But before we get into my impressions on the device, let’s address how the intertubes feels on the subject:

Wired Magazine - “The votes are in:The Storm Sucks”
New York Time’s David Pogue, scathingly upleased
MSNBC on RIM’s lack of response to the internet being pissed off

The results are not good, by and large people hate it, and the bugs that you have to deal with are just too much to tolerate. When viewed as an ‘iPhone killer’, there is just no damn way. iPods are stable, game changing devices, but in the beginning they had problems too, it just took a while to hammer out. I didn’t expect RIM to destroy the iPhone out of the gate, but I did expect them to be a little closer.

First impression out of the box:

My Storm came loaded with OS 4.7.0.65. Activating the phone was easy, not like the iPhone debacle if anyone remembers, and I was making calls within seconds. Right away I noticed a large problem, the screen is a bigass button, it *clicks*, when the phone is held between your face and shoulder (as often it is when one needs to write or drive) you end up pushing one of 4 options on the screen during a call: speakerphone, mute, flash, and conference call. With the exception of speakerphone, any of the other options pressed will lead one of the call participants to believe that the call may have been dropped. This is frustrating for several reasons; 1) My treo from 5 years ago had a ‘disable touchscreen on call’ option, 2) the iPhone does this automatically with it’s accelerometer (the storm also has an accelerometer), 3)There is absolutely no way to change it.

Moving on from that, I plugged it into my computer to sync my contacts from outlook, it tells me there are software updates available…they took almost 45 minutes to install. Afterwards, there was no perceivable difference in either version numbers of apps or OS, and certainly not with bugs. After it was “updated” I gave it a thorough test-drive. Basic phone shit (making calls, sending SMS and MMS) work fine. There is a huge lag between the screen reorienting self from landscape to protrait and vica-versa. I tried to play a movie (it comes preloaded with one for demo purposes), the video quality is amazing, truly gorgeous. When I tried to stop the video, the screen went to static and then blank while the video sound was still playing, all buttons unresponsive. I had to wait for the video to end to get the screen controls back, that was a big fucking glitch in my mind. MP3 playback works, but it’s nothing special. When attempting to unlock the phone after a spell in a pocket, it took at least 3 attempts in landscape mode, and usually 2 in protrait…really annoying, especially on an incoming call. I also attempted to use TwitterBerry, but that ended up crashing the system, but I’m not sure it’s up to snuff for the storm just yet, I’m hoping it will come up at a later date. At that moment, I was pretty upset with the lag of display, and with the phone/face-touching thing.

But…along comes a leaked version of OS 4.7.0.75 via Crackberry. I immediately upgrade, consequences of black market software be damned, this time the update takes almost an hour. Right away, the lag was severely reduced, but not eliminated, but at least it’s tolerable now. No fix for the face-to-phone issue though, and this will be an annoyance until it’s corrected. Haven’t tried the video thing since then. Even with the update though, there is also a ridiculous lag on the camera, really really long to take a picture, renders it totally useless for anything other than still life shots.

Final Thoughts:
Pros: The phone is stunning hardware wise, it’s gorgeous, the display is amazing, the phone also has a nice weight (I picked up a curve once and thought I was going to break it, but this has some mass to it for sure).

Cons: It’s chalked full of software bugs, mundane shit that phones have had solved for years (disable touchscreen), and random other small things. The internets are ablaze with engraged customers, when MSNBC picks up on something like that, I’d like to think that RIM is doing something about it behind the scenes.

Other Pros: Announced today, Verizon will have updates later this week that will hopefully address some of these issues.

In the short term, this device was rushed to market for the holiday season and it shows. Even so, I’m happy I bought it, and I don’t plan on abandoning it anytime soon. The good news about all the problems is that none of it is hardware related (BTW, I really really like the clickable screen, it’s a great idea, and I think it was executed well) meaning that in due time all of them should be ironed out, and when the app store launches next march, I think we’ll see some really iphone/G1 competition as far as functionality goes.

Oh the plight of being an early adopter of technology…

Some guy in SF seriously said that to me, and I seriously wanted to punch him in the face, if it weren’t for his numerous homeless friends and the worry that I might get syphilis from his teeth puncturing my hand, I might have. After that, I started thinking, where do they come from, and why in such abundance?

It is my belief, which may be narrow but I think holds true, that every single one of them made a series of bad decisions to get to where they are. Maybe they had ill educated parents? Unless the parents were homeless too, then they also have the ability to find a place to go. Perhaps they’re into drugs? Poor excuse, check into a clinic or at least commit a felony and go to jail so I don’t have to deal with you anymore. Maybe ‘The Man’ forced him down, took away his apartment for not paying rent, and then denied him access to a shower so he smells? I doubt it, they call them slums for a reason, it’s an entire section of housing that’s low income, and in most places it’s mandated by law!

So what’s the deal then? I can understand not being able to get a job once you’ve become homeless, it’s hard to look presentable for an interview like that, and you can’t list an address for your check to be mailed. But I’m not dealing with how to dig yourself out, what I want to know is how did you get there in the first place? At some point along the way, it must’ve been painfully obvious that you were headed down the wrong path. Ignorance let you keep the downward spiral, or maybe just a gripload of apathy.

Either way, something needs to be done, I felt a little intimidated in downtown SF at a decent time of night, with lots of other people around, they were very aggressive and all over the fucking place, and frankly it gave me a really poor opinion of almost the whole city. I went to see D-Rock in Haight Ashbury, far away from downtown, same situation although the age of the indigent was much younger. This further boggled my mind, how the fuck did you end up here as a 20 year old? The only logical conclusion I had was that these kids (which D-Rock lovingly calls “gutter punk”) were probably ejected from their homes by their parents for being total fuckups. So that’s it? You were such an idiot that your own flesh and blood would rather disown you than tolerate you any further. If that is the case, then the young fuckup in question is at a crossroads: On the one hand you may realize that you are in fact a total fucktard and that now is the time to go back to your parents and turn your life around -OR- on the other hand, you accept your fate and without any foresight of personal worth just continue smelling of urine and guilting the hard working people around you into supporting whatever it is you’lll be eating/drinking/stealing that day.

Get a fucking job…

It outlines a semi-radical plan to get yourself on the path to being debt-free and having the money to do what you want. When the plan is broken down to the basics, it’s obvious, spend less while saving more. To get there you MUST be on a strict budget and adhere to a self-designed plan, but you have to stick to it. After the budget you immediately save $1,000 for an “emergency fund” and you never touch it. After that, you aggressively pay off your debt as fast as you can. You then have an emergency fund equivalent to 6 months of expenses, for ET and I this will be $10,000. After that, sky is the limit, invest!

Thus far I have successfully established my $1,000 emergency fund and payed down the 2 small credit cards I have. Erika also has her emergency fund setup, and we recently sold her 4Runner which relieved us of a monthly expense of almost $600! I debated selling my car almost 3 months ago, and decided against it. But for the moment, sharing our single car works just fine. I take ET to work and pick her up, she takes me to the airport and picks me up, if she’s unable to take me to work, I take a cab and expense it. Totally worth it for $600 a month, or almost $8,000 per year! We’re currently paying down ET’s larger credit card, between the 2 of us we hope to have all $7,000 worth of debt taken care of by January.

The budget ET and I are currently on uses a flat amount taken from every check which I withdraw in cash and then break up into a series of labeled envelopes (groceries $65, dry cleaning $20, gas…etc), then when we need something, you don’t take a credit card and therefore you can only spend what you have on hand. I also have a plan in place at the moment to pay off the engagement ring I have on layaway in 8 months, all the while contributing $800 per month towards the current debt being payed down or the current savings project.

Exciting times my friends! This plan sort of came about when ET and I realized that before tax the 2 of us are pulling in an excess of $100,000 per year and yet we were still living paycheck-to-paycheck. If we can keep up this pace, we should be in good shape to pay for the wedding and honeymoon straight cash!

Sound Personal Finance for Brando = Way Fucking Overdue

B

HDR stands for “High Dynamic Range“, it is a photography term. I’ll distill it down for you as I understand it, you take several pictures of the exact same thing, usually from a tripod, but each time your exposure values are changed. If you took old school photos with a 35mm, that’s increasing/decreasing the shutter speed to generate under/overexposed photos. If you’re on a point-and-shoot digital it’s changed the EV value from -2 up to +2 over a series of shots. HDR is typically in high contrast situations, for instance, shooting into the sun: if you expose the sun properly everything in the foreground is dark, if you expose the foreground properly the background will be washed out (backlit). But, when taken of everyday things that you wouldn’t ‘need’ HDR for, you can get stunning results:

Now mine isn’t necessarily stunning, but it is pretty cool looking, and quite dramatic when you consider the originals:

It was definitely a good first try, I think this will come in pretty handy since I like to take pictures of skylines when I travel all the time, we’ll see what I come up with.

Matt Milby is fucking hilarious! I’m really sad he doesn’t write them anymore.

Things in pirate land had been going just fine, and then the concierge asked me this morning why I couldn’t burn all those movies I had downloaded to a DVD so that we could watch them on the TV. I didn’t know the answer the that question, but in this day and age there must be a plausible solution right? Indeed, which brings me to the next level of piracy. To burn a video file you must first convert that file to DVD format. This was done by Xilisoft’s AVI to DVD converter, torrent provided here. The trick with that one is that the original file must be an AVI, and for a 90 minute movie the conversion takes almost 3 fucking hours, but it’s worth it. If you’re original file is not an AVI check out WinFF which is a freeware program that will convert pretty much any video format to any other format, this program is also useful for making videos play on your iPod. Alright, now that you have your DVD video files, you need to put those on a disc for which I recommend Nero 7, and of course there’s a cracked version here. Now what’s really amazing is the quality, it translated incredibly well to TV, I thought it would’ve been much worse, but from a couch’s distance away, it looks awesome, and it’s all mother fucking free!!!

The next step is for me to cancel my cable and use that money to get a netflix account and then rip every single one of those disc, which I’m told is also easily accomplished using DVDShrink.

Happy Plundering!

Woot!

True Dat! Tax & Spend the shit out of everyone!

I was on a 14 mile ride (which is my longest outside of a poker ride) and the outside temperature was 108. I stop at an intersection and lean on stop light pole with my right arm. A split second later I realize it’s hotter than fuck and instinctively jerk away. When I did that, part of my skin had melted to the pole, and it separated when I pulled away, it’s the bloody spot in the photo. If you look close you can see a little bit of the skin flap on the bottom. There’s definitely a clear red box from the contact area.

Lesson learned. Outdoor things in Vegas can burn you…badly.