SprintPCS's webstore: thumbs down

I’ve been wanting to get a new Sayno 8100, a camera phone. I checked the C’ville sprint store (who had them, but couldn’t give a current customer the $100 rebate) and The H’burg Sprint PCS store (only had a really ugly white and lavender phone, but said they would call me as soon as they got a silver one). Then I looked at their website.

First thing is the URL for a phone’s page in their store is 615 characters long. What kind of crack monkey web dev thinks that’s ok do to? The goal of life now should be really short perama links, URLs as UI, URLs as UI.

Then you can order the phone and they say that you can get $100 dollar rebate, but then they have no information about what the conditions of the rebate is for (only new customers? everyone?).

And last of all, no where to pick the color of their phone. You think I’m being picky about the phone color, but you have to see the 3 possible color schemes to know what I mean, white and lavender, blue and gold, and silver. … google is failing to find a picture of the other two, here’s the silver version, which I want.

SprintPCS’s comment page allows you to send them and email with questions and promises to get back to you in 24 hours. Mine went out at 12:24, and the clock is ticking.

The reason I want this phone is to jump on the cam phone blogging bandwagon. I hope to start another section of this site to post all pictures to, and bump the good ones to the front page as well. I’m thinking “A Day in the Life of Myers Carpenter”. Gripping I know. Remember this site is not for you the reader, but future me, the reader, to remember how lame I am.

I played with one phone in the store, and it looks like you could take a picture and email it in under 10 seconds. AND include a voice memo. I bet you couldn’t run ViaVoice over the voice memo and get good results, which is really too bad. I have the ViaVoice SDK so I might give it a try. Otherwise is the mega slow T-9 keypad for text. I want a color Palm based phone (so I can write apps for it in !Java), that has a keyboard like a Hiptop, built in cam, and uses CDMA AND GPRS.

Bob's new blog

Laura’s brother is in El Salvador with the Peace Core. Laura and I hooked him up with a blog: AdventuresOfBob.com, and he’s been posting to it lately. We are still doing some work on it, for example I want to make the site look like and Indiana Jones poster

Laura also has a blog, but I don’t think she has been thinking about it.

He writes really, really long posts about what’s going on there. And he’s been adding pictures to it as well.

We are planning to visit him in October. Tickets are cheap (~$300/person)

Which reminds me I need to burn Bob some CD’s of mp3’s he wanted (he only has 33.6 connection on a shared phone line). I remember what it was like to be in media starvation while I lived in PNG. I need to keep remembering so I will get my act together and mail the CD’s to him.

Also, does anyone out there are a Spanish Windows 98 license they are not using any more?

Salam Pax's new column

The Guardian is now publishing a column by Salam Pax. Excellent stuff

“Vacancies: President needed - fluent in English, will have limited powers only. Generous bonuses.” This appeared on the first page of the Ahrar newspaper. Another new weekly. Newspapers are coming out of our ears these days. There are two questions which no one can answer: how many political parties are there now in Iraq? And how many newspapers are printed weekly?” Most of these papers are just two or four pages of party propaganda, no license or hassle. Just go print. I am thinking of getting my own: “Pax News - all the rumours, all the time”.

Steve, the king of evil

[12:10:20] Steve: u get the martix game yet
[12:10:32] icepick: no... you are the 2nd person to ask tho
[12:10:36] icepick: must be good
[12:10:54] Steve: I played it the other day @ walmart
[12:10:56] Steve: hah
[12:11:06] Steve: all these kids were waiting to play.
[12:11:13] Steve: I just kept playing
[12:11:24] Steve: "Mommy he wont let me play"
[12:12:59] Steve: the sales guy asked if I would let the kids play. I asked the parents there
if they were going to buy a game for the kids. they said no. I said, I probably will not leave
here w/o buying a game. That shut the salesman up.
[12:13:18] Steve: please the customer....
[12:13:25] icepick: so ... you didn't get it did you, you bastard
[12:13:31] Steve: nope
[12:13:32] Steve: hehe
[12:13:46] icepick: I crown you the king of evil for the day
[12:13:48] Steve: I don't even have a ps2

Charming spam

WINDOWS SECURITY WARNING!!

A VIRUS HAS BEEN DETECTED ON YOUR COMPUTER. IN ORDER FOR YOUR COMPUTER NOT
TO CRASH YOU WILL NEED TO GO TO:

HTTP://WWW.WINDOWSUPDATENOW.COM

AND IT WILL AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE YOUR COMPUTERS SECURITY PATCHES.

SIMPLY TYPE IN WWW.WINDOWSUPDATENOW.COM INTO YOUR BROWSER. OTHERWISE YOU
WILL KEEP RECEIVING THIS SECURITY ALERT EMAIL EVERY DAY.

So how many people do you think went to the site before someone did this:

myers@numbers:~$ dig www.windowsupdatenow.com
[...]
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.windowsupdatenow.com. 236503 IN     A       0.0.0.0