I found my earpiece in the driveway...

I think I'm going to have to start using Twitter if I keep writing short posts... Isn't there some sort of Facebook/Twitter mashup? Oh, I'd like to use TwitterFox on my PortableApps version of FireFox too. I guess I had better get to it.

As i turns out, the missing rubber piece of my headphones was in the driveway... I found it when I pulled in from work this evening. Yay!

T-Mobile Shadow Update

Today, at work, I'm going to work on making my T-Mobile Shadow experience better. In between tasks, and generally filling time as I can, while doing work, of course. So, it is going slow. (I'm starting this post at about 10:00 AM. I've been at it off and on for an hour, inbetween reading training material, reviewing trouble tickets, dodging funny pictures sent to me by my colleagues and such.

For those of you, like my Aunt Staci, who says that I make "boring" posts. This one will probably be boring. Fair warning and all that...

So, music... I've purchased a set of Motorola S9 stereo bluetooth headphones. They're great, and I was going to use them with my Apple PowerBook, but I need Leopard for stereo sound, rather than the simple headset/microphone profile. I'm selling my PowerBook anyway... not specifically for that reason, Mostly because I don't want to pay for the battery upgrade, memory upgrade, and Leopard upgrade, but I digress... The bluetooth headphones work great with the phone, and I'd like to use them when I work out in the mornings before work.

I loaded a few songs from my PowerBook onto the phone, using a memory card that we've bought. They were encoded in AAC (.m4a, like on iTunes/iPod/iPhone) and they worked fine in the Windows Media Player. I haven't ripped all of my CDs, but I wanted to make sure that if for some reason, I go nuts and use Apple as my primary system, that I could use my ripped tracks on the phone. Seems to be fine.

Incidentally, I'm probably going to stick with Windows Media Center and just deal with the OTA subchannel nonsense or maybe go with Media Portal or some other free replacement on our DVR box. It's working very well, and syncing playlists and such seems like it will be great with our phones. Sigh... I've given up freedom for convenience, so I guess I deserve neither. I'll learn my lesson and come crawling later, I'm sure.

I'm also going to try to get my phone updated, and I guess I need to call in to customer service and grab those spare extra capacity batteries that are supposed to be free, but couldn't be sent to customers subscribed for less than thirty days... Sigh.

I'm also going to try to install moBlog, and see if I can try to use my camera phone and post directly to my blog, making some of those life moments more publically available. Maybe then I can justify having this fancy toy, rather than simply saying my wife needs to keep a schedule with her, and I just got one too.

We'll see how it all goes. Good luck to me.

Okay... went to lunch, came back... lunch was just awful, food-wise. My PC is getting re-imaged at 1:30, and I've got training to finish up. moBlog just didn't work right for me. I couldn't get it to work, and I gave up. I do wonder why Wordpress.com has a mobile client for iPhone, and not for Windows Mobile, but there's no real guesswork. Announcing a client on iPhone is bigger news...

I did manage to get the T-Mobile update installed. Avril Lavigne and Dave Matthews Band now emenate from my phone... very nice indeed. There's some better text input stuff too.

I think it is just time to sit down this evening and rip discs on the big box... WMA or MP3?

Bluetooth Mouse

I left work a little early yesterday to go get a haircut, it went quick, so I stopped at Best Buy. After discovering that I needed stereo sound and that I'd have to hack my Tiger 10.4 installation to get A2DP support for my MotoROKR S9 headphones, I thought I'd browse around and see if I could save a trip up "north" to the Apple store on a future journey to upgrade to Leopard 10.5.

I ended up looking for a bluetooth mouse as well as other things... Time Vault, Airport Extreme, external hard drive enclosure with card reader, etc... and found them all. I also found a couple of sticks of DDR 2700 SODIMM for $55... a significant discount from the usual rapage that Best Buy provides on memory. I didn't have money for that, but I'd like to upgrade my PowerBook.

Anyway, I bought a Microsoft Notebook Mouse for Mac, since my old "notebook" mouse got destroyed by my kids. It is essentially the same as the Microsoft Notebook Mouse 5000, but packaged differently so that Mac users think it is special. I'd have normally just gotten which ever I saw first, but the one I saw was discounted for being open. Normally the mice are $50, but this one was $37-something, a weak discount, except that the last sale price was $39.99, so it was more like a $12 discount. I decided that had real value and that I'd go with that. It comes with a nice little pouch too.

Fortunately the AAA batteries hadn't been run down completely, since they were already in the mouse. I will need to download some software from Microsoft to get the "superior" functionality. Too bad I can't hook my laptop to the Internet at work. Also too bad I didn't pick up Leopard... Bah.

Bluetooth Headphones

So, I'm thinking of a way to blow a few dollars... I mean enhance my productivity at work. I also wanted to get headphones that don't make me look like a martian, and will make me able to listen to music at work and walk away from my desk without a big disconnection exercise. Monday, I picked up the browser and searched up the Motorola ROKR S9. Normally a $150 and up purchase, I find them for $37.

Sold... but $17 for shipping? Oh well... might as well bump it up to Next Day Air, and get a day of working out with them. Oh... I forgot my phone at *work*! So, I get home, open the box... the packaging looked like OEM knockoffs, but they seem to work okay. I was solo on Tuesday night, so I didn't get a chance to test them out with anything.

Wednesday morning, I throw them on my wife's head, and explain that there are no wires... but I get them all tangled in her hair... nice. I don't know if she understood that they'd work with her *phone* because she asked me about having a "burner" for getting music off of some CDs.

Anyway, I wore my set to the gym, not listening to anything but the music that was already playing, but getting a feel for comfort. They're great. I love them. I got to work, and hooked them up to my phone... after discovering how to choose between, being a crappy phone headset and stereo headphones, they worked great... on the sample songs that I had on the phone.

Next step, since I haven't ripped any tunes to put on my phone with Windows Media Player is to try using my PowerBook. I chose a headset profile, but they aren't supported. Short story... after several tries, I couldn't get them working. So, I turned to the Internet, and came across this article: Get a Bluetooth Headset Working with a PowerBook.

Goodness, I need a firmware update? Oh, and the update from Apple apparently doesn't actually install anything, it just puts the files on your system for you to run later. Sigh... I'd download the file, but I don't have my PowerBook hooked up to the Internet at work. I guess if I had a flash drive, I could move it from my work machine... jeez, this is hard.

And so ends a blog post at work, when I should actually be working... Thanks for listening.