BrainDrain

I'll be leaving tomorrow for Galveston to spend a week helping to rebuild homes and such that are still damaged from Hurricane Ike which blew through there last year. I'm going with a group of around 20 of my GHBC crew, with about half the group coming over for the July 4th weekend with the other half sticking around for the entire week. Galveston got hit pretty hard and there are whole sections of the town that are no longer there. Even now, a year after the initial damage, there are still places that don't have power or are in a major state of disrepair. So, we're heading over there to see what we can do.

Thus, any updates that I have over the next week or so will come through the Twitterverse so make sure to check the sidebar widget to see what's happening. I'll have the Pre with me and will also hopefully be posting pictures to TwitPic as well as blurbs to Twitter. While I can post to the BrainDrain from the Pre, it's just a whole lot easier to tweet stuff than to post stuff. Plus, I'm not sure what the coverage is going to be like in Galveston, so a tweet might be the better part of posting valor.

In any case, once I'm back to a terminal of some sort, I'll post a wrap-up on what happened on our trip. For those of you that happen to be the praying sort, please keep us in mind for safety and for the opportunities that God will bring to us to interact with people that have lost almost everything. I don't know how much we'll get done in six days, but it should definitely be exciting and rewarding.

Peace out.

Seriously, Vibram should hire me as a walking sales representative for their Five Fingers shoes. I wore my 5Fs to Schlitterbahn today, and got stopped by nearly every park worker in the place as well as quite a few patrons. I think that they should provide me with an Under Armor swim shirt that says "My shoes are called Five Fingers by Vibram. You can get them at http://vibramfivefingers.com" on the front and then have the URL for the site on the back. Oh, and probably give me a stack of laminated business cards to hand out because I get the most comments about them when I'm around the water. The 5Fs are perfect for a waterpark because they allow me to be "barefoot" while still providing protection as I walk from ride to ride and take the tram between the sections of the park. Also, with the tightening strap, they stay securely on my feet so that I don't need to worry about taking them off for the rides and holding them in my hands. They're good for a lot of other things too, like drumming, but I've found that the waterpark scenario is the shining jewel in my experience.

Alas, my 5Fs have developed holes in the bottom and so it's time to investigate getting some new ones. I've had this pair for just under two years now (I bought them back in August of '07) and for the amount I've worn them, it was a $70 well spent. I love them, and wear them pretty much all the time unless legit shoes are called for. I've worn a hole in the ball of one foot and a toe of the other. I think that I'm going to get one size up on the next pair, as my current pair was pretty tight on my feet even with the tension strap as slack as it could be. I haven't quite decided if I'm going to get the same model (the open top "original" model or get the closed-foot model that goes up to the ankle, but I'm pretty sure that I've decided that I do need to get another pair. I think I'm going to be a 5F customer for the rest of my life.

For all you tech-heads out there, Firefox 3.5 was released today and it serves to have a few nifty features added to the venerable Mozilla toolbox. If you are a tech-head you probably already know about this and have installed it, but just in case you don't, I wanted to inform you so that you could run along and go install it.

The most noteworthy features that I can see in the initial run-through are horked straight from Google Chrome - "private browsing" (the "incognito window" in Chrome-speak) and location-aware browsing services. The private browsing is great for doing personal searches or other surfing on, say, a company laptop and it can also be good (or bad, if you're a parent) for keeping prying eyes out of your surfing habits by other family members. You can be sure that the surprise party you're planning won't be betrayed to your S.O. by your browser if you use the private browsing feature, however, so it's well worth playing around with.

I've not had too much time to play around with the location-aware features, and I'm not sure how useful they'll be on a static desktop from home, but again I can see how they'd be useful for laptop applications to save some strokes (and risk of worsening carpal tunnel syndrome) by not requiring the user to input their location. I'll have to get back to you on how useful I find this feature in day-to-day living.

Of course, there are several other enhancements - not the least of which is the underlying rendering engine (Gecko 1.9) - which makes things render ultra-fast and smooth. There's also some new video support and such, so hopefully we can start getting away from all the flash-enabled content and get something that might actually be able to display inline video in cell phone web browsers.

I will say this - I've tried to like Chrome and have tried to use it, but the incognito window and the direct link to Google were the linchpins in my attempts to stick with it. The lack of my favorite plugins or the integration thereof with the browser (as I have with Firefox) was a source of constant consternation for me and now that FF has gone and added those things which I found most useful about Chrome, I think that Chrome is going back into the dustbin until it's got something that nobody else has. The "each tab is a separate process" idea is really cool, but I'm finding that my browser just isn't crashing that much to warrant that kind of feature loyalty.

So, my dear Firefox, I'm back. It'll be like I never left. Hold me.

I enjoy exposing people to new things or possibly things that one should do at least once in their town but just haven't gotten around to doing. It was with this in mind that our home team decided to do some "Austin firsts" with our crew for some that haven't yet partaken in some of the uniquely Austin-y things to do.

We started off our evening with a trip to Frank & Angie's Pizzeria, some of the best pizza in Austin. With great names for the pies like The Travolta (a white pizza), the Scorsese (a meaty pizza) and the Chairman of the Board (a supreme pizza), the atmosphere is as much fun as the food. It usually fills up pretty quick, and the parking is pretty limited, but if you can get down there before the rush it's a great experience.

From there we headed on down to the Congress St. bridge to see the bats fly. There are several massive colonies of Mexican Free-tailed bats that live in various parts of Austin, with the most popular location being the park near the offices of the Austin-American Statesman newspaper. We've had several folks that have lived here for many years and still haven't been down to see them fly, and it's definitely something that every resident should do at least once. It's amazing to see - they start circling under the supports of the bridge, a little at a time, and then one makes a beeline out from underneath to start; perhaps he's some sort of scout or something. Within 10 minutes of that one leaving, the rest of the flying population leaves to go bug-hunting in one giant column that can take an hour and a half or more to complete. At this time of year, the viewing was okay, but the females had just given birth so the entire colony isn't yet flying. By the end of August and into September all 1.5 million of them will be leaving on a nightly basis at the fall of dusk to go keep Austin mosquito-free. It's a wonder of God's creation.

Finally, we ended up the evening with a viewing of Better Off Dead - John Cusack at some of his most amusing. It's one of those John Hughes films that everyone should see because it's just so much fun to watch (even though it's highly cheesy). We had a fairly large percentage of our group that hadn't seen the movie, so some of us that are "in the know" on these things decided that this would be a perfect movie to kick off a "movies everyone should see" series. There are so many movies out there and to know that someone is going through life having never seen "Ferris Beuller's Day Off", well....that's just tragic.

So all in all, we had a good night of fun and hangin' out, and now I feel like I've helped enrich the lives of my surrogate family by given them opportunities to experience some of the awesomeness that Austin has to offer. The next outing should be quite fun as well. Anybody got any good ideas on what we might want to do next? Something that every Austinite should do at least once?

Do tell.

LIFE ON LOAN
RED EYED FLY (715 Red River, 1 block south of Stubb's)
FRIDAY, JUNE 26
9PM

Tonight's show will be the best lineup we've played with yet - a LOT of fan favorites on the bill. Just take a look at this lineup:

The Soles - 8pm
LIFE ON LOAN - 9pm
Matchsticks for Memories - 10pm
Sixes & Eights - 11pm (EP Release party - free EPs for everybody!!)
Mike Truth & the Replacement Killers - 12:45am

If you've never come out to hear us, now is definitely the time. If you have been out to hear us, we would love to see you back again. We're adding some of the old favorites back into the set due to popular demand and we're looking forward to having a good time. This will definitely be one to remember and we hope to see you there! Bring some friends!!!

If you've been following my Twitter feed today you'll know that I went to Sprint to get an Airave in order to boost the cell reception in my apartment. Sprint licensed Samsung's femtocell technology ("femto" being a prefix that is smaller than "micro", indicating a small area of coverage for personal use) which effectively creates a small cellular node in a residence or office. It supports up to 3 phones and Sprint also has plans available for unlimited long-distance calling and such, as the device is basically a PCS-to-VOIP converter. I have finally had enough of not being able to have reliable reception at home and having to go outside just to take calls which still may end up being dropped. Now that I'm doing the consulting thing, I need to have the confidence that my calls will not be dropped in the middle of conversations. As of this writing my Pre is now sitting at a full 5 bars of reception since installation of the device. It looks like it doesn't assist with my EVDO reception, though, so I may still end up switching on the wi-fi while at home in order to interact with the online world via the Pre.

This device is a bittersweet option for resolution, however. Sprint's charging $99 for this little beauty plus a $5/month service charge, most likely to recoup their original cost for the device. I've been doing some research over the last week and the cheapest I've found cell signal boosters for - even on eBay - has been $154 dollars, with most coming in well above the $250 mark. I can't figure out why they're so expensive. As it turns out, I'm basically just amortizing the cost through Sprint that I would pay up front by buying a booster somewhere else. As my man Sammy Hagar once sang, "They gotcha comin' in, they gotcha goin' out, same amount, in 'n out."

I'm reading that some people are getting the devices and/or the service for free via the Sprint Retentions department (the people responsible for keeping existing customers). My problem is that I'm totally boned in that respect because my contract got reset when I bought the Pre in order to get the paltry $75 discount that they were offering. So I can call Retentions, but I'm not sure what good it will do because they know that I can't go anywhere for the next two years and I don't think I have any bargaining chips. All I can do is say that I'm irritated with the service and say that I'm going to bad-mouth Sprint and Palm all day long, and maybe contact the BBB, but I doubt that will sway a big, soulless company like Sprint. They've got my money and they're going to keep getting it for the next two years because I'm not going to spend even more money to get out of the contract.

Thus, I'm really hoping that this Airave thing will give me enough cellular use out of the Pre so that I can not think about getting screwed over. And, hopefully, Palm will get off their buttcheeks and release a software update that will actually effectively manage the cellular antenna so that I can cancel the Airave service and not have to use it anymore.

This is the price of early adoption, technolust, and my indentured servitude to same.

The first contract is in the bag, and overall I think that it went pretty well. I was able to go from knowing nothing about the application to having it running in two days, and was then able to add the customizations and finish up the documentation in another day and a half. It was a simple project, but it required some experience that the client didn't have and it allowed me to ease myself back into the software development world in a nice, orderly fashion. You know, to be honest, this contract was kind of what I thought that my Level 3 job at IBM was supposed to be like - fixing a few bugs here and there or getting something to run properly, but also mainly customizing the application for customers to add features or make something work specifically for them. We did a little bit of that at IBM (sometimes on a very large scale for a single large customer), but for the most part it was always about getting things to just run as advertised and nothing more.

Now that the contract is done, I'm back to "livin' the dream": getting up late, going swimming when nobody else is at the pool, catching up on reading and television, and just generally enjoying the unemployed life. Ideally, I'd be either back to scouring the job boards full time or pushing my fixers at RHT to find me another contract, but since I've got the mission trip to Galveston coming up at the end of next week, I don't really want to take anything until I'm done with that. I guess that means that I'm currently "benched", to use the parlance of the industry in which I now find myself. This is a good thing, though - it will allow me to concentrate on the Life On Loan show coming up THIS FRIDAY and will also give me time to prepare for the Galveston trip and help out with that (seeing as I am the YSA Intern at GHBC, after all). I kind of hope that I can keep up this short term contract work followed by short bench breaks for a little while because I think it would really serve to keep my stress level at a manageable mark as well as keep enough money coming in for me to satisfy my financial obligations (having no debt is a nice place in which to be).

Plus, it gives me more time to practice using the Toypedo so I can display my deadly accuracy at the next pool party I attend. Gotta have priorities in life, man.

It's been a long time coming, but I think that it is finally the hour to commit to print my reasons for being one of the five people on this planet that is not on Facebook. Seeing as Mondays are complete crap for television now that 24 and even Heroes are on hiatus, let me just sit back and fill you in on my thought process while Mr. John Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater Revival provide the background music. I scored a copy of "The Long Road Home - the Ultimate John Fogerty/Creedence Collection" from Amazon for $2.99 the other day, so I'm feeling mellow and groovin' right along to the solid sounds of the bayou.

But enough stalling. Without further ado, here's why (in no particular order) I do not have a Facebook account, nor will I unless forced to do so under penalty of death or as a requirement for a job paying a minimum of six figures.

• I'm a control freak. I maintain my own webserver in my apartment and I have chosen to do so because I can have total control over the software that runs my blog and what goes on that machine. That machine isn't shared by any other users, and if I decide that I want to add something to the server - like Google Analytics, for example - I can do so without having to check for permission or fiddle around with somebody else's poorly written "one size fits all" code. Of course this means more responsibility for maintenance and security on my part(as was evidenced by the downtime experienced when my server went kaput), but in the long run the maintenance has been fairly minimal. Plus, I'm a geek and so my inner geek respects the rest of me more because I run my own server and host my own blog.
• I'm not a shutterbug. I don't take a lot of pictures, nor do I mess around with tagging individuals in the pictures that I do take. I'm also not that concerned with what pictures I'm in that were taken by whom...the pictures are already out there and I'm not arrogant enough to think that I could ever make anyone remove anything that I didn't like. Hey, I did whatever I was doing in the picture when it was taken, so I can't really deny it anyway. Because I already have my own blog, the main reason I can see for facebook is to pass photos around and since I've already stated my indifference to photography, Flickr does just fine by me. AND my pictures are viewable by everybody, so you don't have to be part of some special club to see them.
• I have enough drama in my life. This one is more of a minor point in the grand scheme of things, but it is a factor I will not deny. I have enough trouble keeping up with the blogs I follow already, nevermind adding in a whole plethora of blogs/walls from every friend I've ever known to keep up with. While I'm narcissistic enough to think that people are interested in my up-to-the-minute status when I deign to post it (via Twitter or whatever IM program I'm using), I don't really have time to keep up with everyone else's status. I think we've all heard the horror stories of people accidentally forgetting to set a relationship status and being deluged minutes (yea, seconds) later with questions of, "Ooooh! Does this mean that you and Janey BROKE UP?" Even unemployed I've got too much drama going on in my life to worry about crap like that.
• There's a reason I didn't keep up with people from high school. Like a typical guy, I have a few really good friends, a pretty good smattering of friends, and a lot of acquaintances - and then there's everybody else. I've pretty much made an effort to contact the people I'm interested in contacting and keeping in contact with and I just don't really care about everyone else. It sounds ridiculously calloused, I'm sure, but I figure that if I was really interested in being friends with someone and they were important to me, I would have been in touch with them by now. Stages in life happen, and if I don't keep up with everyone from every one of them that I've gone through, well...I'm okay with that. Besides, there are some people out there that I don't want to make it easy to find me for, and so if they're going to make an effort they're going to have to use Google, for cryin' out loud.
• I'm not a cookie cutter person. Now before you go flipping out on me and get all offended, I have nothing against anyone who has a facebook page and spends copious amounts of time fiddling around with it. Plenty of people have (I'm sure) great facebook pages and I don't think any less of someone for using facebook rather than anything else. All I'm saying is that I want you to read the first point in this list, and then realize that I feel driven to express myself as much as possible, which means that I like solutions that can be completely customized if I so choose. As much customization as facebook may have in the templates, at some basic level there are certain restrictions that facebook imposes which have a common denominator for every page. MySpace has the same issue. Changing the fonts and background image does not a unique page make and I feel that I can't be as free with my ideas of what I want the BrainDrain to be if I limit myself to someone else's framework. Sure I'm using MovableType as an engine for the blog now, but if I really want to get in there and monkey with the perl modules, the CSS, flash widgets, whatever, I can totally do that if I put my mind to it. Have I? Barely. But I could, and that's more important to me.
• When Facebook gets superseded by The Next Big Thing (TM), I don't want to have one more piece of web detritus to manage or try to contain. Let's face it, facebook is currently the bee's knees for most people but that probably won't be the case forever. Something else is waiting in the wings to explode onto the scene and when it does, facebook will become the virtual graveyard that MySpace already has become and that Orkut and Friendster were years before that. Many people have abandoned MySpace profiles just sort of hanging out there that they never check and I, for one, don't want to have a trail of virtual corpses littering my path through the internet. The BrainDrain has been updated a few times, but for the most part it is a living thing that has evolved with me and will continue to be my oratorical platform of choice. Plus, I don't want to have my blogging history strewn across multiple sites; the BrainDrain was started in 2004 and is still going strong, and every post I've ever written can be searched and accessed. Users don't have to jump from site to site to see where I've been. If someone is really bored, they can start from the beginning and chart my personal growth through five years of blog posts. Can your social networking site deliver that at the moment?
• I want people to come to me, not just randomly be reminded of me as they glance down a "friends" list. This will be the most hubris that I exhibit in this post, but I want people to have to come search for me to see what I have to say. I (sometimes) put a lot of thought into my posts and generally want to express my ideas, and I labor under the notion that those who read my posts regularly are interested in what I have to say and that they find my words entertaining at the very least. I don't really want to be the "I'm bored, let's see what.....oh, hey, Drew....is up to" (although I'm sure that has happened for some of my readers more than a few times). I think I tend to enjoy the community engendered by some blogs with a small (but dedicated) readership rather than posts that are accessible to any Tom (is not my friend), Dick, and Harry to read. Sure my blog is out there available to anyone who wants to read it, but they kind of have to look for it first. Whether one of my posts gets linked to another offsite post via a TrackBack, or the person knows me and wants to find out more information, I want them to come looking for something specific and maybe find something else of interest once they arrive. Think of the 'Drain as a local mom & pop store that all the locals know and like to frequent versus the corporate one-stop-shop for generic items that is Wal-Mart. Like I said, hubris. But that's why I have this blog.

So there you have it. Those are probably the most prevalent reasons for my aversion to facebook. I debated whether or not to enable comments on this post, specifically because I don't really want to deal with all the facebook zealots trying to convert me or tell me why my perceptions of certain points are wrong or errant. I've heard it all before and unless you can prove to me that I will get a million dollars the moment I sign up for a FB account, your missives will go unheeded. In fact, if you get too lippy, you can be sure that your comments will just fade into the ether. There goes that control thing again...but that's why I have my own blog. On the 'Drain, the Drew giveth and the Drew taketh away.

I'll leave facebook to all those of you people who love it and have time for it while I repair to the top of Curmudgeon Crag and blithely post my thoughts for whoever will listen to the crazy old hermit who only comes into town a few times a month to yell at small children and haggle over the price of fruit at the market.

I've had my Pre for nearly two weeks now, and so I figured that it was time to give another review of the overall experience now that some of the immediate, out-of-the-box sexy factor has worn off. Don't worry, I'm not all blase' about it yet, I've just had some time to use it and allow it to take over the role that was previously held down by the Centro.

Overall, I really like the device as a whole. The app store is coming along, and hopefully soon there will be a lot more useful applications to put on the phone that don't necessarily require internet access (for those dead zones like interior bathrooms in office buildings where no cell signal can survive). I love the gesturing and the touch screen, and the apps are pretty well laid out and thought out in how they interact. The flippable web browser is everything I've dreamed it could be. I'm totally in love with Tweed, and looking forward to giving Spaz a try in a bit.

I've pretty much come to grips with all the idiosyncrasies of the thing except for one - the dismal,abysmal, and just downright terrible cellular reception of my phone. It seems like the antenna is just woefully underpowered and unable to maintain a solid signal in any location other than a completely unobstructed outside setting. I've been complaining that this new apartment is terrible for Sprint reception ever since I moved in, but now I literally have to go outside on my porch to take calls and even then there's no guarantee that they won't be dropped. I'm finding the reception to be as equally terrible inside office buildings (I got one bar inside the client site this week) and restaurants (my reception yo-yo'd up and down the spectrum while in Pluckers). I'm finding the phone alerting me of voice mails for calls that never came in, text messages that show up hours or days late, and an overall inability to maintain connection to any online services without wifi being enabled.

It is really, really frustrating to have a device which performs the way I want it to in just about every other way fail at performing the single most important and basic function for which it was designed. I want a communications device and this one seems pretty incapable of doing that reliably unless I'm able to use a wifi connection (and that means that I pretty much have to keep the phone plugged in while it's on because the wifi connection can drain the Pre battery in less than a day). The Pre is just like the little girl with a curl from the old nursery rhyme:

"There was a little girl,
With a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very, very good;
But when she was bad,
She was horrid."

There was a WebOS update released this weekend (Palm WebOS 1.0.3) that had some minor fixes in it but none of which seemed to be related to the reception or antenna quality. Note to Palm: Please, please, please fix this soon. I want to love this phone completely. I want to give myself over to it and commit to the long and happy relationship that I know we're both dying to have. But I can't do that if we can't communicate, and so I need your help. Please fix the reception problems! Help me help you by being able to give the Pre all the warm fuzzy reviews that I possibly can...and mean them!

I'm not alone here. Gizmodo posed the "how good is your Palm Pre signal?" question a few days ago and out of 4100 responses to the survey at the bottom, 41% of them (1666) at the time of this writing list their signal as poor. If you look at the picture of the Pre in the article, my reception bar looks like that on a good day at home.

...as the MT-Twitter plugin works on the post to complain about it not working. It seems that it only works if I save the entry from the main composition screen as opposed to the entry preview screen.

D'oh! Feh.