Sick as a dog...

So I spent X-mas down at my mom's house, where she said a bug of some sort had been going around. I either caught that bug, or got food poisoning yesterday because at 2:30am last night I was emptying the contents of my stomach thru my mouth. I've never been quite so sick. And, only about an hour ago did I try eating any food, in particular a piece of bread. It's now 11:07pm here, and I feel a little better, but I imagine I'll spend the day tomorrow recovering. Food I won't be eating any time soon: Lasagna, and cheeseburgers. Ugh.

The ass is still working...

Almost two weeks after I posted about starting at the gym, and I'm still going. I've gone about nine or ten times since I last posted, and my body's loving me for it. My clothes aren't, as they're smelly and sweaty, but that's the price you have to pay.

So far I'm liking it. I do hate getting all sweaty, though, but my arms feel tighter after working some of the weight machines there. I spent a few sessions on the exercise bikes, and then moved to treadmills, and then today I tried the cross trainer. Yowch. That thing really gets your heart going, and your muscles burning. On the treadmill, I'd keep my heart rate at 160-165. On the crosstrainer, the lowest I could keep it was 176. I'm going to have to take it easy on that thing.

My sister had her baby, and I'm now the proud uncle of a little baby boy named Raven Michael. He's a cutie. I haven't seen him in person yet, but I will when I go down to Longview for Christmas with the family.

It's been busy here, which explains for the lack of any postings in the journal. You know I'm busy if I'm not wasting time pontificating about crap that most people don't care about.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. Time to go sweep the driveway of needles and tree debris and then take a shower. Happy Holidays!

Hi-Fi

Some time ago, I was lent an old Dual 1229 turntable by Nicole's parents. It served its purpose pretty well for the time it was in service. When I got it, it had no cartridge and was a mess. I took it into Hawthorne Stereo and had them take a look at it. The guy there said that this particular turntable was his first when he was a teenager, 30 some-odd years ago. I asked him if we could get a cartridge for it, and he pulled out a Grado Black cartridge and proceeded to mount it on the Dual's tonearm.

I took it home and played with it a bit and it sounded pretty damn good. I bought a few records here and there and recorded them into the computer. It did well, until a few days ago. Nicole had bought two new records and the old Dual just couldn't play them very well. The left channel was barely working. When it did, it'd be fine for about a minute, and then cut out, leaving only the right channel to do its thing. Finally, we gave in and bought a Numark TT-1600 DJ turntable at Guitar Center up in Lynnwood.

What an improvement. I don't consider myself too knowledgeable about turntables, but putting this one together was a good learning experience. Today, I managed to get the Grado cartridge mounted successfully, replacing the stock Numark cartridge. I don't really hear much difference between the two, but I figured if I paid $40 for the Grado cartridge, I might as well use it.

Thanksgiving was good. We went up to Nicole's grandmother's house on Camano Island. I'm still waiting to hear from my mom or my sister about my sister's forthcoming first child. Any day now....

Sidekickin' it, boyeee!

It's a little too early for a X-Mas presents, but I couldn't wait to get my girlfriend a T-Mobile Sidekick (a.k.a. Danger Hiptop). She's been pining after one since I first showed her the product page and flash demo on Danger's site. I've been pining for it too. It looked pretty damn nice.

So, I let slip with the hints that I was going to get her one, and went into the T-Mobile kiosk at Northgate Mall to pick one up. I'm already a T-Mobile customer, and she has no credit to speak of, so I added it to my account. T-Mobile's running a special where you buy the phone for $250 plus activation plan, and you get a $50 rebate. Get this, the activation plan is super sweet - $40/month gets you all-you-can-eat data and AIM messaging, 200 weekday/1000 weekend minutes, and 1000 outgoing SMS messages. Not bad at all. I pay $30/month and don't have a phone that can do all that her Sidekick can. It's a sweet little device.

There are always going to be some problems, and purchase and use of the Sidekick was no exception. I went to the T-Mobile store right after work, and proceeded to wait for about a half-hour in line as other customers were helped. Once I finally got to talk to someone to tell him I wanted a Sidekick, I explained that I had actually already been in the night before, but the salesperson told me that there weren't any available units. That salesperson told me that all of the units there were returns and hadn't been properly reset for resale. So, the guy that I was telling all of this to looked to see if there were any reset units. There weren't. He asked if I'd wait while he reset the unit, and I said I would. I waited patiently for the next 25 minutes, and then got the Sidekick. Wooo!

But all was not well. I got it home, plugged it in to give it a little charge and then fired it up. What's this? No SIM card? Where is it? Oh yeah, I have it put it in. Doh. Okay, fire it up again, watch the T-Mobile animation as it boots and then wait. A message comes up telling me that I need to register. I choose a new user, and go through with registering this unit with Nicole's standard username. Going good so far....

At the end of the registration, it contacts T-Mobile's servers and then returns an error telling me that the device is already registered! Wha?! There's another option in the registration screen to login using an existing account, so I try that. It's already got a username in there AND it won't let me change it (the box was grayed out). Ugh! I called T-Mobile's support department after looking at their website and they told me I'd have to wait for 24 hours for the unit to be "activated."

The dufus I spoke to also told me that I'd have to first register on T-Mobile's site. Not quite. I tried to register, but whenever I entered in the phone number, it'd tell me that the phone # wasn't recognized. Rather than hassle with their wonderful "Wireless Data Group," I took the phone back to the T-Mobile Kiosk. While there, I saw the salesperson I had talked to the prior night.

After another long wait in line, he helped me out. He got on the phone with the Wireless Data Group people and quickly realized that they weren't going to be of much help for me. He started to reset the phone himself (even though he had never done it before), but stopped when he realized that it'd just be easier to grab a brand new phone (a couple came in a half-hour after I left the store earlier) and try it out with the SIM card I had.

Success. The SIM card from the already registered Sidekick was put into a brand-new factory fresh one and we got it all registered. Hallelujah. Now Nicole would finally have her new toy. When she started playing with it, she was extremely impressed. It allowed her to check e-mail, make phone calls, chat with friends on AIM, surf /., and keep herself occupied during her commutes.

Tragedy, however, struck on the 3rd day of possession. Nicole went to reply to post on /., and the Web browser locked up. She was still able to use all of the other tools on it, but not the Web browser, and after restarting her Sidekick, the browser wouldn't even load.

After looking at a User Guide on T-Mobile's site, we found a very interesting passage about a Recovery Tool that would re-flash the Sidekick. The PDF had links that went nowhere, but luckily, Google found this page with all the info and links to the working recovery tool, and it supports OS X!!!!!!

We ran the recovery tool on the Sidekick, and it gave us an error that said it couldn't flash the device, with a ROM1 code. Shit. Well, we reset the Sidekick, using the instructions the ROM1 code gave, and the damn Sidekick came back up, albeit without any data whatsoever. Here's the brilliant part - all of your data on the Sidekick is automagically backed up to T-Mobile's servers (yes, it could be a privacy risk, but it's a brilliant backup strategy). Once the Sidekick got re-connected to the network, it automatically downloaded all of the backed up data on the T-Mobile servers. Fucking awesome. And the browser started working again!!

Perhaps this weekend we'll re-run the recovery utility, because it might have a newer version of the OS and firmware, but for now the Sidekick is working and Nicole's a happy bunny. I am too.