Mindful Musings

To give you a quick glance of what the review is going to be about, I know why they call it the CrackBerry now. After years of waiting for the “right moment”, I finally purchased my very own Treo 755p Smartphone this past week. Ever since that time, it has been a path to discovery.

Pros:

• The phone is small enough that I can easily put it in my pant pocket, cover and all and it still feels not quite heavy.


• The Palm software is easier to navigate and use and judging from my past experience with Windows Mobile, it has a lot less control and strangely, a lot less hassle.


• EVDO is fast and web browsing is a breeze. I even setup my Slingbox with the new client Palm client and it works, albeit choppily.


• It is easy to make a call, quality is loud and clear and the speakerphone is nice though I tend to not use it very often.


• Office document editing is painless and the documents are very easy to read in the format presented. I have yet to take documents back to my PC but opening them from GMail is a breeze.


• Texting is no longer a frustrating and painful experience. I can reply quickly within reason. The keyboard took me a couple of days of getting used to, but now it is more than functional.


• The screen is brightin sunlight and easy to read.


• Very interesting escalating ringtones.


• Email “push” or syncing works well, though not for me. I like GMail to be my respository and not my phone. I wish I could set my phone to delete emails that I have read after a certain period. If I could do that, I would probably use the email feature.


• Solid feel, fit and finish of the phone. Everything feels like it will hold together (knock on wood).

Cons:

• The GMail app does not work (yet). I might have a wordaround for this soon and I will post my methods.


• Battery life is enough to last one day, but not enough to last two.


• All cables are proprietary, so new chargers and new USB cables for both home and work.


• Adding a contact from the phone screen without dialing a call is a hassle.


• Speed dial setup was a learning curve.


• PCS Vision takes a bit of getting used to on this phone. I think of Vision as a modem service now and know that I have to wait for it to connect.


• JVM should come pre-installed.


• Phone security sould be much more configurable. An $8 program provides more security than the phone does. For an enterprise level phone, each application should be lockable.


• It should come with SOME sort of a case or holder.

Ever since I received my phone in the mail and activated it, I have been using it extensively. I have had it for a few days and I am really happy with it. I even surprised myself and started using the datebook feature. I had failed in the past with a PDA. I think the convenience of having it with me all the time helps a great deal. Overall, it was worth the price. I had seriously thought of getting the Sprint HTC Mogul and that would have also been a good choice (my co-worker Bradon bought one of those) but I am very happy with my Treo 755p. I need to resurrect some of the old code that I had written to work with Sprint. I might even resurrect my old picture blog and modify it to work with videos from Sprint.

PS: Absolutely AMAZING cases here.

Make decisions based on your best knowledge, not your worst fear.

– Me

Jennifer is pregnant with our first child. Can you believe it? I am gonna be a father . . .

Celebrations abound!

This is a pickup only in (or delivery within 50 miles of) the Toledo area.

I would like to find a good home for my trusty Aerobird Challenger and my Storm Launcher. I would prefer pickup but I could deliver within 50 miles of the Toledo area. Here are some details of the planes.

Aerobird Challenger: About three years old. 70% of original life left, two batteries, charger, transmitter. There is some re-enforcing tape on the wing but that was put there to protect against crashes, not because something was broken. The plane flies fine but I fly it less every year and it does not make sense to just sit on it when someone else could make good use of it.

Storm Launcher: One of the very first few produced. Very few flights, simple modifications made for performance. It crashed one time into a wall and knocked off the front end of the floats. Easily fixed. Battery and charger comes with it. It flies like it is mostly new. Motors broken in.

This plane I do not want to get rid of but if I get a good offer, I will definitely consider it. I also have a combatwing XE2 with the insides of a Zagi 400. Needs batteries but comes with everything else. Speed 400. Hitec Focus III AM 3 channel radio, transmitter, servos etc. Not a new plane but will fly great with a little TLC. Equipment about 5 years old, plane about three years old.

Please email me at mark at wltc dot net if you have any questions, want to make an offer or would like to take a look.

One’s greatest hidden strengths are their weaknesses.

Venture Hacks: Venture capital essays Personal bookmark for a new blog talking about venture capital, management, funds, making the right decisions and survival in the world of private funding.

I read this on another post about a free speech mess in the blogging world, but it comes from Mark Pilgrim and really says a lot about bloggers. I might have to use it sometime.
I get to say whatever I want on my own turf, and suffer the consequences all by myself, including you ignoring me. If you don’t like that, you get to go start your own weblog and say whatever you want on your own turf, and suffer the consequences all by yourself, including me ignoring you.

I know that I searched far and wide for this answer and even ended up canceling my subscription with Rhapsody. The answer was relatively simple and I hope that someone will benefit from me posting it here.

If you are running Rhapsody 4.0 and suddenly cannot authorize your MP3 player anymore in Rhapsody, you might be running into the same problems that I did. My solution was to uninstall Windows Media Player 11 which was causing some issues in the PlaysForSure DRM and my Sandisk Sansa e260 player. After the uninstall, I restarted my computer and everything was back to normal. I have also listed some of the other resources that I have found on the Internet that has some pretty good solutions to the issue. These resources are also very good for other Sansa solutions, fixes and Rhapsody fixes, tweaks etc. If you find this information helpful or would like to add your own, please leave a comment.

Why do I get a “you are not the owner of this track” or “insufficient rights” error when I try to transfer a track to my device with Rhapsody?

Rhapsody Tips, Tricks and Tweaks

Why do I get an ‘Unable to authorize computer’ error in Rhapsody 3?

Why do I get a “Computer Not Authorized” error in Rhapsody 4?

I have always liked data in every form and manipulation of that data tickles my fancy a little too much. In pursuit of that endeavor, here is a little gem I recently uncovered.

I (recently started to) work out regularly on my exercise bike. I own a Nordic Trac AutoRider R400 which I absolutely adore. The bike is comfortable, there are lots of options and it is still fun to use it. Fun is a crucial component of any exercise routine. My plans are to train on this bike all winter and then ride in the summer. One feature of this bike that I find unsatisfying is the EKG monitor on the handlebars. The pads are not very accurate, nor very sensitive and the readout leaves a lot to be desired. I have been targeting heart rates (I have high cholesterol) and it is hard to do with the bike.

Recently I also found the Polar FS1 Hear Rate Monitor Watch for about $50 and I thought that it might be cheap enough and work well. Then I found the ADI05 Software Logger on Amazon (it works with the FS1 and all its cousins) for about $27 and it all fell into place. I had a heart rate monitor, a receiver to plug into my computer to receive my heart rate data, a data logger for my computer and all the data I could ever dream of. From one of the reviewers, ... keep track of how much time you have spent in each zone per week and tells you how many more times, for how long, and how hard you need to exercise the rest of the week to reach your goal of maintaining, improving, or maximizing. I love it.

Now I need to fork over another hundred bucks to get all the stuff and write some code to put it into cool flash graphs. I can’t wait! PS: I will be looking for a relatively inexpensive road bike come summer. Any suggestions would be well appreciated.

Clocky – Alarm Clock that runs away Gauri Nanda came up with an alarm clock that jumps off your sidetable and runs around the room if you ask it to snooze. All this for $50!

O’Henry wrote that life consists of sobs, sniffles and smiles, sniffles predominating. I say that life consists of hopes, shattered hopes and fulfilment, shattered hopes predominating.

So, I needed to get in touch with Amazon.com Customer Service and was really not in the mood to explain my quandary in a long email. So, I decided to look on Amazon.com for the phone number and could not find it anywhere. Following that I searched Google for what would soon become a pretty cool story with a bunch of people running into the same issue. Here is what I came up with:

Direct, toll free line to Amazon Customer Service: 1-800-201-7575 (Watch out, they hang up on you if you ask difficult questions, have strange falsetto accents and sound like Japanese Flying Robots from Outer Space)

You could also click here (thanks LifeHacker) and have a customer service agent call you. This worked for me the two times that they hung up on me.

While I am on the subject, let me say how easy and satisfying it was to talk with an American in Idaho answering the phone for Amazon. The question was weird but the answer was really simple and the real accent along with the real American idiosyncrasies were curiously satisfying to me. As a matter of fact, I changed nothing on the order and was completely satisfied with the stale and nondescript answer I received from Dwayne, thanks in a large part to his ease in dealing with my request.

My friend Vijay and his wife Archana visited Jeetu in Ann Arbor and it was a wonderful surprise for me. We had a couple of dinners together, enjoyed each others’ company, ate Jeetu’s delicious food, drank a few and just had a very good time. I just wish I had more time to spend with them as opposed to doing homework for school. Jennifer has put up the pictures from their visit here.

Beside their visit, we had a really nice Thanksgiving with a small family dinner at Jennifer’s mother’s house. I friend a turkey for the first time this weekend and it was nice. I had received a lot of good advice on how to make sure I do not burn down the house and it was painless.

Milton Friedman Dies at 94 Friedman is a hero to me. I knew of him but did not know much about him till I started my MBA. His knowledge, experience, insight, direction and the education that he imparted on the world will be sorely missed. This article in the NYT does a good job of detailing the ups and downs of Friedman’s career and his (sometimes revolutionary) philosophy and economic train of thought. Thank you Milton Friedman, may your soul rest in peace.

I normally do not ship much and try to either use UPS or USPS to send my packages. I have also used FedEx in the past with relative success. However, now the big names have come up with a way to be completely irresponsible for their service and in the process make it “cheaper” for its users. Announcing Fedex Smartpost. I really wonder how executives at these shipping companies can come up with this horseshit and put it into production without performing a reality check. I see Fedex Smartpost as a way for Fedex and USPS to completely deny any accountability for a package shipped through this service, thus reducing overhead normally associated with extra checks and balances to control loss and/or mistakes. This makes everyone concerned look really, really bad. They need to hire better marketing and managerial folks.
I was shipped a small package through this service and somehow it got lost in the shuffle. However, now Fedex has no way of tracking it, nor does USPS. They both asked me to visit the others’ website/phone support to get it resolved. I shudder to think what would have happened if this package was expensive or had an insurance claim of some kind. Needless to say, I will never ship anything again (or have anything shipped to me) with any “Smartpost” type service. I really like accountability and would like to think that my carriers are responsible enough and reliable enough to want be accountable since they sell reliability and their business models are based on reliability of service. If anyone reading this was thinking about using Fedex Smartpost, I would strongly suggest against it. Save yourself the hassle and the line of flaming dog poop that these people are offering and pay a few bucks extra to use a better service.

I recently upgraded to Rhapsody 4 from Rhapsody 3 since I was having trouble transferring playlists to my Sandisk Sansa e260 and created a large mess. Rhapsody would not start after upgrading to 4.0 and everything would lock up or freeze. This was after trying to uninstall Rhapsody and install it again from scratch. Rhapsody online help was poor to say the least and did not help at all. However, after reading some forum posts and trying to use my programmers’ thinking cap, I made it all work and work much better. I now can transfer playlists directly to my device without any rigmaroll and everything seems to work smoothly and seamlessly. I do like the new interface a lot better than the old one. It is cleaner, more intuitive and is simpler to navigate. No more “mixer”.

Before I go into this, this advice comes with no warranty or promise. If this completely breaks your computer and everything else, I am not responsible. please proceed at your own risk, especially if you have purchased songs on your system from Rhapsody. If you have purchased songs from Rhapsody and have them stored on your system, I am not sure how cleaning the DRM will affect your music. Please contact Rhapsody tech support for a better answer. This method only works well if you JUST use Rhapsody to go.

Here is what I did (this is considering you had a previous version of Rhapsody installed and nothing seems to work, program will not start):

• Install Rhapsody 4 from the installation file but uncheck the box that says start Rhapsody after install


• Unplug your device and close rhapsody (and WMP or any other DRM program) if it is running


• Open up a command prompt (start->Run->type “cmd”->Enter key)


• CD to the Rhapsody program files directory


• Use the RhapDrmClean.exe program to clean the DRM files



• type in RhapDrmClean -hx -hxstore -clean_phd_keys


• Type yes a whole bunch of times as Rhapsody asks you if you are sure


• Close the command prompt


• Now that all of your DRM components are clean, open Rhapsody, log in and set it up again


• You will have to re-license your device to get it to transfer music


• Now you can drag and drop playlists onto the device and the lists themselves are transferred


• If the device is not found, follow the same procedure you used before (when installed for the first time) to find and install the device.

I believe that there are a whole bunch of DRM updates in Rhapsody 4 and it conflicts with everything that Rhapsody had setup on your machine prior. The installation program does not seem to take care of this for you and it needs to be done manually. I am transferring all my music to my Sansa e260 as I type this. I love the fact that I can transfer playlists using Rhapsody now, it was a source of major frustration in the past.

I recently sold off my iRiver H120 on eBay and replaced it with a Sandisk Sansa e260 from Amazon for about $120 including shipping. As a side note, Amazon is simply wonderful. They are fast, courteous, and have price matched their own site and refunded me the difference in the price of the product since it went down. That is how to handle customer service.

Anyways, the Sansa e260 is definitely a good product. It is small, mostly lightweight, sleek and the screen is very clear and bright. You can upload songs, pictures and videos through the Windows Explorer or use a program like Rhapsody of Windows Media player to upload/control your music and create playlists etc. I primarily bought the Sansa to avail of the Music to go from Rhapsody and it has definitely been a pleasure and I am enjoying every minute of it. However, this is a review of the Sansa and I will stay away from talking too much about Rhapsody.

The scroll wheel is very smooth and works well with the software. I do have a problem with the smaller buttons around the scroll wheel since my fat fingers cannot get around to them too well but I think I have a feel for it now. The sound is very clear and loud (there is a loudness setting on the device beside the volume) and the player runs on the provided Lithium Ion batteries for approx 18 hours (more like 15 hours with frequent turning on of the LCD). I am not as fond of the headphones that come with the Sansa, but that was a given. I own a pair of Phillips set of sound isolating headphones that I love and will continue to use. Many of the features of an MP3 player are well manifested in the Sansa e260 including basic navigation, sound controls, equalizer, playlists shuffle etc. One note about playlists is that if you download a playlist from Rhapsody, the only way to get that playlist onto the player is to sync the device through Rhapsody.

One of the annoyances is the only way to charge the Sansa is by using the provided USB cable and it does not come with an extra wall charger. The other peeve is that the radio uses the provided USB cable as an antenna so if you want to receive FM transmissions that are a little faint, they are very noisy without that cable (the cable does not have to be plugged into a computer).

Overall this is a nice player with a lot of features and a small price tag. I look forward to finding lots of new music and enjoying it with Rhapsody and the Sandisk Sansa e260.

Django for non-programmers Interesting personal link. I will definitely need to read through some more about DJango.

UC Berkeley on Google Video: Finally! Almost every video on there is interesting and I will definitely watch them as soon as I have a few minutes. Look for Sergei Brin (of Google) in Information Systems 141 talking about Search Egines in Society and Business.

Gmail Tips and Tricks Monster Roundup Personal bookmark. I think I could really use a lot of these tips, especially being able to forward filters onto SMS. Nice.

I recently purchased an Aspire 5601AWLMi Notebook for school and as a mobile development and testing machine. I paid about $599 for it after rebates from CompUSA and it is replacing an aging Celeron M Toshiba notebook that I had had for quite some time. I needed some more speed, a better and more intergerated wireless solution and something that could handle a bunch of tasks at the same time. I thought hard and long about getting a beloved Mac but real world needs overshadowed my Mac fetish.

Out of the box, the Aspire 5601 comes with 512MB of RAM, Windows XP MCE and a 100GB hard drive but there are some gotchas. Click here for the full specs. The hard drive had a small factory partition on it along with two other partitions for the OS and data respectively. The laptop was shipped without any media and there was a whole bunch of Acer software loaded that was really annoying and useless.

Before I made any changes, I created the factory suggested OS and application backup on the excellent DVD RAM drive that is included. It was quick and painless, though I later realized that the OS backup was useless without the provided partition types on the hard drive. Luckily, I had a copy of Windows XP MCE from Jennifer’s laptop. I wiped the drive clean, created a single partition and installed Windows. I then loaded the applications from Acer that I would use, especially the power control program that regulates the battery usage. Then I proceeded to install the apps that I mostly use. These will probably vary with user but I have provided a list of them here in case someone finds it useful. These are in no particular order. Some of these are from Matt’s suggestions.

Once all of this was installed and after a few reboots, I was ready to test out the speed and memory. I am well aware that I am going to need to purchase more RAM for this laptop as time goes on, but at a reboot, without closing anything, the laptop was using about 250MB. With most apps open, it ran a tad under 512MB. It seems to run a lot better without the default partition structure and the Acer stuff. Time will tell.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to purchase a cared for Toshiba s103 with 512 MB RAM and everything it came with, please let me know. I will probably eBay it pretty soon.

Since everything seems to have settled down quite a bit and we are not only done with the ceremony but also with the honeymoon and the leftover food, I think it is time to get back to normal life.

Jennifer single handedly put together almost everything for the wedding and it went beautifully. (knock on wood) The ceremony was very fast, clean and smooth, people loved the reception, especially the indian food from Tandoor and the bar had a line leading up to it almost all night.

Pictures of the Rehearsal

Pictures of the Wedding Ceremony at St. Adalbert Church in the Polish Village

Pictures of the reception following the wedding at Wildwood Metropark, Ward Pavillion

Pictures from our honeymoon at the Sandals resort in Whitehouse Jamaica

Sandals Whitehouse is a beautiful resort with perfect surroundings and an exquisite set of menus. We spent the five days being lazy, swimming, drinking, diving, snorkelling and enjoying the good food and beautiful beaches.

We also had a fish fry at our house the weekend after the wedding to get rid of some of the beer and left over food. It was TONS of fun.

PHP offers a PECL package called APC or Alternative PHP Cache that can significantly increase performance on your LAMP server with high loads. I have seen significant decreases in performance issues over the time that I have tested it. However, once I had turned it on, I noticed some serious problems with PHP Gallery and since I was short on time, I figured I would turn it off till I could find a good solution to the problem.

Gallery will return an “undefined method” or an obscure security error with APC turned on. This is mostly evident on Gallery 2. Restarting the apache webserver normally solves this problem temporarily. I had tried to turn off the performance peice inside Gallery to see if the caching was crossing hairs with APC. That did not solve the problem. (Wordpress cache might also have problems with APC, that needs addressed as well).

To make a long story short, I found the answer by trial and error. Turning off APC for Gallery classes normally fixes the problem. I built a filter for APC in php.ini that kept the Gallery files from being cached by APC. After searching some more, I found a more complete solution on the Gallery forums.

Just add the following line to the APC config inside php.ini, right above the apc.mmap_file_mask line:
apc.filters="-Gallery.*\.class"

Your gallery should work without any further trouble.

One Time Password DisplayCard heightens transaction security This was pretty much what my masters thesis was about. We just did not have the technology, money or the know-how to put it into a real electronic paper format like this company. I wonder if my research is referenced.

“The Next Time” is Now.

Qlue.in is a new service that will give you a free hosted Wordpress blog but will also allow you to post Google AdSense ads. You get paid directly by Google, we switch your ads with ours on one in every four pageviews. Simple, easy and fast.

Give it a spin.

After Googleing for some time and trying to figure out why Adobe files would not open on my Windows box without some sort of trouble, I came upon a brilliant solution on Experts Exchange that worked like the charm.

In short, my Adobe Acrobate reader would lock up when trying to open PDF files of any size or kind. It would use 50%+ of the CPU and sit there till I ended the task from the task manager. A similar problem would occur if I were to try and view PDF files from inside any browser. I had tried uninstalling, re-installing, updating, downgrading and everything in between.

Apparently, Adobe Acrobat Reader starts creating temporary files in your Documents and Settings/Local Settings/Temp folder and does not know when to quit. These files exceed the magic 65xxx number and then Acrobat is at a complete loss. Here is a simple fix.

Go to C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp where “username” is your Windows username. Find and delete all the files in this directory starting with “Acr”. Once these are deleted, you will be able to run Acrobat Reader. No re-install or upgrade needed.

You would think Adobe would fix such a simple problem, but what do I know?

Jennifer is selling her Oldsmobile Alero. It is a nice car and has had little use beside her driving it to and from work. We are selling it since Jennifer wants to drive our family car and not make payments on an extra, unused automobile. The car is mechanically sound and looks quite nice. It would be a good buy for someone looking for a reliable/relatively new car with low miles. Here are some of the details.

2002 Oldsmobile Alero GLS, V6 Auto, Leather, CD, Sunroof

• One owner


• Black Onyx


• V6 3.4L


• Power Sunroof


• Power Mirrors, Power Windows, Power Doors


• Keyless Entry


• Cruise Control


• Neutral leather


• Air Conditioning


• Radial tires & alloy wheels


• CD player


• Power Driver’s seat


• Remote car start


• 44000 miles, oil changed every 3000 miles.

Price is negotiable upto a certain extent. Please contact us for a test drive if you are interested in buying it.

After almost exactly two years, my Nikon D70 has bit the bullet. Nothing happens when the switch is turned on. I have checked, charged and tested the battery and I have tried operating the camera without lenses, with different lenses, with no card and with two seperate CF cards and still nothing. When a CF card is present in the slot, the drive light flashes with a slow regular beat. We really wanted to get some more pictures taken for my parents (of the spring flowers and tulips) but they will have to wait a little or Jennifer will have to borrow her mother’s camera. Has anyone else had manufacturing problems with the Nikon? You would think a $1400 camera would be built better.

I am quite dissappointed with Nikon but am very glad that we had purchased quite a bit of extra warranty from Best Buy with the camera and I should be getting it back from them in about two weeks. I guess gentle handling and proper care does not always ensure longevity of electronic equipment.