Thursday, April 20, 2006

The Internets Give To Me

Am I the only one who caught the Golden Girls reference in Desperate Housewives this week?

I finally saw it. I tried to download it from the TiVo at home over the public internet, but the connection is so bad the sustained FTP does not work. In frustration I downloaded a BitTorrent client and hit piratebay.org (thanks, Mike). This torrent thing is god slow, but it survives running on terrible flaky bursty connections for large files. Technically I only have the right to watch an NTSC copy with commercials, but I ended up selecting a version that had commercials edited out from a High Definition broadcast.

My god. The stereo sound. The picture clarity. Clearer, sharper, widescreen, fullscreen.

I am sold on downloading again. Not since the original Audiogalaxy have I felt like this. But I'll only download stuff that my TiVo recorded off TV. I think that is kind of fair.

60% Of the NSFW Problem Could Be Taken Care of Right Here

I would like LJ a lot better if it allowed to read my page over https. Sure the URL would show up in the corporate logs, but they couldn't see what I am reading on it.

Then again, all the external links people embed would show up to. And my desk is positioned such that I'd still have the 40% problem, which is why I haven't brough in my personal laptop to work yet. And I am not sure how I am going to do that now that I am supposed to split my time over two locations, Glendale and North Hollywood: lug around two laptops, work + personal? Nuh-uh.

It seems obvious to me now that I need to miniaturize my portable personal electronic communication needs even further -- personal email, web browsing, IM, music. OQO? Harddisk is too small for my music collection. Nokia E61 loaded with a multi-IM client + an iPod? Geez, I'd essentially be carrying two phones.

Yes, I do insist on a keyboard, so the 770 Tablet is out.

Sunday, April 09, 2006

Backup

So, I have this smartphone, and it has all these contacts on it. Switching smartphones every year, or having more than one at the same time, while not having a Macintosh with iSync, means I had a synchronization problem. Fortunately, a free service called mobical.net allowed me to keep one central list of my contacts, and synchronize my phones with it over the air, wherever I was.

I like the service. It makes a back-up before every sync, so if the sync goes wrong you can go back to where you were. If your data-plan does not cost you an arm and a leg, and you do not back up your contacts anywhere, I really do recommend a service like this. It supports Motorola phones (including the V3 RAZR) and LG phones and many other phones too, even ones not listed there, if they support SyncML.

Now the contacts editor allows for uploading small pictures for every contact, so I have been adding LJ userpics for some of you I have in my list and whose picture is your face, which means that, should you ever call me, your face will flash on my screen.

I just now saw that mobical allows me to send a request email to a contact with an embedded URL so the email recipient can update hir contact info on the website directly -- if the spamtrap doesn't trhwo away email coming from info@mobical.net already. That would be dangerous. Who knows what pictures you guys would upload for yourselves.

Saturday, April 01, 2006

A Slight Obsession Buds

I am wondering if offering the kid fifty bucks might get me fj on MySpace. I can't see how active the profile is.