my home. It provides a freedom similar to that of email where an address follows a person forever (with certain restrictions imparted by technological limitations: the phone company doesn’t appreciate it if you move to a different area code). Phone calls are placed with the intent of contacting a person rather than a place, so the model that cellular phones create seems like a sensible evolution of telephone technology.

I’m actually fairly new the cell phone scene. I didn’t have a phone throughout college, and I got just by using whatever phone was handy wherever I was. I bought my first phone in 2004 when I moved to the Smyrna apartment with Mike, and it’s since been my only phone number. There was a landline in the Smyrna apartment only because the Moshelink ISP could only service a regular phone line, but I’ve since dropped even that and just have a dry pair running to my apartment to provide Internet service. I’m no longer in the phone book, and I’ll never again receive money from Nielsen Media Research (I never did fill out that survey. I guess I should have split that money with Mike, but it was only five bucks.). It felt very liberating to end my forced relationship with BellSouth, and I hope never to go back.

As for my choice in actual phones, I started out only wanting the most basic phone possible. I don’t want a PDA or a mobile computing platform. I’m not nearly organized enough to get any use out of PDA, I don’t care whether my phone can play ten seconds of an obnoxious pop song every time someone calls me, and phones really sucks as computers. My first phone was a Samsung something or another, and besides being a phone it was able to be an alarm clock, play nibbles or something, send and receive SMS messages and act as an AIM client. SMS and AIM are features that have grown on me. I like the idea of being able to send text messages in situations where it’s inappropriate to talk, though I don’t understand why some people choose to tap out messages a third of a letter at time outside of these instances. In any case, the Samsung whatever was a very simple phone, and it cost -$10 after rebate (I think it was $20 before). I liked it.

I broke that phone in 2006. I took a turn too fast on my bicycle and landed on the pocket that the phone was in. At first the only problem seemed to be the cracked screen, so I just made do without being able to see the last digit or two of any number, but after a while I found it more and difficult to find and hold a signal. Time for a new phone. My second phone, the one I use now, is a Motorola V195, which was the cheapest thing I was able to find ($20 after signing another year or two of my life over to the Germans). This phone does a lot more crap. It can play those wave file ringtones, run Java applications and who knows what else. I didn’t care about any of this at first and just appreciated the phone for its ability to be a phone and very long battery life. As an added bonus, the power connector is a mini-USB port, so I can hook the phone up to the computer and download my numbers without having to buy a special cable. It’s been a pretty nice phone, but my error was when I started mashing those buttons and began looking at it as a mobile computing platform.

It all started with those bus rides. I have a bad habit of packing unreadable tomes to entertain me on my commute, and I figured out that for an extra $5 a month I can use the phone to browse the web, instead. I started doing that, sometimes reading news instead of reading books, checking the weather, and searching google to settle bar arguments when no one can find the right book to answer questions about Prince’s age or the capital of South Dakota. The window the phone provides into the Web really sucks, but it works pretty alright for occasional, casual use. More recently, though, I found that Google has a phone application for Google Maps, and I thought I’d give that a try. Maps are nice, so maybe this thing can help me find something the next time I head off into the world completely unprepared. The problem with this is that T-Mobile, like other phone companies, would prefer that I buy my Java applications through them, so they make life inconvenient for everyone else.

The phone’s Java platform makes use of all those security level calls that most people ignore when programing Java, like the one that determines whether you have permission to access the network. This is great and all—I wouldn’t want some jerk’s app sending data all over the place without my permission—but the implementation of the security prompt leaves a little to be desired. There are four choices presented with every data network access attempt: yes always, yes this time, no this time, and no always. Since Google Maps is an unsigned application, I don’t get the first choice, so I have to stop and reauthorize the program every time I pan or zoom. That sucks. There’s a way around it, but it involves messing with my phone’s firmware.

Connecting computers to phones seems to be one of those areas where the programs available in Windows aren’t in any better shape than the ones available in Linux. My best bet seems to be the programs available at the moto4lin project, but I haven’t been able to get very far with it. All of the plugging and unplugging the phone I’ve been doing seems to have gotten out of sync, so I’m probably going to have to reboot my phone or the computer or both (or it could be that the warning messages are correct and I really do need a new cable) before I continue. I hope I don’t have to buy a new phone at the end of this.