Personal

Golden hands located

Finally, after many years of searching I have found an expert on house maintenance. This guy is fantastic! He can paint walls and ceilings (with crack patching), fix electrical appliences, and change plumbing equipment. Proabaly he can do tonnes more. He is reasonably cheap, fast, and reliable.

The only two minor problems with him are:

He has a day job which comes as a priority to him. All the other work should be arranged around his schedule (which basically means that he is free only in the second half of the day).
He does not have a car. This means that he should be picked up, drived to the DIY shop for tools and materials, brought to the spot, and taken home afterwords.

Let me know if you want his phone number.

On smartphones in general and Motorolla A780 in particular

Via this post in Hazard’s blog I found this reivew of Motorolla A780.

It looks like Motrolla A780 is indeed a decent smartphone. If I was to buy my first smartphone, Motorolla A780 would be a perfect choice for me (nevermind the fact that I still cannot buy it anywhere). But, I already had my first smartphone – Sony Ericsson P800. Getting and using one for more than a year slightly altered my requirements list. Things that I care about now are:

FM Radio. It turns out I can spend a lot of time listening to FM radio rather than to silence or mp3s on the memory card. MP3s eat up a lot of space, and listening to them eats battery like a car with no petrol. FM radio reciever must be built-in into my next smartphone. It is a good option anyway, since it is cheap and small, but with a lot of use for many people. It seems that Motorolla A780 does not provide it.
Recoding and playback of voice calls. I never thought that I would want this feature in the first place, but in the course of the last two years I foud myself in the situation where I badly needed it more than once. Luckily, Motorolla A780 has it.
CompactFlash memory. Although I am yet to see any good phone with CompactFlash, I still want it. CompactFlash is the best memory option for a smartphone I can see out there. It is cheap. It is open. And it is huge. CompactFlash cards and microdrives are in the GByte area already and not only that, but they are relatively cheap too. Memory Stick Pro 1 GB is roghly 3 times more expensive than a 1 GB Compact Flash card.
High level of integration in PIM. Personal Information Manager is an important part of the smartphone. I, therefor, expect it to be properly done. Sony Ericsson P800 has an average one. It provides all the important functions for calendaring, addressbook keeping, TODOs and notes. What it lacks is a good integration between this parts. For example, when I creat an appointment or a reminder for a phone call in the calendar, I cannot use contacts from the addressbook. I have to retype everything. Similarly, I cannot attach notes from the notepad to the contacts in the addressbook. Addressbook allows one to type in a single note for the contact but that’s it. I cannot attach any graphics (like a map of how to find someone’s house) except for one single photograph. P800 has a photocamera, but I cannot organize my photos properly with contacts or notes attached to them. All of these require user to dump all data to the computer and do all the organization there. Bad. Unfortunately, I don’t know how good Motorolla A780 in this regard. But in the worst case scenario, I guess, the same solution as for P800 will work – install a third party organizer.
GPS. Global Positioning System allows one to always know exactly where he is. Not only that, but it can provide this information to all sorts of software. When taking pictures, location coordinates might be saved into the image. This way you will always know where you took the picture. Alarms and reminders can use the coordinates to go off only when you are in the area. Coordinates can be used with a number of mapping services to suggest a better route through the city or to help you find your way back to civilization. Or to the nearest petrol station. Or hotel. Or good restaurant.

One of the things that I have noticed in the review is that Motorolla A780 does allow you to have both a ringtone and a vibrating alert. This is really odd and I don’t see any reason of why did they make it like this. I hope they will fix the behavior in the next generation of this phone.

One thing that I stopped worrying about is battery life. If the phone can live one a single battery through the day, I am satisfied enough. I realized that there is no way that I will find myself away from power for longer than a day. As long as the device can be recharged from a socket, or a car, or a USB of a computer, it is good enough for me.

DVD copies

Disclaimer: I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings with this post. Neither I am complaining about my presents. It’s just yet another warning for the general public.

Before Christmas spirit wears off the air, I decided to watch one of the DVDs that I’ve got for Christmas presents. In total, I have recieved 3 of them. Martin surprised me with the “Bowling for Colombine” and my brother presented me “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” and “The Terminal”.

After a hard night’s work in the NOC, I was in the mood for some action, so I though I will watch the Angels. When I picked up the box, I was suspecious about the quality. I could see that it not an original DVD. The printing of the cover was of a very low quality with totally messed up and washed out colors. The vacuum pack was also totally different from the original DVDs. It was thin and very easy to open. No holograms, parental warnings, or any other stickers were present. I though “OK, it is definitely a pirate copy, but maybe it is of a good quality”. Opened up a box and saw a disk. It was a regular DVD-R disk, with one side white and another blue. Nothing was printed or even written on it. I put the disk in and fired up my player. It played. The copy was of a terrible quality. It wasn’t even a DVD copy. It was a screener. For those of you, who don’t know what a screen is – it is a copy of the film, done by someone with camcorder in the cinema. Yup. Creepy. The position of the camcorder relatively to the screen is not centralized. The sound is totally messed up with suround being pushed into camcorder’s microphone. Terrible. Not even watchable.

I was very disappointed. I decided to check “The Terminal”. From the moment I took the box in my hands, I realized that it will be the same. It had the same thin vacum pack, lousy printing and virgin white top side of the disk. And it was.

Than I said “Enough is enough” and thought that I am not going to bed without a movie. Martin’s “Bowling for Colombine” was my last hope. I picked it up. The vacum pack was thicker, but not as thick as I am used to. Still no stickers or holograms, but a quality printing of the cover. I opened the box and found the DVD box itself was of a much better quality. It wasn’t something you can get from any computer shop, but something which looked like a real one. Also, the box cover was printed on both sides of the paper and could be seen from both inside and outside of the box. There was also a quality printing on the disk itself. The other side of the disk wasn’t blue or gold either. It was a proper “DVD” colour. For a moment there I was thinking that it is an original DVD and that all the stickers are missing because it is a region 2 DVD. But than I saw something. I changed the angle at which I was looking at the burned side of the disk and I saw FINGERPRINTS!!! There were three huge oily fingerprints on the disk. Now, can anyone tell me how is it possible for human fingerprints to get on the disk which is burned and packed by machines? A copy again. But from the looks of it I thought that it should be better than my previous two attempts. I put it in and started playing. It was indeed a copy of the DVD with menus and everything. The movie was of an excellent quality. I watched until about 20 minutes to end. And than it got stuck. My DVD just couldn’t handle it. Most probably I didn’t dispose of the fingerprints good enough before inserting the disk. The disk got stuck in the drive and it doesn’t want to open up now. I am forced to shutdown my machine and only than I will be able to eject it.

Why am I writing this? I want to warn you. Getting a copy of the film is easy these days. You can get anything – a copy of the DVD, a screener, a compressed version (DivX). You can buy a movie on DVD, CDROM, or download it from the net. But remember, you are getting what you paid for. If you pay the cost of the empty DVD disk, you might as well get one. If you want to be sure that you are getting an original film, buy it from a legitimate DVD shop, with a reciept, and with a heavy price. That is the only way that you will not be screwed over your money. In the worst case scenario, you will be able to change the product for another one, or return your cash.

R.I.P. Lucky

My all time favourite dog of all times has been killed by a car. :( These are really really sad news. Lucky was a truly adorable dog. Noone who saw him could stay away. Everyone wanted to pet him and play with him. He was very kind, fun, and full of life. I am really going to miss him…

My condolences to Martin, who I know feels totally screwed now.

Yet another blog

Some time ago I have registered at LiveJournal.com. Originally, I did it to be able to search for blogs by region. It turned out that this feature was available only to paid accounts. I thought that I won’t be needing this account anymore.

After some time I found myself posting comments to different LJ blogs using my account. But I was getting warning that my account is about to be deleted due to inactivity.

Today I got an interesting idea. I am getting emails from some mailing lists with jokes and funny stories. I usually forward the best ones to few friends of mine via email. Instead, I will post them in my LJ blog and will do the forwarding from there using RSS feed and a simple Perl script.

This way, I will be able to maintain my LJ account and share the funny stuff with more people, while doing less. Long live Perl and RSS!