Lawn trolls blast biker and kill phone.

goobermaster — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 16:26:53 -0500

Or something like that... Here's my adventure from last night: I get to Nyes and immediately the damn phone battery dies. OK, I was on the phone for a half hour, but still, the battery should last longer than that. Oh well -- nothing a martini can't solve. So after another fun night at Nyes, I'm ready to bike home. After crossing the Hennepin bridge, I'm waiting at a light near Washington Ave and "SHPPPPSHHHHHHH" -- now I'm soaking wet! A fucking automatic sprinkler head decided that a good time to poke it's head out would be while I'm right next to it waiting at the light. And to make things even more awesome, this one is broken, so it sprays one large jet of water RIGHT ON ME. Oh that's great, I think as I pedal along dripping wet. My lower half looks like I fell in a lake. I get a block away and "phphhhhhhht" -- flat tire. [insert long string of expletives here] I'm still 4 miles from home! So I had to walk the whole way, pushing my broken bike, dripping with water. :( Arriving home a little after 4am, I let Sid out, plugged in the phone to charge, and crashed onto the bed. So tired. Now this morning I try to turn the phone on and it doesn't cooperate. In fact as I lifted it up a drop of water ran out of it. Dammit! The effin' sprinkler got my phone too. So here I sit at work blowing out the phone guts with compressed air. It's decided to die halfway. The touch screen no longer works and the battery won't charge. And sometimes it just shuts off at random. But I can get phone calls and texts (sometimes). So at least I'm not as dead in the water as I thought. The replacement will hopefully arrive on time on Monday. Damn and the weekend is only just beginning!

My phone is better than your phone

goobermaster — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:08:27 -0500

The ol' Razr finally died. A death that might have looked something like this. :) Anyway, on going to my online Cingular account to cash in on my insurance, I see I qualify for an upgrade. I just have to sell my soul to Cingular for another year. After much deliberation and web hunting, I decided that the coolest of cool phones is the new AT&T Tilt 8925, otherwise known as the HTC Kaiser.

The home screen with a live rss
news feed from the Tribune.

Live weather.

My favorite applications.

Goobertech on my phone!

Opera-mini zooming in on
full view internet.

Here're a few of the phone's kick-ass features:

Runs Windows Media 6.0 - that means you can add nearly limitless applications and view any file type. Just like desktop windows. Unlike the iPhone which traps you with what it comes with.
Built in GPS - coupled with google maps, an unrivaled direction system. No need for the Hudson Atlas anymore.
Wi-fi and HSDPA - which means the internet is very fast and when near any wi-fi hotspot, free.
Full QWERTY keyboard - with the nifty pull-out screen, texting is now that much faster.
3 Megapixel camera - although I hardly ever use my phone to take pics, it's nice it's there.
micro SD card slot - never ending memory.
Auto-updating - with the suite of apps I've installed, they all update themselves automagically. New emails, weather and rss news feed are all instantaneous.
USB hookup is plug and play through Windows Explorer on my computer. And as a bonus, charges while plugged in.

The phone came bundled with all sorts of bloatware and free trial crap from Cingular, so the first thing I did was roach it and then a hard reset to clean it out. A couple of forums I found detail all the info needed for this process and are an excellent resource for tweaking the Tilt.

Here's how I modified the goober-phone...

After the hard reset I followed Jenn's 10 step process.

Clean out the Cingular branded junk as told above.
Install a new home screen - Jenn's right, the default is awful. The HTC Home Plugin does a nice job of prettying things up.
HTC Home Customizer adds a clever little program to customize the layout of the new homepage.
Skin the phone calling page with the Black Dialer Skin.
Install KaiserTweak in order to modify registry values.
Install Opera-Mobile to view webpages full size. Far more supreme than the default Internet Explorer packaged with the phone.
Enable HSDPA - this is off by default and is definitely the connection to use if you've an unlimited data plan like me. Way faster than Cingular's 3G network.
Sync my gmail account. Since gmail supports imap, this was a snap. Now when I get a new email, my phone gets a copy too. And if I reply from the phone, gmail updates itself automatically.
Install Google Maps to work with the built in GPS.
Install PocketCM's Contacts - this clever little bit threads conversations like the image below.
Install PocketCM's Calendar - although new and not fully functional yet, this program is clearly the way to go since it'll soon sync with my google calendar.
Games! I downloaded and installed Aces Blackjack and Championship 500.
Download MyMobiler for my laptop and desktop PC. This nifty program let's me fully run the program on my computer's desktop and snap all these lovely screenshots. I dare anyone to text faster than I can when hooked to the PC.

File explorer.

Google maps with
real time GPS.

Sid in my phone!

500 card game.

Blackjack

Windows Media Player.
Music and videos - any format.

Threaded conversations.

And it makes phone calls.