After struggling working for the last two weeks on my new iPhone, I’ve decided that I absolutely hate it for it’s marketed primary purpose (which at one point, I believe, was placing and receiving calls).

For listening to music? Hey, it can do that, and it does that quite well, although the battery suffers about double that as it does in standby (god forbid it goes a day without being recharged, it’s almost guaranteed death – even without any applets in the background).
For browsing YouTube, it’s great, if not a little cumbersome.
For browsing the web? It’s a little hinky, but workable.
Placing phone calls? Forget it.

Unless you’re sitting in a stationary place where you can dedicate at least 80% of your attention span to the phone, and have absolutely no ambient noise, you might as well just be shouting into your wallet. The reception is nearly as good, as well as the user experience. If you truly want the iPhone experience, though, you’ll turn the wallet upside down and let the cash fall where it might. Don’t forget to wipe (front to back).

So, here are my top ten four uses for the iPhone, since it sucks at telephony:

1. Playing Solitare City while on the toilet.
2. Watching YouTube clips while on the toilet.
3. Twatting (twittering) or updating your blog on the toilet.
4. Browsing the web on the toilet.
5. Listening to your music collection while at a public toilet as a distraction from your bizarre noises.

I’m sure there are six five other toilet-related activities, but I don’t think I need Trapster on the toilet.

Yeah… I know.

Trust me, I know.

I don’t update this site too much. I am well aware of that; it’s been over eight months. The truth is: Blogs are for people who have something worthwhile to share – or people who think they do. I have no such pretentions. Heck, if I didn’t have to listen to myself, I probably wouldn’t.

As I have ceased all open source software support, and prefer that my relatives (who want me to sign up for Facebook, currently) call me on the phone – this site has become widely disused. I have relatively little use for either Facebook, or at this point in my life, a blog.

Anyhow, I did a dist-upgrade on OpenSUSE from 11.2 to 11.3. It almost worked. Almost. Wireless crapped out before it rebuilt the drivers, and couldn’t insmod what was no longer there. It ended up becoming a mess of loading from the 11.2 CD (keyboard and mouse were broken in X11; minimal command line was basically impossible as I needed to backup to a USB HD, and most libraries were half-installed. I ended up archiving /home, and starting over.

..and it still doesn’t work right. NetworkManager craps itself if you try to sleep – and does not always come back with solid-network hacks. The OpenSUSE ndiswrapper of Adobe Flash 32 bit on 64 is worse than Adobe’s final (and now missing) Linux 64bit release. Otherwise, it’s much the same with slightly newer stuff.

To add to the prior post:

The 2000 is doing well, having rolled over to 172k miles recently, with an average of 30.0 MPG (Damn that hill).

I’ve also picked up a new-to-me toy:

It’s nearly a decade old, but the price was right, and it’s absolutely a thrill to drive. The resale value is well worth what I paid for it, but I don’t think I’ll be getting rid of it any time soon. It has a few very minor things (it’s a convertible, so it’s gonna be a little more creaky and squeaky, but it’s still no 9-5). It’s prior owner made me promise to take care of it, and I could tell she was having second thoughts. SAAB owners are a quirky bunch.

I decided to bite the bullet and get up to date with OpenSUSE 11.2, which, after the issues with 11.0, should show that I still have an occasional ‘redline’ tendency.

I followed the 11.1-11.2 update procedure outlined here, and here’s what I ran into:

• Kernel was updated, but GRUB menu was not. Yay for tab autocomplete.
• Still a few strange module and startup/runtime issues, and incomplete packages by this method.
• It took almost 5 hours, with 10mbit. The network overhead from others installing 11.2 made it annoying, but COME ON.

So far, my impressions:

• The default installation of Firefox 3.5.5 does not work; the default file open dialog returns a nil after the file is chosen, but the 3.6b2 beta on the Build Service works just fine.
• OpenOffice is finally unbroken again with tables created in Word.
• I miss KDE 3.5, but have been able to make 4.3 do most of what I wanted, even if in a roundabout way. I hate the ‘display desktop icons in a folder’ view with 4.3, so I drag an icon from it to my desktop, then moved the rest to other subfolders. I keep my desktop clean, but I like having my files right where I put them. I have yet to integrate my ssh agent, but looks simple enough – just need to stuff in env, and slightly mod my shell scripts. I can probably live with this. (Edit: I can now view the desktop as a ‘folder view’ after repairing KDE’s installation.)
• Intel video is not accelerated by default, and transparencies don’t work even forcing konsole to support them.
• Pulse still sucks, and I don’t like Dolphin as much as Konqueror, but I’ll learn to deal with it.

Overall, 11.2 seems like a pretty solid release.

Update: It’s solid as heck on my Latitude 6500, but on my aging Inspiron 1525, it’s a no-go. The old 3945 works fine, as does the laggy video, but it will NOT work right. I’ve tried a plain 11.2 install – no keyboard with GUI despite various BIOS and X11 settings. Tried falling back to my old 11.1 and upgrading (after the first attempt left me with no zypper). Still, nada. It’s back at 11.1 and will probably sit there until I feel like wrestling with it to get it to work.

When I was young, I had a fascination for raccoons. Thus, my family would always buy me raccoon items. I had several plush raccoons, several wood and resin items, and even pictures.

As a younger child, I obtained my first Intellivision gaming unit from a garage sale. I saved up all of the cans I could find for months, and eventually managed to buy a rather complete unit for about $32. This was maybe 1986.

As I evolved into a computer geek, I saved up over a hundred dollars to obtain a Gravis Ultrasound – not only did it offer 16 bit audio, but hardware mixing. This means you could actually play games and compose music on the-then-standard 20Mhz machine.

In my early 20s, I accumulated G-Body cars; all Oldsmobiles – but I figured I’d eventually get a GN. I never did.

Now, I seem to be collecting SAABs.

SAAB the first, my first (and currently only) new car:

I fell in love with this car. It is such a quirky little thing, but so much fun. I drove it up to Montana in August . Within less than two days, I made it there without so much as a hint of pain; nor a ticket – despite my best efforts.

Well, a year and some months later, I found this beast on Craigslist:

When I first spotted it, the turbo was blown, and it was unusable. It was entirely undrivable. It was just.. trashed, mechanically. Eventually, the price for this carcass went down, and my interest went up.

Despite being 10 years old and having 160,000 now 172,000 miles on it, it’s in brilliant shape inside, and out. I couldn’t say no, and now I have a second car – or as I like to call it, “my soon to be daily driver.” The rebuild is nearly complete, and should hopefully be entirely roadworthy and smoggable in the upcoming weeks. I’ve just ordered more parts, and rebuilt the foglamp assembly on the right side.

Those Oldsmobiles are long lost to the annals of time- each of them were sold for hundreds after thousands invested. I currently have 4 functional Intellivsion units in the garage with several games. Years ago I sent my GUS collection to Trixter, who still hasn’t cataloged and inventoried it for historical purposes. My relatives still sometimes send me raccoons. If I ever have company, I’ll have to disclose this – I don’t think it’s normal for a place to be filled with polyresin and wooden striped critters and pictures.

Woohoo.

Being a merchant who processes online, there are many security implications you need to be aware of. Just passed Type 5 SAQ-D, which is required for anyone who actually stores data for ANY period of time, which differentiates it from a Type 4.

This is one of the most difficult to attain due to the requirements for software auditing, smart coding practices, setting up stateful firewalls, and handling of volatile data. Passed with no issues.