Welcome to My World

In the coming days, I plan to document this arcane process a bit more clearly (though admittedly it didn’t ultimately take all that much fidgeting around to get it working — it turns out that when you assume features labeled “advanced” won’t work because even the basics aren’t working, you are sometimes wrong ), but I made a series of really happy discoveries today regarding my HTC Excalibur (the “T-Mobile Dash” in the United States) and my laptop running Ubuntu 8.04:

• Synchronization now works (calendar, contacts, e-mail, and files) with Evolution on the laptop and the phone’s own native apps
• Network sharing works in both directions
  • If my laptop has a network connection and my phone is connected, the phone can happily share the laptop’s connection
  • If my laptop does not have a network connection and my phone is connected, if I enable the phone’s “Internet Sharing” app (just standard practice here — no special tricks), my laptop can snag an IP address from the phone via DHCP (again, all automatically) and share its connection
• Though it is an absolute pain in the ass (no recursion, and no wildcards), files can also be manually copied from anywhere on the device (storage card, root folder, etc.). Regular file synchronization in the device’s internal memory “My Documents” area works correctly.

Right now, synce-gnomevfs doesn’t seem to work (the damned binaries don’t seem to understand where to find each other):


will@prometheus:~$ synce-in-computer-folder install
Failed to open input file: '${prefix}/share/synce/synce-in-computer-folder.sh'.


(if I can get this piece fixed, it will mean the file browser (Nautilus) will let me skim around in the phone’s filesystem which will help sidestep the command-line “one file at a time” thing)

But this has got to just piss off somebody in Redmond, Washington something fierce — a Windows-based phone is cheerfully talking to and working with a “lowly” Linux box. Nyah, nyah! This was the last thing I “needed” Windows for (though the phone is capable of installing apps on its own, which made that issue much less itchy).

My birthday brought an assortment of happiness this year, and despite my brooding about turning the “big” 30 (yeesh — talk about drama queen … my life is likely less than a third over, and “30” isn’t so big; hell, my voice cracked today as I was singing a song at karaoke, and I was told puberty ended in the teens ) I got all the warm fuzzies I needed given what happened that same week.

Friends and family both conspired to make the event memorable, and they succeeded. Despite that I’m over there all the friggin’ time, they managed to sneak around and snag some gifts for me without my having even a single clue they were doing it. My folks sent a very nice gift as well (it arrived a bit late since apparently the first attempt to buy it saw the merchant claim the beast was “damaged” at the warehouse before it could be shipped).

There was a big, nice leather computer bag (the gadgets and stuff I carry around finally outgrew the one I’d received last year from a former coworker), and within it were two books I’d expressed interest in (paperbacks, both science fiction works) and a gift card to snag some more once I burn through these (heh, not bloody likely anytime soon, as you’ll understand in a moment). The shipment from my parents was a 23-pound monster — the Complete Calvin & Hobbes, a three-tome compilation of every Calvin & Hobbes comic strip ever published.

With gas prices soaring past the $3.50 mark, it’s officially become “only use vehicle when absolutely necessary” time. Thanks to the generous loaning of a bicycle by a friend of mine, I’ve been enjoying a newfound enthusiasm for bicycling these past two weeks. Naturally, since I’m a bit of a geek, I had to “geek out” on the bike a little bit, and since I was going to be bicycling around at night on the trips home, a couple bits of safety equipment were needed. And nobody with a brain rides around without a bike lock these days either.

It’s actually transformed into a rather silly but remarkably effective means of transportation. The headlight (steady only) and taillight (steady or blinking in various patterns) both cost under $8 each and run on standard battery sizes (4 AA for the headlight and 2 AAA for the taillight), and both units cheerfully accept rechargeable batteries. They run seemingly forever on a charge, too, though I’ve played it safe and recharged them all at least once a week so far. The U-shaped bike lock was also pretty cheap, and so was the little computer I added to the handlebar — it shows stuff like current speed, average speed, elapsed time, distance, calories & fat burned, and so on.

Because a friend of mine was out of town last Friday, we all decided to skip celebrating my birthday until she returned so we could all be involved. I’m glad we did that.

Between last week’s general suckitude (some bad news mixed with the expensive truck repairs) and my lack of excitement of rolling the Willfe odometer to 30, it turns out it was a fabulous week not to celebrate my birthday

This afternoon my friends took me to dinner. There were jokes about a repeat of last year’s R.J. Gator cream pie to the face debacle (though in that picture they took of my gibbered face, my buddy in the background had an absolutely devilish grin on her face that made the whole thing worth it ), but mercifully we just went to a cozy dinner at a tasty local restaurant (Longdogger’s, if anyone’s curious).

Then, later on at their place as we ate some chocolate cake, they spontaneously busted out in song and plopped a brand new (very, very nice) laptop bag on my lap. Within were a pair of books I’ve been itching to read (including Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon … yes, I hang my head in shame for being a geek/nerd who hasn’t read any of his stuff yet) and a gift card to snag the next book in the series started by the other book I was given today. The card was spiffy, too. Dirty socks rock!

The new laptop bag is all leather, well padded, and expandable (like an accordion of sorts), and is a perfect fit for my laptop. It’s “quieter” than the Targus bag it replaces, and it strikes me that this thing will hold up very nicely in the coming years. Lots and lots and lots of pockets, yet somehow it stays small. I love it

My thanks to my buddies for such a spiffy and thoughtful set of gifts, the tasty dinners (we sneaked one in Friday while S was away), and tonight’s yummy dessert

I am pleased to report the Dead Hardware Parade has come to an end with the arrival of a replacement (and functional) 500GB Western Digital disk. My desktop now has two 750GB disks in it, with the 500GB disk attached externally, for a total of a whopping 2TB of storage space! Woohoo! Naturally this fails to impress any real geek who works in a data center with attached storage devices (these days a single hardware RAID5 enclosure with just 12 disks could push past the 1 petabyte range), but it makes me happy

Some kudos are in order for the people involved in this:

• Canon gets major marks for (very quickly) replacing my PowerShot A570 IS when it acted up in February. Not only did they send me a new camera to replace it, but they seem to have loaded it with newer firmware (I don’t have the old camera anymore so I can’t actually check ), since the little bugger feels faster and is definitely taking better pictures than the old one was.
• Seagate and Western Digital both score high marks for quickly (and without a fuss) replacing the bad hard drives I sent to them. They could have scored higher by paying for shipping both ways, but “customer pays to send to us, we pay to send it back” is fairly standard practice in this industry, so no biggie.
• HP gets a begrudging “thanks” for finally sending a replacement power supply for my notebook free of charge. It is clear they use offshore tech support personnel, as there is a very frustrating communication barrier when dealing with their support group. It took several e-mail exchanges over the course of three weeks to finally get them to actually send the right replacement part; initially they wanted me to ship the whole notebook in.

All told, it took two months to get everything fixed (replaced, really), but it is done. Huzzah!

Just a short one today. Two days ahead of schedule, the replacement power supply for my notebook arrived; now it’s as good as new again! This one doesn’t short out and stop working at random intervals Huzzah!

Now I’m just waiting for one final piece to arrive, and then the Dead Hardware Parade is over: the 500GB Western Digital disk that died shipped back to Western Digital on Saturday. UPS’ tracker (WD had competitive pricing on shipping costs, so I used their “preferred” shipper instead of DHL since they could generate (for me to print) a custom shipping label that included the RMA number and other control labeling) still hasn’t picked up the actual package (it still just says “Billing Information Received”) but I’m assuming that’s because there weren’t any Saturday pickups at the dropoff spot where I took the drive. It should get picked up today. This one’s going all the way across the country to California, so it’s got a long trek ahead of it.

Meanwhile, the notebook happily slurps power from its new power supply

I’m not generally fond of publicly talking about my finances. As I skim through the Google Reader some evenings and come across the various Personal Finance blogs on pfblogs.org I’m sometimes stunned with how open some people are about their money problems (or successes).

It always struck me as something that’s better kept private — if you reveal to the world that you’re wealthy (or that you’ve got a nest egg of any decent size), someone will do their damnedest to beg, borrow, or steal as much of it from you as they can. If you tell the whole world you’re broke, an entirely different class of scumbag will crawl out of the woodwork to try to take advantage of you when you’re weak.

I’m going to make a small exception today to my normal rule of “don’t talk about your financial situation” to describe something my new(ish) credit union set up for me this past week that’s really got me chuckling. I’m not chuckling at them, because they’re not losing money in this endeavor. I’m not chuckling at the other bank involved, because they’re undoubtedly making money on the deposit as well. I’m certainly not laughing at myself, since even I am not losing money in this. What makes me laugh, then? Unless I’m missing something subtle (or obvious — it’s happened before), this is one of those rare situations where everyone involved actually wins.

Okay, I think this time the right buttons got mashed and the right people got nudged over at HP, since I received an actual order number in a confirmation e-mail from HP. Just as before, when I requested some replacement rubber feet for this laptop, they have opted to ship this replacement part via friggin’ *next day air* … at least this time the part is valued in the double-digits Before, they honestly did ship me a nickel’s worth of rubber and adhesive via FedEx Next Day service. Absolutely nuts. But I’m not bitching — it’s been nearly three weeks since I first reported the issue to them and I’d like to have a reliable power supply for this poor beast.

My day began with momentary grumpiness as I was awakened by the sound of somebody banging on my door. My annoyance quickly subsided when I realized “ooh! That’s going to be the new 750GB disk!” Sure enough, a UPS minion stood proudly at my doorstep bearing a box-shaped gift, and within (no signature required, which I thought was kinda odd) was a shiny “new” (read: “certified refurbished”) 750GB disk.

Since I was up a couple hours early, I decided “ah, what the hell, I’ll try this whole thing and if it doesn’t work I can look up why this afternoon.”

Color me stunned — it actually took less time than anticipated to get the data copied over, it took fewer steps, and the new disk booted right away, no questions asked. It all worked on the first try! The weird part? I didn’t even have to update LILO!

Last Thursday, I continued the dance of the Dead Hardware Parade by shipping off the ailing 750GB Seagate disk to its warranty service center in Texas. I shipped the drive via DHL ground, which cost me $6.25 (including the insurance). It was supposed to get there this coming Thursday (that is, two more days from now). It actually arrived yesterday … woohoo!

Before I could get too excited about the (very) early delivery of the drive back to Seagate, I noticed another dose of good news — Seagate had already checked it out and sent me a refurbished replacement drive. It’s due here Friday! That’s pretty damned good turnaround time for a warranty replacement like this. They’ve beaten Canon’s response time, which was adequate to me.

In preparation for the drive’s arrival, I’ve been researching (just to make sure) how to actually get my 80GB factory drive (it came with the Dell) transferred non-destructively to the new 750GB disk. Running Linux, and using the XFS filesystem, happened to be a good choice here. It makes life really simple: