12:53 PM
I haven't been to Disneyland in almost two weeks, and I'm starting to go a little crazy. I just didn't have the energy to go last Friday after work.
Eric Robison's new 100 Mickeys exhibit just opened up last week in the Disney Gallery and I'm anxious to sneak a peek! Actually, I'm really looking forward to playing with the new 'print on demand' kiosks they've got set up there. I hope they're offering more than just the 100 Mickeys for printing, 'cause I would really like to have a Peoplemover attraction poster.
Also, March 1st is the day that the second pin of the annual passholder dining pin series is released. I'm not much of a pin collector, but I've already got the first pin from this limited-edition series, so I might as well get 'em all!
Tammy and I will stop by for lunch on Saturday afternoon and we will get our fix!
9:45 PM
I think alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.brazilian is my new favorite newsgroup. People post some truly great out-of-print vinyl albums up there every now and again (a.b.s.m.jazz is another good one.) TWO THUMBS UP!
5:11 PM
Scroll down to the news posting for 22/02/2002 at this site. It looks like there's finally going to be some competition in the world of Game Boy Advance flash cartridges.
The best part? The new flash linker is USB powered. No more slow parallel port/separate power adapter nonsense!
2:00 PM
Tammy and I went looking for places to live yesterday.
We had initally considered renting an apartment, but everybody's been telling us what a waste of money renting is, and we had to agree. So now we're looking to buy a condo, townhome, or maybe even a small house.
We found an ideal freestanding two-story condo in Redondo Beach, but it's about $100k out of our price range. It's in a beautiful development, and all four of the available models are very well designed. I could see us starting our life there, but it's just not going to happen.
I always thought we made decent money, but our combined income isn't enough to qualify for the amount of money that we would need to borrow to get it. Pretty depressing. Even worse is that both of our employers haven't given raises to anybody in a long, long time.
We'll just have to keep looking, even if it means living where we might not want to be.
If you would like to contribute to the Brett and Tammy Down-Payment Relief Fund, you should contact me as soon as possible.
10:18 AM
I found a cool site this weekend- Video Game Ringtones. All of the ringtones are in the RTTTL format, but just click the 'FAQ' link to learn how to convert the tones to work with your particular brand of phone.
10:39 PM
My highest score in Windows XP's Spider Solitaire (single suit) is 1200. I think that may be a perfect score, but I'm not sure. If you've gotten more than 1200, let me know.
12:15 PM
My scooter's alignment was off so I fixed it today. Dave lent me a wrench and I was able to tighten things up. That did the trick! Now it's straight as an arrow, and it's nowhere near as loose as it was before.
My scooter is one of those Razor knock-offs, not some motorized dealie. I keep it in my trunk at night, and I ride it from the parking lot to the front door of the office in the morning. I also ride it from my office to the bathroom and soda machine to maximize my office productivity! Sometimes I take the elevator and scoot around the spacious second floor, but that gets tiring pretty quickly.
Sometimes I make screeching sound effects when I come around corners like "ERRRRR!!!!", but it's not very convincing when you're driving on carpet.
8:37 PM
There is secret stuff out there that wireless phone companies don't want you to know about! Today I reveal one such secret!
I just got a cellphone. I've never had one before, but I found a pre-paid deal that basically gives you a phone, 3 months of free service, and $5 for your trouble. All that with no contract! How could I turn that down?
So anyway, the phone came yesterday and I activated it last night. It seems like a pretty good deal, but the custom ringtone situation is crap.
AT&T wants to charge people $0.99 per song to purchase ringtones through their website. Absolutely ridiculous.
I did some research, and apparently Nokia has developed a messaging format that allows service providers to send special commands to your phone via SMS. (Luckily this pre-paid phone comes with unlimited incoming text messages, or all of my testing would have cost me big time!)
If everybody knew about these codes, the wireless service providers would lose money on all those ringtones they're selling, and Nokia would be in hot water with all of them! So! It is up to average Joes like you and me to figure out what's going on.
When you buy a ringtone from AT&T's website (or anyone else's,) they're actually sending a short SMS text message to your phone. The difference is that this message is encoded and prefixed by //SCKL. When the phone sees that //SCKL header, it says "AH-HAH! This is not a normal text message. This is probably a ringtone or a phone company logo for me to display. I will not display it as a text message, but I will treat it specially." The phone then looks at the rest of the message to see what it just received. If it's a ringtone, the screen will say "Ringtone received!" and it'll let you listen to it, save it, whatever.
Most of the free ringtones that you find online appear in RTTTL (aka: Nokring) formats. I can't speak for all phones, but my Nokia 5165 needs to receive ringtones in "Nokia Binary" format. I believe most recent Nokias can handle this format as well.
Sooo...how do you convert RTTTL ringtones to Nokia Binary? You can actually use this free web-based tool to convert between several different formats: http://cellphones.about.com/library/bl_rc.htm.
Once I've got the binary conversion, I send an email to my phone that basically looks like this:
To: 310xxxyyyy@mobile.att.net
Subject: Body:
//SCKL1581 024A3A5505519585B40400...
The body of the message has to be one complete line, with no blank lines above or below it. There is one space separating the command code from the data package.
"1581" after the SCKL indicates that this is a ringtone. Everything else is the ringtone itself (the title's encoded in there too.)
That's the format for a relatively short ringtone. However, there is a limit on the size of any SMS message that you can send. If the ringtone that you want is too large to fit, it needs to be broken up into several smaller messages. In that case, the messages will be formatted differently:
Notice that the SCKL1581 is still there, but it is now accompanied by a string ending in 301, 302, and 303. That's to indicate message #1 of 3, 2 of 3, or 3 of 3. There's also still one space in the entire string, but its been pushed to the right a little to make room for the multipart data.
You won't receive notification of a new ringtone until all of the parts of a multipart message arrive on your phone.
OKAY! Now you are empowered! You can stick it to the man and get your ringtones for free! BOOYAH!
3:50 PM
Tammy hasn't called me back yet today. I've left messages, but I guess she's in a big meeting or something. I had a funny poop joke to tell her, but I forgot it now.
It's referencing a missing CSS file, so it takes you to the 404 page which also uses the missing CSS file, so it forwards you back to the not-there CSS, and the whole thing repeats itself over and over. Stare at the status bar and watch as the pages reload faster than the eye can see.
If LinkPoint ever checks their server logs, they will realize that they are dumb.
11:41 AM
I drive two hours each day on LA freeways. One hour into LA, and another out. I'm sort of lucky because the 110 freeway really doesn't have a lot of traffic south of downtown, so I'm always moving.
In the mornings I listen to Jamie White and Danny Bonaduce on 98.7. On the way home I catch the tail end of NPR's All Things Considered and the first half of Marketplace on KPCC, 89.3.
They are good shows, but they're very different. Jamie and Danny are cuh-razy. David Broncochio and John Rabe are a pretty sharp contrast to all that galavanting. Sometimes I listen to CDs, but not often. All of my CDs are really old and stale now. I download all of my new music and I never get around to burning any of it onto CDs, so I have to rely on radio for companionship. By and large, I really don't like the radio. Those shows keep my mind off the drive though, so that's good.
Driving anywhere on a regular basis can do strange things to the way you perceive the world. Sometimes I'll be pulling out of the driveway at home, then all of a sudden I notice "Hey, I'm on the freeway. When did this happen?" It's like I put myself on autopilot. I hope someday I don't find myself saying "Hey, I'm standing in the middle of the street with my pants down around my ankles and my car is gone! When did this happen?"
5:08 PM
I rented Final Fantasy X from Red Octane and played it a little yesterday. It's a beautiful, beautiful game. I haven't played it too much just yet, but it looks like those stupid random battles have actually decreased in number. I think.
The voice acting is crap, but not many console games have been able to pull that off. Every conversation has a long pause between lines.
COMPUTER VOICE ACTORS here is a tip: It is ok to talk fast.
2:32 PM
I'm waiting for my bottle of Centrum to run out so that I can crack open the bottle of Men's One-A-Day. By my calculations, I'll be there on Tuesday.
One-A-Days are smaller than Centrum and they don't taste like Flintstones vitamins, yet their ingredient list is nearly identical.
Actually, now that I look at the labels, One-A-Day has even more nutritional goodness than Centrum.
11:44 AM
I guess there was a big party at our office over the weekend. The building was in pretty bad shape when I got in today. Oh well. That's the rock and roll lifestyle for ya.
Dave's gonna put a lock on our door, so at least our office will be protected in the future. But still.
After years of ignoring Blogger and editing journal entries by hand, I've finally come around. Blogger is a bit of bizatch to set up when you've got some fancy html stuff going on, but it looks like I got everything working now.
Now we'll just see if I bother to actually post stuff!
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