Wow, two posts in three days! I'm on FIRE!

Actually, the only reason why I logged on today was to clean up the 200+ spam comments I noticed yesterday, and to edit my blogroll. (Added There, I Fixed It to the Sites I Like category. I love this site so much that I actually have the feed on my iGoogle page… right above Lolcats. Don't judge me.)

Anyway, I always get a kick out of seeing the spambot crap that shows up in the modertion queue. (That also reminds me… obviously my anti-spam comment filter-y thing is not working quite as well as I'd hoped. Maybe the words aren't hard enough? I'd love to see if spambots have dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane in their dictionaries.) Apparently spammers think I have a serious insomnia problem, because about 70% of the comments were for Zolpidem, a.k.a. Ambien. The other 30% believe I'm addicted to painkillers and are pushing me to buy Darvocet.

Guess I should rethink tagging all my posts with "I love prescription drugs." [kidding.]

Nerding out here for a bit…

 Retired.

This past summer, I decided that I was tired of my Nokia 6126 and began the long and painful process of looking for its replacement. The 6126 actually was a somewhat decent phone, although there was a brief period where it would just randomly shut off during the middle of a call… oh, and the plastic casing managed to peel off. However, one time it fell out of my pocket into the riding ring, and I somehow managed to find it a few hours later in the dark. It was a little scraped and I had to use half a can of compressed air to remove the grains of sand, but otherwise it survived.

Being the techo-geek comp sci major that I am, I thought I owed it to myself to buy a real, honest-to-goodness smartphone. You'd think I'd be up-to-date with all the latest and greatest toys… not quite. I don't have an iPod (in fact, I actually won a Nano in a contest and then regifted it to my sister), my computer is circa 2002 (complete with 19" CRT monitor), and my cell phones have all been of the free 'n' crappy type.

Granted, I have not been living under a rock and had a basic idea of what I did and didn't want: No Blackberry. No iPhone, because a) I hate touch screen phones and b) AT&T requires you to buy a data plan in order to have one, and I wasn't ready to blow an extra $360 a year. Flip-style or slider. Good reception. GPS. Somewhat low SAR levels. (I would prefer to keep my brain cancer-free, thankyouverymuch.)

After many many MANY hours of research, I finally decided that getting another Nokia was the way to go, and this meant doing even MORE research on the OS/platform they use for their smartphones: Symbian Series 60, aka S60.

Turns out this Symbian S60 thing is actually pretty popular. In fact, Symbian OS is the most popular smartphone platform in the world, thanks to Nokia's popularity in Europe and other countries outside the U.S. (Side note: at the time of my new-phone-buying, the updated Android and Palm webOS hadn't been released, so the 4 major players were Symbian, iPhone, RIM/Blackberry, and Windows Mobile.) S60 also supports application development in a variety of languages such as Java, C++, and Python… which means a decent amount of apps are created by third parties, although nowhere near the number iPhone has.

Shiny and new!

Anyway, after a few more weeks of searching, I decided to go with the Nokia E66. As an added bonus, they come in white, which meant I could find my stupid phone slightly more easily in the black hole of my purse/bag.

It's been about six months since I purchased the E66, and so far I've been pleased with it. The GPS can take a loooooong time to lock, which stinks, but fortunately there's a positioning method that'll at least put you roughly in the right place while the phone attempts to find satellites.

Look familiar, iPhone fans?

Also, I can download podcasts directly to the phone, listen to the radio, view text messages in a threaded format (see pic on right), view PDFs, word documents, and PowerPoints (haven't had to use the last two yet), and more. The problems have been minimal, although somehow my phonebook got corrupted and about a third of my contacts were deleted. You'd think I would have learned my lesson from the Jesus Saves post I wrote last year…

Additionally, I've found myself looking into writing my own programs and tweaks for the phone. My first idea was to create a mashup for the Ovi Maps application that would show the nearest Metro stations and their closing times… but offline. Sometimes bars have little-to-no reception, and the last thing I want to be doing at 2:30 AM is trying to get online to find out where the nearest metro stop is and when it closes.

This idea was shelved for a bit while I decided my time was better spent finding a way to keep my job due to a sudden change in my project's contract. Recently, though, I've looked into putting together a basic Python program as a basic speedometer. I got the idea after playing with the Nokia SportsTracker, a neat application that uses the GPS to record your running/walking/whatever route and the speed/distance. Unfortunately, it does NOT allow for recording in meters per minute, the unit we use in the (horse) eventing world. (Granted, I can set the SportsTracker to record in km/hr, but mentally converting it to mpm while you're galloping along might be a bit dangerous.) There are special GPS watches to give you a real-time speed, but they're mucho $$$. Instead, I could try and use my phone and have it display my current speed.

So far I'm still writing/testing the program, because for some reason it works great in the emulator but refuses to work on my phone. Boo. Stay tuned…