Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

Rottweilers. Computers. Cameras. World Domination. Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers.
Computers. Cameras.
World Domination.
Not necessarily in that order.

Technology, gotta love it

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It seems like I’ve spent a lot of time so far this vacation dealing with technology.

Dan’s BlackBerry was delivered the day before we left, so a good part of Friday was spent getting it set up. I am not sure why a brand new phone is delivered with an older version of the operating system and desktop software, but it was, and that took a while to update. Also, there is no quick and easy way to get contacts from a Motorola phone to a BlackBerry, especially if you don’t want to involve Outlook. All is good now though.

There are three Dish Network satellite receivers here at Mom and Dad’s, but only one gets used daily. After a bad moment trying to reconnect the oldest TV, with the help of (non-outsourced! yay!) Dish phone support, all was working again. Well, almost. Apparently Dish receivers have to be reactivated if they are not used regularly. Sigh. Another phone call, another wait. All is well again so can’t be too upset for now.

(NaBloPoMo | November ’09: 22 of 30 | 75% Challenge: 267 of 274)

Things I want to talk about

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I’m running on empty for no apparent reason, so I’m just going to make a few notes about some topics I want to talk about, before I forget about them entirely.

  • I got my invite for Google Voice last week. I did set it up, but haven’t had a chance to play around with it much, nor have I tried to set up its BlackBerry client. I’m sure at least a couple of you out there might like to hear about it!
  • I wrote a little bit about WordPress for BlackBerry when it first came out, but I should probably do a more complete review. There have been six updates since then, over the space of less than a month, so the developers really are working hard on bug fixes and enhancements.
  • As you all know, Freya is working on her rally obedience titles. When Axel goes back out with Julia this fall, he will also be working on rally obedience titles along with his AKC championship. That is, if I make sure he knows all of the Novice stations before he leaves. With about two and half months to go, we should definitely be able to do that, and get some training posts out of it, too!

(NaBloPoMo | July ’09: 30 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 187 of 274)

Mobile music (19 of 31/54 of 274)

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I’ve never owned an iPod. I was around when the first Walkman came out, and I have to look back in amazement at how far portable music has come. Comparing the size and weight of the original Walkman to the current iPod offerings, maybe part of our workouts back then was carrying around the Walkman!

When I bought my first BlackBerry this past November, a major goal was to eliminate the need to carry a PDA and MP3 player in addition to a cell phone. That goal has been accomplished in most satisfactory style. I often still opt to bring a small point-and-shoot digital camera and Flip Mino, even though the BlackBerry Curve has a camera and video built in, but that is another post for another day.

The music player on the BlackBerry Curve is pretty basic, but meets my needs pretty well. I didn’t have any issues transferring my music from my laptop to my Curve’s SD card, since almost all of it was already in MP3 format. I had been converting my iTunes music to DRM-free MP3 format as I purchased it, since I had a non-iPod MP3 player. When Apple broke iTunes to prevent the conversion utilities from working, I switched to Amazon for all digital music purchases. Not too long after that, Apple brought out their iTunes + DRM-free versions. May I say that I still purchase from Amazon and only when a song is available nowhere else will I ever purchase from iTunes.

I am not enough of a psycho audio freak to bemoan any sound quality inadequacies or shortcomings of the music player. At my age, and with my lack of musical skills, the difference between “real” sound quality and that of my Curve is not even a factor.

I’ve currently got three different Internet radio clients installed on my Curve. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, so I’ve kept them all rather than choosing just one.

iHeartRadio is a little different from the other two, so I’ll mention it first. The BlackBerry version has about 150 stations to choose from, including major-market and medium-sized market “real” stations as well as Internet radio stations. If you are living far away from your hometown, this is great. That is, if your hometown stations are included. Currently there is just one station from Honolulu, which would not be my first choice to listen to when there, but it’s ok and nice to be able to get it in the car here in Chicago. My old van did not have an AUX jack for music players, but my new one of course does, and one of my first purchases was the cable to connect music players to the car stereo.

Slacker and Pandora are similar in many ways. Each one allows you to create your own custom stations by choosing artists or songs that you want to listen to. For legal/licensing reasons, neither one is available outside North America nor do you have 100% on-demand choice of music. With Slacker, you choose up to 15 artists for your custom station, and most of the music selected will be by those artists or by artists very similar in style. With Pandora, you choose one artist or song and Pandora takes it from there to create your station using the Music Genome Project to choose artists and songs that you should enjoy based on your original input. Both allow you to ban artists or songs that you do not want to hear again, and favorite those that you do.

I have been a fan of Pandora for a while and often have it running on my desktop computer at work. Their BlackBerry client came out just this week, so I don’t have a lot of time with it yet. One feature that the BlackBerry version of Slacker has that I have found invaluable is the ability to cache stations. This means that I can listen to these stations even in areas where I don’t have a good signal.

The free version of Slacker has audio advertisements (about 1 an hour); the free version of Pandora has visual advertisements (so far, all for Docker that I’ve seen). I haven’t yet felt the need to upgrade to the paid versions of either service. The free versions are that good (sorry, Slacker and Pandora).

Any other BlackBerry users out there? Would love to hear your thoughts on these, and anything else I haven’t tried yet!