Michelle - Today is Michelle's mumble-mumble'th birthday. We went out for a nice quiet dinner at The Mile Away last night. Today she took the kids to Stone Zoo with another mom and her kids. From the sounds of it, the kids had a good time but we didn't all get back home until late.
This morning I realized that this year marks us knowing each other for half her life. From here on out she's known me a majority of her life.
Rant - I had two unpleasant surprises today. First, as I was coming back from lunch I stopped at an old Citgo station to fuel up. It had the old pumps that don't take credit cards and don't relay the information inside the station. I pumped gas, noted the amount, and went to the office to pay. I then waited about 10 minutes for the attendant to finish his full service duties so that I could pay my debt. I'm not a business major, but I think that businesses that make it difficult for customers to give them money usually don't do well.
The second unpleasant surprise came when I updated the firmware for my phone. I've had this program sitting on my desktop at work for several months and today decided to bite the bullet and go through the procedure. Unbeknownst to me beforehand near the very end, it wipes out everything Java related on the phone and gives you a new 'fresh from the factory' installation of the latest Java and the default applications. Hey, thanks for wiping everything out!
Most importantly it wiped out OperaMini. OperaMini takes an ordinary cell phone with a data plan and Java, and turns it into the next best thing to an iPhone or Blackberry in terms of web surfing. (must see OperaMini vs iPhone video slam ad) It was the application that made mobile web surfing tolerable for me. Well, that and T9 text entry. But once I did the update, the browser was gone. I re-installed it, but gone were my logins, my bookmarks, cookies, etc. Argh!
Mobile Bookmarks - So in case I every lose the key ones again, here are the links to mobile editions of some of my favorite sites.
Some sites just degrade well in mobile rendering. Kudos to Wikipedia which for all of its flaws regarding content reliability, renders fine on cell phones.
Before the phone "upgrade" I also had the GMail application and the Google Maps application for Java phones. They both work well, but I don't use GMail that often and Nextel's data rate makes Google Maps painful. So I just stuck with re-installing OperaMini.
I just read your entry, and was reminded of something Cass said the other day...she used "wikipediaing" as a verb in a sentence- I wonder if/when it will be in the dictionary- amazing how technolgy changes our vocabulary!
Glad Michelle had a nice birthday. Tell her I'm sorry I didn't get to talk to her, but it was pretty hectic here. I worked, came home to a powerless house, then the basement started to flood...not a good time to be making calls. All is ok now though. Tom has manadatory overtime this weekend, which I guess I understand...I needed power, others need their phones fixed. School starts Tuesday! I have an Abby in my class! No Claire, but an Amalinalli, Noemi, Ximena, Syncere, Genesis, Ulises. It will be interesting!