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Skygazing - I just got in a few moments ago from looking up at the sky. From 9:21pm to 9:24 the space shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station were able to be seen zooming over our clear skies. Neat! It reminded me a bit of watching distant jets flying across the sky at night.

Phone - In other semi-geeky news, I finally dug up the USB data cable for my phone. I had this cable from years ago when Motorola was shipping them out to all of their Nextel customers because it was important that the phones have their firmware updated. I believe it was something related to the GPS functionality built into most modern Nextel phones, but don't recall for sure. I recall I had to do the update at work because the firmware updater was a Windows program only. I mean, who would have 2 cell phones in a house and not have a Windows PC?! (I also hear chuckles from the Linux crowd in the distance...)

Anyway, I was digging out the cable because I wanted to put a few mobile Java based applications on the phone. On most other cell networks you can download these over the air. However on Nextel over the air downloads seem to be limited to what you purchase from the Nextel store. Other cool Java mobile apps need to be downloaded via the cable and a program Moto provides called the iDEN Java Application Loader (or just iDenJAL).

So, what did I download? Well, four applications:

1. OperaMini - Boy! Does this web browser rock compared to the default web browser that Nextel provides. Honestly, Nextel should just pay Opera a six or seven dollar figure and bundle this with their Java enabled phones. It renders better and faster and doesn't give nearly as many "out of memory" warnings as the default browser. By the way, Opera is the creator of the web browser on the Ninendo Wii.
2. GMail - Yes, in theory I could use the browser to surf to Google's GMail service, but the dedicated Java application is more usable on the handheld.
3. Google Maps - It's about as interactive as the Internet Explorer/Firefox goodness in PC Google Maps. Zoom in/out, see satellite data, get directions, etc. If only it could leverage the GPS abilities built into the phone...
4. TinyTwitter - I may or may not keep this one. It's a dedicated Twitter client. The Twitter mobile website is so simply anyways, I'm not sure the value of a dedicated client. If any readers are Twitter users, drop me an email...

Work - In sad news the "non-voluntary attrition" within our Marlborough hardware group continued today. As I've mentioned before, last quarter's numbers were less than stellar. We lost a few more engineers today. One was just in my cube a few days ago. He and I worked closely together several months ago porting the testing software I wrote to our prototype board.

Gym - I went back to the gym today. I don't think I mentioned that I strained my left ankle muscles/tendons last Friday at my fitness class. In essence I tripped while working out. The injury made clutching during the homeward commute a real joy! By Monday it was mostly healed but I stayed off it just to give it a little extra time. Today's workout was fine, 'cept it was humid out! It was one of those days where no amount of post-shower towel drying seems to work. You feel that you just can't dry off!

Timothy - Michelle mentioned to me tonight that Timothy seems to finally understand that he has only one ear and that it's different from the norm. I think that in his mind it's only cosmetic. He probably won't know for some time the concept of stereo vs mono sound. While he didn't seem saddened by it, nonetheless it was somehow a bit of a sad moment for us when we found that he now knew. We never hid it from him, but we didn't go out of our way to point it out to him. In a couple more years he'll be old enough to get the cosmetic surgery if he feels he's ready.