My birthday

The more important things are, the more likely I am to talk about them well after the fact. As an illustration, my previous post about bat removers was filed within 24 hours and now I am about to describe my birthday from over a month ago.

Just wanted to show my nice little cake and the documentation of the sweet hockey game to which I was treated. Look how great both look! Sharks beat the Kings! The cake had ice cream inside! Woo hoo! I'm old! Thank you, Neelu, for both of these treats. Also, thanks to Micah for the Magic Online packs! Yow! A power-packed birthday to be sure.

Someone help me with these bats! Bats I say!

Saw a truck on the highway yesterday. On the tailgate it said "Bat problem?" with an 800 number. When I got along side of it, I could see the truck was from "Western Bat Specialists". So cool. I honestly didn't know that bats were a problem in California. Now I realize that is a testament to the way bat removal specialists take care of business.

Before I realized that these bat specialists were real, I thought it would be cool to advertise my own pest removal service for animals that no one will ever see. Perhaps penguin removal or wolverine abatement. Stencil "Wolverine Problems?" on my truck, get an 800 number and, BLAM, instant awesome business. The more I think about it, the better it sounds.

AM Radio

While driving in the Bay Area late this morning, I thought I'd spin through the AM stations. Normally I just have KCBS ready on the AM dial for my "Traffic and Weather together every 10 minutes". I came across a national talk radio station advertising an upcoming special they are going to have on the "Global Warming Myth". The guy told me (and, I suppose, everyone else listening) that this wasn't going to be a balanced report, because we already hear too much of the "propaganda" of the left. They also let me know that this was their second investigative report following the wildly successful piece on Muslim Extremists. Indeed.

This is about when I thought it would be good to cruise the dial a little. Next up was Dennis Miller. I remember liking him as a teenager watching SNL, but had heard he was a full on "loyal Bushie" now. Odd. Anyway, he had a guest on to discuss how lopsided the "debate" on Global Warming was and how so many network news stories on the subject don't even mention alternate points of view. I love when pundits grab onto one piece of information and use it as the most indicative point of the "other side's" position. In this case Dennis Miller must have heard that one thing we could do to help the environment was to use less toilet paper. So now the whole conservation movement is absurd because all those greenies have as a solution is to use one sheet of T.P. per bathroom visit. His guest was saying he didn't think the bad ol' liberals tell everyone the whole story--in particular how they don't discuss the cost of some unnamed initiative, which the pundit put at $400 billion dollars. He also noted that he hadn't decided one way or the other if global warming was real and wanted to debate the topic more. Are you convinced that molecules are real? Are you convinced that laparoscopic surgery is the best option for removal of a gall bladder? Are you convinced that multiple, slower CPU cores are a better option than larger, faster single cores? (I would ask about the Big Bang and evolution, but know better). We live in a world of vast knowledge. So much knowledge, that people can't be experts in many fields like they used to. We allow those who are experts to advise the rest of us who don't have the time to learn about their field. If the vast majority of recognized climatologists say global warming is real and we are accelerating it, I will believe them. And if the cost of profiting off of the exploitation of the environment has forced us into a situation where we need to spend lots of cash to fix it, then so be it.

OK, back to the task at hand: touring the AM dial. I listened to Dennis Miller until my last ounce of respect for him dissipated. I found that there were 4 or 5 Asian language stations and 4 or 5 Spanish language stations (I can't know for certain, but I don't think these stations were spewing right-wing claptrap) to go with 2 news station and 2 sports stations. To round out the trip there were TWO stations with the same Rush Limbaugh broadcast. Yikes. That whole "liberal media" conspiracy that the right has passed off as real was done very well the last 10 years.

Visualizing our consumption

Found this story via a CNET post. It is one of those neat, scary, weird, sad kind of things. Trying to visualize how much we consume as a country is a pretty monumental task. As a mathematician, I would always try to describe things with numbers. The problem is that when numbers get too large, many people have no reference point for them and the numbers become meaningless. That's why people come up with ways to describe things based on how high of a stack they might make or how many times they could circle the earth if put end-to-end. Anyway, Chris Jordan has tried to actually show us what those numbers look like. I mean, 60,000 plastic bags every 5 seconds, sheesh.

A monumental task pulled off quite well. Worth the 30 seconds of computer energy to see (you could, of course, install BOINC for some of those unused computer cycles, but that is another story for another blog entry on another day)....

photo downloaded from Chris Jordan's site, http://www.chrisjordan.com/

Disassembly of a Sharp TM150 cell phone

I have had a Sharp TM150 cell phone for a couple years now. It works well and I haven't had any complaints. But I recently thought, "hey, I don't have no games nowhere on here, nohow." Sometimes it's fun to think in multiple negatives, I highly recommend it.

The whole t-zones thing from T-mobile still somewhat confuses me. When I bought the phone I was under the impression that I could have games, but t-zones won't let me download any. Lame. So I searched for "Sharp TM150 games" and found some sites that would let you download things. The phone has java installed, so these games seem to be .jar archives. The weird, highly disappointing part is that there is no way that I can find to install a game. There is a removable memory card that is handy for moving pictures from the phone to my computer and vice-versa, so it seemed logical that a .jar could be moved likewise. Not gonna happen. Lame.

So the only way to get things installed seems to be to download them. To download them, you have to use some service not run by t-mobile, and it will cost you. But to have access to the Internet you'll need to pay t-mobile an extra monthly fee. Not sounding worth it for a Tetris knock-off I'll use only a couple times a month. Lame.

I would have hoped that the process for installing things on my phone would be more open... a bit naive maybe. So to get a little more to the root of the problem, I cracked the phone open. I wish I could have documented it better with some pictures, but my only camera is actually on my phone. Sorry. My main goal was to kill a half hour and find out what processor is actually in the phone. I achieved the first part, but the second part was a failure. The bottom half of the case (the half with the buttons, as opposed to the half with the screen) opened pretty easily. There are only four screws. You'll need to remove the battery and the little activation card thing that t-mobile supplies. And I think the memory card should be out also. Unfortunately, the processor is located underneath a bunch of casing for the memory card and the charger interface. Couldn't see the chip at all. Oh well.

If I find more info about the phone, I'll be sure to update it here.