About 20 minutes later most of that would be on Tori’s shirt…
Author: fish1964
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That was fast
I assumed with all the different Android devices this would happen eventually. But not this fast…
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Just Funny
Whatever your position in the immigration debate, this is just funny…
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Still in love
For the record, I love my replacement Incredible just as much. With the recent great weather I’ve especially enjoyed tendering with PdaNet. Now I don’t even need WiFi.
I have yet to pay for an app…
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Phone bites the dust
It was a gorgeous spring weekend in Brooklyn and my wife was up at SUNY Binghamton for her nephew’s graduation, so I had the girls to myself. So that meant plenty of park time.
We were at our favorite park and Danielle was doing the monkey bars. They aren’t really monkey bars, more like gymnastics type rings spaced apart so you swing from one to the next. Danielle is pretty good at them and loves doing it.
So of course, I try to take a picture of her doing the rings. When I take pictures with my Incredible, I tend to hold the phone lightly from the bottom (since the lens and flash are on the top). Danielle is doing her thing and I try to time the shot so I can actually see her face while swinging.
I haven’t used the phone enough to have a good feel for the exact time lag between pressing the button and the picture being taken, so this type of action shot is a bit of a crap shoot. So after taking the picture, I’m looking at the phone to see how it turned out. Danielle is, of course, finishing up the rings. I’m not watching her closely.
On the last ring, one of her hands almost slips. She loses balance a bit and her legs go flying to get it back. Her foot executes a perfect punt of the phone right out of my hand. The phone goes flying 20 feet in the air. This part felt like slow motion. I try to catch it. But it’s just out of reach.
Danielle feels terrible, like it’s her fault. Of course it isn’t. I, of course, am upset. But my daughter is more important than my phone (saying a lot about my daughter, because I love the phone) so I lie to her, tell her it’s fine and we go back to playing.
But I could see the hairline cracks in the screen. And the very top part of the screen (the notifications panel) wasn’t working right. I knew it was toast, but at least it looked serviceable until I could get a replacement. I do have insurance on it, so it’s not the end of the world.
Though as the day progressed the screen slowly died. It’s now to the point where you really can’t see anything. I can receive calls, mainly because I know where to press to accept a call. But that’s it.
The replacement arrives Tuesday. Monday will be no fun…
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Killing Citizens Abroad
Imagine you travel abroad. And then for some crazy reason (your name is Islamic, your name matches a known child pornographer, you are friends with known radical Dan Song, etc.) the US decides you are a threat. So the CIA authorizes you to be killed by airborne drones. Sounds ridiculous, right?
It’s important to put yourself into these equations. Usually when we talk about stuff like this it is, "terrorist who authorized release of hideous deadly fart smells in D.C. subways authorized for death", except it’s usually a lot worse than "fart smells".
But remember, we (meaning the US government) do screw up sometimes on this stuff. Lets think about how many supposed criminals have been released lately due to DNA evidence. And those are people who went through actual trials with actual judges and were still wrongly convicted. Recent drone killings abroad have no trial or judge. We’re just smokin’ bad guys based on totally one sided evidence. And again, big picture, not that I’m against this.
But we tend to trust the government to kill a terrorist thousands of miles away with limited evidence, but not to give our grandmother a flu shot.
When you are debating whether this is something the government should be allowed to do, you shouldn’t always assume we are only talking about "guilty people", you should imaging that you decided to take a trip to Pakistan and for some reason the government confused you (Fred Patriot) with someone else (Fred Patrios).
I live in New York. I’m a big fan of not getting bombed/killed/etc. I like walking in Times Square without bombs exploding.
But I’m also a big fan of the uniquely US view of justice. That whole "innocent before being blown up by the CIA" thing.
So this story makes me a bit uneasy.
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Product Safety
I would like a guarantee that every single product I’ve ever purchased in the last 45 years is 100% safe. If not, please recall the product and give me a full refund.
Honestly, is this how people think?
I just received a very nice email from Amazon. Apparently some product that I purchased in the past 10 years has a 0.0001% chance of causing injury to my child. So there’s a product recall and I can get a free fix.
I’m not making this up. My math might be off, but even if it is, it’s immaterial.
We bought this product for Danielle years ago and we’ve used it for Victoria as well. It’s excellent. It’s from Step2, who I would like to say generally makes very fine kids products. My only complaint would be that if you leave it outside, the rain will fill it up internally and it’s hard to get the water out.
The recall notice is here.
Note the statistics. The product has been sold about 2.5 million times. There have been 28 reports of issues. 2 of those reports required a trip to the doctor.
Holy crap, that should prompt a celebration, not a recall.
Honestly, I believe in meaningful government regulation to promote product safety. Especially when kids are involved. But c’mon, if this is the standard no company will ever sell anything…
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Foursquare for Old Farts
Foursquare has been very popular in New York since it first came out. I recall thinking it was an interesting concept, but with my old crappy phone (with no GPS) it didn’t really work. So while I signed up for Foursquare, I never used it.
Hey, now I have a cool phone with GPS. Using Foursquare is a snap. It automatically detects where I am and shows me all the places nearby I could be checking in. And since it’s been around for a while now, there are a gazillion places in my neighborhood to check in. I can actually check in to my apartment building.
But, um, why? I mean, I get it if you are single and out on the town all the time. But for an old fart with kids, what exactly is the point? Become the mayor of Walgreens?
Sigh, clearly I’m too old to be hip…
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More Incredible
OK, I’ve had the HTC Incredible for over a week now, so I can talk about it a bit more.
Camera: I hadn’t really used it after two days. Now I’ve used it a bit more, though still not a lot. Overall, at 8 megapixels I’d say that this phone can easily be your general day to day camera. I’ve never considered a camera a big part of the phone, but perhaps that’s because I’ve never had a good camera in my phone. Some shots of the girls on a chilly Mother’s Day:
Video: Quite good, though you need the proper lighting. The interesting thing about trying video on your phone is that you naturally just pivot the phone landscape or portrait depending on what looks better. But it’s not as easy to rotate a video.
Here are two videos taken from my phone. The one of Tori dancing to The Wiggles in her PJs was taken portrait, downloaded to my PC and rotated via some freeware. The one of Danielle flipping was uploaded directly to YouTube from my phone, and is thus sideways. But the light was better.
Google Map Navigation: This was called the "killer app" of the Nexus One when it first came out. It may kill Garmin. Especially for someone like me who uses ZipCar and therefore doesn’t want to install a real GPS system, this is ideal. The turn by turn directions were as good as the GPS on my old Acura. It’s a battery killer, so you definitely need a car charger, but this app is truly great.
Games: Still way too early to tell, but my phone can keep either daughter entertained and I have yet to pay for a game. That was my basic success criteria, so all good there.
Battery Life: If I really use this phone a lot, I can blow through the battery in less than a day. On a regular day’s usage the battery seems to last fine. They are already selling more powerful replacement batteries for the Incredible. I’ll wait on that. I do make sure to turn WiFi and GPS off when I’m not using them. But I’m still leaving the Live Wallpaper on. Silly as it is, I like getting a sunset every day on my phone. If it’s raining, when I turn on my phone a windshield wiper pops up and "clears" the rain off my screen. Yes, I know, totally silly.
Apps: Right now there isn’t anything I can think of that I need. Yes, I’d like ZipCar to release an Android app. FreshDirect has an iPhone app though I always order food from my laptop so I’m not sure I’d use a phone app. But I’m seeing a rapid move towards Android development (Twitter released their Android app before an iPhone app). So I’m not worried that I won’t have apps that I need.
There are some usability things that I would quibble with. I’m using a different SMS client which I like, but now I’m getting notifications from both the new client and the default SMS client when I get a new text. Haven’t figured out how to turn that off. The behavior when I connect to my computer seems inconsistent. Sometimes I just get my SD card as a hard drive, sometimes I get the phone memory as one drive and the SD card as another.
The biggest negative I have found is that it’s pretty much impossible to download any paid video to this phone. If I buy video on iTunes it is copyright protected and I can’t watch it on my phone. If I use Amazon I get a Windows Media Player file, which my phone doesn’t play (need to look for an app for that, I guess). That’s not something I care a lot about, but if you did care about that, an iPhone is clearly your best bet.
My overall impression remains the same. This is a tremendous phone.
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First picture
The first picture taken with my Incredible.
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 