Anyway, when I wasn’t breaking my new cell phone, we had a lot of fun, enjoyed some great Celtic Music and drank a lot of Texas Pecan Coffee amongst other things.

Thanks everyone for coming.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid29266405001?bctid=68172270001

I have learned that I suck at Diplomacy.  The game that is and pretty much at the real life thing too.  I really need to work at the negotiation thing.  That game is a lot of  fun, but gawd.  My ld issues really become issues where it comes to knowing who to trust and who is outright lying to you.  Vital in that game.  I never realized how much that game was a Roleplaying game.  You only think it’s a board game.  It’s not, that board is there only for your convenience.  That game is 99% RP.  I must play this more, it’s good therapy.

The LARPs were great.  I was too Larped out for the Sunday Paranoia LARP.  I’ve never made one, I’ve always wanted to do one, but alas, I was doing good to stay awake for the AD&D game.  Yea, a real live AD&D 2nd ed. game.  For real!  I haven’t played that in years.  Anyway, the cthulu LARP lasted until 4am.  I lasted through the whole game without dying, but went stark raving mad.  It was a good madness though.  I have video from the Serenity LARP, it was fun too, but could have used more action.  I’ll process the video when I get time, possibly this week and post it up on youtube.    I have to do some work on my own larp this week.  I’ve made a lot of observations on how everyone runs their larps and now I am getting a good idea on how I’m going to work out the system for mine.  It needs to be more actual skill based and not so reeve/keeper/ST heavy.  LARPing should not be just table top gaming standing up and with costumes.   It needs to involve actual physical skills.  But I need this to be held in a hotel, so I need to curtail the physical action to some extent.   Much to be done.  I am still also waiting on more information from the concom about the hotel.  This needs to be finalized.  I need to do a trip to the hotel and get this worked out and finalized so I can plan decorations, and plot space.  I need to get the props worked on too.  Much to be done. Email isn’t hacking it on this.  Must make real phone calls.  Ok, I’ll stop thinking out loud… lol

I am waiting on a friend that is in the middle of a game now.  I have a LARP I will be in at 1500.  His game stops at 1400, that will make a short lunch.

It’s a good phone.  Nice, sleek, smaller than I thought it would be and it fits in my pocket pretty well.  When I ordered the phone I decided I would buy the accessories later.  Sprint charges a lot for accessories and I wanted to get a good look at it before I bought anything that would turn out to be redundant, and I was right, if I had bought that car charger, that would have been an extra $33 that I wouldn’t have had to spend.  The Hero uses a usb cable to do everything including charging so if you have a usb plug in your car already as I do, you don’t need a car phone charger.  Just plug it in.  Nice, I like that kind of versatility.  It comes also with an SD Card.  This card has software on it for syncing etc.  I pulled that out not knowing that fact and put in my old SD Card.  However, but I put the new card into an adapter and got the software just fine on the laptop.  No problems there.

The screen is pretty easy to figure out.  However,  I did have a problem with figuring out how to configure it.  There are options, like “scenes” but I have yet to figure out how to change the clock from the retro clicky flap over clock to one of those cool analogs in some of the alternate “scenes”.  It should be there somewhere, I still need to play with this thing.  Maybe I will make a cool steampunk themed scene… fun to be had.

It never ceases to amaze me how we can make so many “innovations” to the smart phone and yet, take old “innovations” away that I liked.  I can’t help but compare this phone to my old tried and true little hand held computer I bought back around 2004.  My HP iPaq 3715 Multimedia Companion.  Ok, the iPaq isn’t a smart phone.  But dang it, I can and still can use Skype on it with wifi b, if I can find wifi b anywhere anymore and it’s a full version of Skype that you can use as a full fledged phone not the broken version that the phone companies are so afraid of.  I am spoiled.  I like being able to “write” on my iPaq.  You can’t “write” on the Hero.  No new smartphones that I know of have that anymore do to what I’ve heard is a result of a patent troll dispute over patenting “writing”.  I miss the ease of a stylus.  I have read that Koren kids are using sausages as styluses on their smartphones. I would rather not mess up my own phone with sausage juice but having a finger like stylus to get those little screen buttons would be easier and faster than a chicklet keyboard of a blackberry or the touch screen of this phone. There is a lot of great tech out there that is marching around in patent limbo because some greedy guy in his garage owns the patent and wants a gazzilion dollars for each and every license.  You would think they would realize that if you sit on a patent and you don’t license it out, you don’t make money, but I’m not a business person so what do I know.

The phone is pretty, even if you can’t write on it, but I digress.  It is good that it is so intimately connected with Google, because that leaves open a lot of ways to cheat fate and get around corporate habits of charging for things that are actually free and open to the public.  One big one is the backing up of your phone book online.  It turns out that if you take your old phone book on your old phone and copy it over to your SD card or use your phone as a usb drive like my old one could be used as, you can keep your old phone book backed up just fine.  Never pay for a service you can do yourself for free and be just as secure as a pay “service”.  Google made their android platform to sync with your google account.  I was lamenting that this new phone couldn’t recognize the old phone book address list.  I had put the old SD card from my old phone into my new phone and yea, it found all my pictures and music and stuff, but not the phone book.  That sucked, I have over 200 phone contacts I don’t want to lose.    However, not to be discouraged, I hooked up the phone to the computer through the usb cable and started going through all my twisty subdirectories all alike.  I found it, my old backups, or should I say, new backups of my old phone I made yesterday before I wiped it clean.  It was in the format of a vcf file.  All I had to do was copy it over to the computer, import it to my gmail contact list and then sync the phone.  I had all my old phone book contacts!  Yea!  I cheated fate.  Praise Ada.   My contacts are all now floating up in the google cloud, not to be lost except to the random vicious hacker.

So my new phone has no IR port, I can’t hack restaurant TV’s with it.  Oh well.  I still have the trusty old iPaq for that.  hahah.

I have yet to explore to my content the oodles of apps out there.  I love free apps.  I can always find a free app out there to do the same thing a pay app can do.  I know, I am cheep.  That’s why I like open formats.  I do donate to these causes, really.  I always say, by the best you can afford when it comes to electronics of any kind.  I have not much money, I’m a civil servant.   We don’t make much money.  So I am used to that.  However, I have oddles of apps on the iPaq, Windows Mobile 2003 has been pretty much forgotten by the main stream, but there are still a lot of good apps being written for it by diehards who live for this sort of old tech.  Kind of like OS/2 fans, they are there… hiding in the back ground still playing with their old DRM free stuff all written back in good ol’ days of when geeky devices were only known to geeks and kept by geeks and geeks were real geeks…

I have a lot more to say about the Hero.  I just haven’t had yet enough fun playing with it yet.  More to come.

This is the “manifesto” written by the guy who flew a plane into a building in Austin yesterday.  Go ahead and read it.  There are a lot of people out there who probably feel this guy’s pain.

Check out who is top recommended commenter here.   I have often argued with my friends on this issue.  For Profit Insurance is the elephant in the room of health costs.   You can have insurance all you want so long as they don’t profit from our misery.