Ahhh… streaming internet radio. One of the few things that gets me through the work day. (That, and a Diet Coke at lunch.) Since 2002, I've used Yahoo's LaunchCast with relative success, even more so when I got a free Plus subscription when we got Verizon DSL. I have LaunchCast to thank for discovering artists I would have never listened to otherwise, and also for providing comic relief in the forms of Chris Rock, Ron White, and others. Despite the few problems I've had with the service, it was VERY customizable with a rating system for artists, songs, AND albums. Can't stand Jewel? Ban her indie junk forever. Love Maroon 5's new album? Hit "4 stars" and the songs will come up pretty frequently. And to top it off, Plus users got unlimited skips.

Unfortunately for me, Yahoo closed the customized station portion of LaunchCast last year. It was a sad day for me, as there wasn't much of a viable alternative to a station that would allow for the type of ratings that LaunchCast did. I started using Pandora, which at first was pretty good, but the rating system wasn't great, you couldn't specifically ban artists, there was a bandwidth limit per month, and you only got a few skips for an entire session. I could never really get into Last.fm, and the "real" streaming radio stations were mostly weird ones from Europe. Apparently Top 40 in Germany is NOT even in the same realm as Top 40 here in the States.

After I threw in the towel on Pandora, I brought up another Google search in the hopes that maybe a new customized radio service had been created… and that's when I discovered Slacker Radio.

Despite its name, Slacker Radio isn't a slacker. In fact, it's a pretty hard little worker, and it works on my government computer. The free service is light years better than Pandora's, as you are given six skips per HOUR (not limited per session like Pandora's), you can specifically BAN artists/songs (not this "thumbs down" or "I'm tired of this song" crap), and you can set how much "suggested" music you want played, AND they have comedians' albums! Oh happy day!

Like everything in the tech world, Slacker isn't perfect. Their rating system could use a little work, such as "I like this artist but you've played this song 74231 times but I don't want to ban them entirely," their mobile application only works on BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Palm, and Windows mobile (no Symbian, but then again no one really has Symbian apps), and the ads on the free version are annoying and you have to actively click to "dismiss" some of them. For example, I love Jeff Foxworthy, but when I've heard the same track over and over and over, it's hard to go through and specifically ban them… plus whenever you ban something, you use up a skip. So the alternative is to listen to it again, then go back and ban it when it's finished playing.

Either way, I think I may have found my LaunchCast replacement. Let's hope they don't remove half the features on the free version so I don't feel compelled to shell out $50 for the Plus subscription.

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…

Jesus and Satan were having an ongoing argument about who managed to get the most out of his computer. This had been going on for days and God was tired of hearing all of the bickering. God said, "Cool it. I am going to set up a test that will run two hours and I will judge who does the better job."

So down they sat at the keyboards and typed away. They moused away.

They did spreadsheets,
They wrote reports.
They sent faxes.
They sent out e-mail.
They sent out e-mail with attachments.
They downloaded.
They did some genealogy reports.
They made cards.
They did every known job.

But just a few minutes before the two hours were up lightening flashed across the sky. The thunder rolled and the rains came down hard. And, of course, the electricity went off.

Satan was upset. He fumed and fussed and he ranted and raved, all to no avail. The electricity stayed off. But after a bit the rains stopped and the electricity came back on.

Satan screamed, "I lost it all when the power went off. What am I going to do? What happened to Jesus' work?"

Jesus just sat and smiled. Again Satan asked about the work that Jesus had done. As Jesus turned his computer back on the screen glowed and when he pushed "print," it was all there.

"How did he do it?" Satan asked.

God smiled and said, "Jesus Saves."

So, smart person that I am, forgot to renew my web hosting in January. (Why I have it set on month-to-month, I don't know. Probably because I keep telling myself I'm going to shop around and find a better deal than GoDaddy, but I never end up doing that and end up renewing it monthly.) Usually they're pretty forgiving and will give you a week or two to cough up the cash and renew your bandwith. Unfortunately, if you let it sit for practically a month, they WILL delete your stuff. Like, all your stuff. Including your database that has 3+ years worth of blog posts (that no one else reads).

If I had half a brain, I would have remembered that joke and saved my crap like the good IT nerd that I am. Unfortunately, I don't, and I had to pay $$$ to get them to find a backup tape and restore my stuff.

Costly mistake, yes. But it's only a mistake if you make it once.

That being said… kids, back up your work. That way, if your account gets wiped clean because you were in Uzbekistan and weren't able to renew your account, you can easily restore your data using your own backup without having to pay out the nose to your hosting provider.

I've noticed that the post that has received the most reads/comments is the one I wrote around 3 years ago, titled eBay addict. In it, I lamented how addicting eBay is (particularly to a cheap frugal person like me), and how I need to start an "Ebay Addicts Anonymous" group.

I never realized that people can actually have an addiction to eBay. I wrote the post partly in jest, because anyone who knows me knows that I'm a bargain hunter. However, when the shopping/spending habit truly becomes an addiction, then it's no longer a joke.

That being said, I've found myself buying less things on eBay nowadays and have actually SOLD quite a few items. I have a few groundrules that I've set to prevent myself from getting sucked in to an auction.

1. Establish your spending limit. Obviously this is a catch-22, as it can backfire. If you enter in your max bid 3 days before the auction ends, someone could swoop in and bid $0.50 over that bid with 30 seconds to go and win the item. On the other hand, if you wait until the last minute and get in a bidding war, you find yourself saying, "Hey, it's only $2 more to win… $5 more…" etc etc etc, until you find you've won the item and spent $40 more than what you wanted to. So, that being said, I usually do a combination of the both. If it's an item I REALLY want, I tend to snipe but make myself do only ONE bid in the last 30 seconds, walk away, and if I've won, great. If not, there's always another time. The getting up and walking away is the hardest, because you know there's always someone else who may have the same plan as you.


2. Use the "save search" function. I'm always looking for one item that I need buy don't necessarily need to buy this second. Instead of searching every day, I do one search, save it, and eBay will e-mail me a list every day of the search results. You can even set the min/max cost so you won't get a message full of 200+ results in each e-mail.


3. Watch out for excessive shipping charges. I absolutely refuse to purchase from a seller who advertises an item for say, $1 (that normally costs $35) and then charges $25 for shipping. It's illegal by eBay standards to do this, as it circumvents paying a higher commission to eBay. (e.g., if you sell an item for $1, you pay a lower percentage of the original listing and selling price to eBay than if you sell an item for $20. eBay doesn't take a cut of shipping fees.) Even if it's still a better deal to purchase the $1 item and pay $25 shipping, I'd rather go buy it for $20 and pay $7 or $8 shipping since THAT seller is playing by the rules.


4. Never buy anything directly from Asia, especially electronics. It's just sketchy.

This last tip may or may not work against you. If you use Firefox, there's a great extension called myTimeZone for eBay. If you're like me and hate that the ending times are in Pacific Time Zone, this add-on will change the time to your local time. In addition, you can see bid updates in real time (rather than having to refresh), and the page displays a countdown timer with an audible alarm. Also, it allows you to sort listings by total price plus shipping, remove the "featured items" and "additional matching results" section at the top of search results.

myTimeZone MAY (kinda sorta) work to your addiction advantage, as I've found it's not synced to the eBay official time and can be 30+ seconds off. So, if it IS off, you can choose not to re-sync it when the dialog box pops up and thus make it seem like the auction has ended when there are really 25 seconds to go… and thus prevent you from doing any more auction snipping.

And that's all I have for today.

I usually post about this every 2-3 months, but I really, really, REALLY need to find a new domain name for this site. (Click here to read the back story on it.) I do have kendallchurch.com registered, so I no longer have to have the embarrassing "rainypony.com" at the top of my resume… but the main problem with that name is that no one knows how to spell Kendall. (Unless I registered and set up redirects on kendlechurch, kendullchurch, kandallchurch, kendellchurch, etc… you get the idea.)

So… I need IDEAS! Anything! Only criteria is that is has to be easy to remember and spell. Oh yeah, and no profanity. And it can't be stupid. (Says the girl who picked the domain with "pony" in it.)