T-Mobile Shadow... Batteries... and back to imprisonment with a Windows Mobile smartphone and a contract...

My wife missed an important appointment the other day. Time for action. "You need a smartphone, I say" and suggest that I get her one. The Sidekick was too big and bulky, so I sold it on Craigslist.

I signed up for a 1-year contract with T-Mobile, since their rates are less killer, and used a special code I found on the Internet to get two T-Mobile Shadow phones on the cheap.

Of course, I just got through kicking the ball and chain of AT&T to the curb, but I really didn't want to pay $300 for another set of smartphones, so I signed up for a 1-year contract. I ported the numbers from our pre-paid phones to the new lines of service, and signed up for the slow EDGE-based Internet plan (to get the $50 rebate for each phone).

The phones have WiFi, so I might not need to keep the Internet service... however, the biggest reported problem with the phone seems to be battery life... but then there's this post on AllShadow.com: Get an Extended Battery from T-Mobile. I recieved the phones Friday, and didn't get the new batteries, so I guess I need to call customer service.

Then I have to figure out why I want to spend $30 each for a couple of car chargers at the corporate store. And get my wife a dedicated setup of Outlook to sync her phone with, and organize her address book, and all sorts of crap... Getting new phones is hard work!

World of Warcraft 2.4.3 (Mounts at Level 30?)

I might have to go back and start playing World of Warcraft. The recent update supposedly lets you get mounts at level 30. My Mac is pretty weak for playing it though, but my PC is plenty powerful enough. The real question is, am I willing to give up 50 cents a day? It has to come from somewhere... sigh.

I hate computer docks. Anyone recommend a bluetooth mouse?

This morning, the dock I was using with my laptop computer at work just "died". All of a sudden, I was disconnected from the network and my external keyboard and mouse stopped working. WTF?

I have work to do, so i just plugged everything straight into the laptop, and soldiered on. Maybe that's why should just get wireless "everything". The dock failing was just a symptom of the "real" problem. connecting stuff to a computer is prone to failure, stuff breaking is bound to happen. This laptop does have bluetooth, maybe I should just get a bluetooth mouse, and headphones, and a phone that can connect with bluetooth.

Oh well... back to work.

At the end of the day, I left 30 minutes early, stopped at Starbucks, to get the iTunes data for the CDs I ripped on my PowerBook, only to find that they don't have Internet... I drive down the road to another, and discover that they have that damned hook-up with AT&T wifi. Fortunately, I have AT&T DSL, but it is becoming apparent that I won't be able to leave so cheaply if I need wireless internet and Flickr Pro... Oh well, it is still cheaper than Comcast Cable, right?

Linux Haters Blog, Hackintosh

I read the linux haters blog. Seriously... I went and read every post. I've been a Linux fan for years, but not always a user. I had seriously hoped to move more toward being a user, but reading this made me rethink a lot.I had a recent frustration, which I have since resolved, but in the time that it took, I acquired an Apple PowerBook G4. I now remember every reason I used a Mac before. Stuff just works. Then I used it some more, and wanted to do some stuff, and remembered why I quit using Macs... Everything costs money.The question isn't really whether it is worth the money, but rather, whether I have it to spend. Linux has costs too, mostly time. I'm short on both money and time these days, so it can be hard to decide if I should let either dictate my OS of choice.I'm going to try building a hackintosh, Maybe then I can really evaluate whether I need that Mac Pro tower. Well, no... not really, I don't need it. But, I would like to experience some of the OS X goodness on some higher end hardware... and all my high-end hardware isn't Apple branded... so there. Worst case scenario, I lose some more time, and end up back on Linux, looking for marginal programs to do things that I could just pay money and get good applications for on Windows or OS X, right?

Crud, Drivel sucks too?

I think I know why the Fedora People use LiveJournal. There's no client for WordPress in the distribution that sucks less thanthat sucks less than that goat-whatever-program I used to use... (logjam).

Drivel doesn't even support Titles natively, with it's Atom 1.0/Blogger support. I'm writing this post in Drivel, but I think it will be my last one. Sigh... maybe I really should just go back to LiveJournal.

Ripping with Banshee, part 2 - FreeDB backup?

Okay, lots of the CDs I've tried don't have MusicBrainz entries... fine, I'll try them in SoundJuicer... oh, wait, it is doing some sort of fallback to FreeDB... well, why doesn't Banshee do that?

Oh, and the submission to MusicBrainz in SoundJuicer... that's too hard, I don't understand what to do. I don't really have anything to add, I just want my tags to show up. WTF?

Oh, and BloGTK... eh... it kind of sucks. I need something better.

And what the heck is with SoundJuicer just falling over? It is as if it just gets tired of being second to Banshee and quits in frustration. :(

Ripping it up with Banshee

I had a really good session with Banshee last night. I've been trying to rip CDs for this eventual portable media player I think I'm going to get. However, I've had a hard time coming to terms with a few things.

I have a machine with 4 cores and 4 optical drives, and I want all of them to work at the same time, so I can rip more discs faster.

I don't want to be tied to Windows or OS X. Actually, I don't mind being tied to OSX, but I can't really afford the hardware to rip the CDs efficiently under OS X. I like the iPod Touch. Rearlly, what I want is a player that will play .ogg files so I can be "free".

Just those two restrictions alone have been enough to make the decision hard. What software do I use? What device am I going to get? What format to I rip to? Being a Freedom Fighter is hard... every device uses .mp3, but the files are bigger, and there's the whold patent issue. Ripping to .mp3 on Linux involves "evil sorcery" that's easy enough, but not really what I want to do if I can avoid it. I thought about ripping to AAC/.m4a and using an iPod Touch, and my recent acquisition of a PowerBook makes this very attractive, but then there's the whole vendor lock-in issue.

I think I'm going to settle with Linux, and just try to find an MTP device I can live with, and I probably won't get an iPod just because of cost. Ripping to .mp3 is probably what I'll end up doing, I'd like to use Vorbis/.ogg, but I'm having a hard time finding a device that I really want that does it.

With all that decided, I had previously done some research on software on Linux for ripping CDs. Banshee recently went 1.0 and it's awesome. I put in 4 CDs and if there's information available, it rips the tracks and ejects the disc. If not, it just sits and waits. Unfortunately, it sat and waited on 2 out of the 10 discs I tried last night.

Sound Juicer works splendidly also, and picked up the discs that didn't automatically get track information in Banshee. Some sort of MusicBrainz interface... strange... since Banshee supposedly has MusicBrainz too... I'd just use SoundJuicer, but it wants me to actually select a single optical drive for ripping... no good for me.

I tried a few other apps, but Banshee was so easy and simple, I think I"m going to stick with it. Now I just need to find an media player that I can use with it. The Computer Geeks Discount Outlet had some old iRiver H10 devices for sale... maybe I can snag one of those. The iPod Touch lingers in my mind, but there's some "clones" that might work for me.

Prescription Drugs

I take four different drugs for maintenance.  I got some 90-day prescriptions and still haven't filled them. I'm out of some of the freebies that the doctor gave me, so I've really got to get on this. The way our health insurance works, you pay a different co-pay based on tiers. Nothing weird, other than I need to shave some cost somwhere. A few options come to mind, other than simply stopping taking them, or actually getting healthier so that I don't have to take them.

I saw at K-Mart has a list of generic medicnes that you can get 90-day scripts filled for $15.00. Plus we got a coupon in the mail for $20 bucks if we bring our scripts there.

I heard on the radio that Kroger has a list of generic medicines that they'll do 90-days for some obscenely low cost that I can't remember, probably $10 or something... I can't be bothered to go to Kroger though... not sure why. Probably because whe shop at Meijer, ususally.

Walgreens has a sign that I've seen that has $12.99 90-day scripts, and this morning, before work, I decided to stop in. We've had a pretty good relationship with Walgreens, but the $4.00 generic scripts at Wal-Mart pretty much had us going there as our first choice, and then filling the other drugs at a conventient time and place, which usually was Wal-Mart, with the rest of them, unless they were antibiotics for the kids, which are sometimes free at Meijer...

Anyway, the pharmacist was helpful and explained the program and checked... two of my drugs are on the list, one is avaialble generically, but not on the list, and the other isn't available generically. Furthermore, my insurance won't let me fill 90-day scripts at retail. I have to mail-order them. Typically when I mail order, I get three months for the cost of two... which is nice, but not cheaper than $12.99. The lowest monthly co-pay is $15.00, so for the cheapest mail-order drugs, I'm looking at $30 for a 90-day supply of one drug.

So, I also find out I have to participate in a Prescription Savings Club, which costs $20.00 annually, to get the $12.99 price. So, I've got to split my scripts, and come up with $20 extra... ugh... I hate "clubs" and "plans" and "memberships" I think that's why I don't shop Kroger... anyway... I signed up for it for my family, which is actually $35.00 and then took my two scripts that I have to fill via mail-order with me to work.

Oh... but I get coupons and discounts for buying Walgreens products that I wasn't going to buy in the first place, making that extra money I spent totally worth it... yeaah... okay. My insurance carrier online pharmacy rapes me, so I just settle for being beat up by Walgreens, whatever.

At work, I log on to the website, and get the order form. Then I figure I'll just call the doctor and have them call them in, as opposed to paying the stamp and waiting for them to be filled. My doctor's office was awesome.  They just asked what the drugs were, and they'll fax them in. I gave them my number, in case they wanted to call me for questions, and that was pretty much it. I guess the pharmacy will bill me, we'll see.

So, maybe I saved enough money over three months to help with the cost of this gym membership we just got. Maybe not, but maybe if I get in shape, I won't be spending as much money on fixing what's wrong with my body with drugs.

What's really wrong with Fedora 9?

I like Fedora, but there's always some crazy voodoo I have to learn or figure out, or learn from someone els who has figured it out already to get my stuff working.

Recently, with Fedora 9. I'm using two 8800 GS video cards in SLI on a dual opteron workstation board, and I can't get into the GUI when I install the kmod-nvidia driver. My issue seems to be described by this post:

http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=190393

Basically, I get the text login prompt, flashing like 30 times. I can log in, but I can't start X. Apparently, I need to read the log file to find out that I have two video cards, and that X can't start because it doesn't know which one to use. Then I need to specify one card.

That pretty much seems like a functionality regression to me, since it worked fine before. Then again, it worked fine *until* I installed the proprietary NVIDIA driver... Hmm...

So, is the evil closed-source driver at fault, or is the bad choice of Fedora to launch with the new X server at fault? I don't know. I guess I'll be happy if I can go home today (I read this on my lunch break at work) and get my box up and running with Linux again.

The real question is, "why should I have to use my google-fu to solve this problem?" It either needs to not happen, or there needs to be some kind of "safe mode" gui with a VESA driver so I can at least look at a FAQ distributed with the software, or get online to look up the solution to the problem. I'm lucky enough to have another computer to get on line and search for the answer, but lots of people aren't.

I didn't even try, I just switched to another Operating System, on a different machine. Maybe that's what's wrong with this whole Linux thing. It doesn't seem like there's any incentive to identify and solve "hard" problems. Just incrementally (though rapidly) improving with small easy problems until the hard ones become easy or go away. I suppose it is a different development model, but I think I'd actually pay for a Mac, just to get rid of these insane quirks.

Now to find a portable media player I can live with in Linux, and ditch this Mac, LOL.

BloGTK, Fedora 9, Mac OS X and an iPod.

Hello. Posting from BloGTK on Fedora 9... How did I end up here... long story, but this is my blog, so I guess I have time:

I got a broken update on Fedora 9, and I kind of gave up. I tried openSUSE, and liked KDE 4, but still missed a few things being on Linux in general, I also read awful things about KDE 4 missing critical functionality...

So, I tried KDE 4 on Fedora, and then futzed around and killed my GUI with an update. I got tired of living on the bleeding edge and unstable distros and not having what I wanted, and went back to...

Mac OS X. A friend of mine had a 1.25 GHz G4 Powerbook he had long been wanting to get rid of. I couldn't justify the cost, but I did come into some hardware he wanted by way of trade, and was able to get the PowerBook from him. It has a gig of RAM and OS X 10.4 Tiger, and it was everything I remembered. I like OS X, and I'd like to upgrade the machine to Leopard and 2 GB. However, I'm really living on the low end of the Mac experience.

I've got too many other priorites to get that MacBook Pro or Mac Pro that I really want, and I've also got all my PC hardware and my Windows Gaming habits to think about. I have a quad-core box that runs Windows quite well. I think I may just have to live heterogenously for a while.

We started working out at a gym, so I've got to figure out how to come up with an extra $80.00 a month. And, I'd really like an iPod. I can rip my CDs for the Powerbook and take that to work, but I can't really carry the laptop from machine to machine at the gym. There's the iPod Touch, and then the whole iPhone dilemma... ugh... my buddy has an old PowerMac and an iPhone that I could get from him, but I don't really want an iPhone. I'm *not* going back to AT&T, and I'm content to keep my phone and media player seperate.

Ripping CDs on a G4 Powerbook is too slow. One drive, a single-core processor... I installed Windows, and iTunes on my big box with 4 cores and 4 drives, and put in 4 CDs... thinking, I'll just put the PowerBook in FireWire Target mode after I mow through these CDs, and plop the tunes on there from my big box. However, iTunes wants to rip one CD at a time, even though I've got the whole 4x4x4 setup going... grrr... Windows Media Player might do it, but I want to rip to AAC, not MP3 or WMA... or do I really want a Zune? Focus... focus... iTunes ecosystem... Mac experience... okay.

So, I whip out a Fedora 9 install, and go with Banshee, which has treated me well in my short series of experiements on ripping CDs. Why didn't I just go back to openSUSE, since the lead developer of Banshee works for Novell? I don't know. Why did I use Fedora 9, when I know I'll have to use the bad/ugly plugins from livna to do AAC? I don't know. Why didn't I just settle for .mp3 files? I really don't know. I know Banshee won't work with an iPod Touch, so perhaps I really just haven't thought this through.

Oh well, I did the $10 upgrade at the wordpress.com site, so now http://blog.mvpittman.com is official. I guess I should e-mail a few people and let them know what's up.

Back to WordPress

I'm not doing self-hosting for a blog... life is too short for that. However, I don't want to pay to be on a social networking site that has a blogging component, and that's really what LiveJournal was. I don't do any of the social networking on there.

WordPress offered me a blog for free, and I left it because all the cool Fedora people were using LiveJournal... should have known. Fedora is cool, the community is cool, but for me, LiveJournal wasn't the right fit. If I learned anything from observing that community, it is that open, solutions are good and people should be able to use whatever they want. I'll probably just pay the $10 to get mvpittman.com to point here, and move all my files and random junk here, and pay for an upgrade to get rid of ads...

Not sure why I didn't use TypePad/Movable Type... maybe I will. I don't think WordPress will try to trap me. The export/import functions are pretty good. I'm glad I wasn't on LJ more than a few months, since I can only export one month worth of posts at a time.

I'll have to e-mail people who weren't looking at my blog through a redirect like http://blog.mvpittman.com and make sure they know about my new headquarters for world domination... all three of them. I guess I had better get my domain name stuff in order too. I switched from FastMail to TuffMail on a trial, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up keeping TuffMail. It's cheaper for what I do and FastMail does lots of things well, but I only need them to do e-mail. I guess that's another blog post... I've been taking notes for that one.