Finally, a good cell phone..

I've been with my cell phone provider for over 10 years. I don't know how many phones I've had in that time. Probably 10 or 12. And I've never had one that I actually liked until now.

A few months ago, my cell phone started breaking. I fixed it with my sisters broken phone, but it didn't last long. Got another one from my provider but I couldn't hear anyone. Got yet another one from my provider, but everyone complained about only hearing me breathe. Finally went in to the wireless store and upgraded to a non-free phone. With the contract extension it was about $50. Worth every cent.

This is the best phone I've used. Here are the features I like:

• I can hear clearly.
  
• People can hear me clearly.
• It's very slim, and tiny.
• I can get my email on this phone without paying extra for a data plan. Sending or Reading an email costs me 1 text message.
  
• The music player very usable, and the headphone jack is a standard 3.5mm stereo connection!
  
• It accepts a micro-SD card, and actually came with a 1gb card.
  
• The headset includes a mic that plugs into the the headphone jack, and regular headphones. That means you can use any headphones you want to talk on the phone, and that you can hear your conversation in both ears. Very cool.
• The FM Radio is also very user friendly, and reception is good.
• Bluetooth works great. Connects with my palm, laptop, and headphones no problem. I can run with this in my pocket, and my headphones on. No cords.
• It runs java programs easy peasy. I can copy game .jar files on the SD card and they play great.
  

I should add that it also takes pretty good photos, up to 1600x1200, and even movies with sound. But in 10 years, I think I've taken about 10 photos with my phone. I just don't use it.

Anyways... next time you're ready for an upgrade, check out the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic. It's wicked.

Don't buy stuff...

TFR

Took this in American Fork Canyon tonight. Jack and I took our tripod up there and played around with our cameras.

Published...kinda...

One of these days one of my photos will be in a book or magazine, and I'll be excited.  But for now, this is pretty exciting for me.

http://205.118.116.97/phpApps/articleViewer.php?artdid=456?pdid=1250

Just a website...Alpine School Districts.  I work for Jolesch photo, and sometimes book events locally that I can't handle myself.  They send me, I take the pics and sometimes collect order forms etc, and then we split the commissions.  Makes for some fun travelling sometimes. 

Anyway, the photo on that page is one of those.  Taken at Gardner hall at the UofU.  I'm standing on a step ladder. :)

Props to Trav for loaning me his wicked and wide lens for this.  

Traffic...

Beep beep.

Beep beep.

Ya.

Best Town Ever...

There are a number of things right or wrong with this sign... you decide which.


Blackwater, Missouri. Home of the Mid-Missouri Museum of Independent Telephone Pioneers

Map
Town Info

I would totally visit this town again.

PIC: Jack and Friends...

I like to try and think what Jack was thinking here. The more I look at this pic, the more there is to it. April 2003.

PIC: Holy City

Taken on our trip to Jerusalem last Sunday.

PIC: JRel...

Add your favorite caption...

PIC: Free beads and patches...

I know that the scouts get all the fancy glasses... fine clothes, free beads and patches. But my life is good...really good.

PIC: Huuunnnggggg...

PIC: War Memorial...

On a trip to DC. At the Viet Nam war memorial. 2007.

PIC: Magic Show...

The Magic Show.

PIC: Calico..

I'm still confused about the name of this cat.


Many of these are throwbacks from the screenshots that my wife made while we were copying dads tapes on to DVD. They were used to make the DVD covers.

PIC: Maximum Jefferson..

Cami had a long layover in Kansas City once, and I was able to see her and her fam. It had been too long since I saw any of them, so it was a welcome visit. However I think given the travel time, they would probably have voted to skip the layover.

This is my favorite pic from that night. 3 things we miss are pictured here. Jefferson. The Maxima. Kansas City.

PIC: Melody and Doll..

Melody at Logan. It was rare to see these girls without their Dolls at this age. I bet they still have them. Am I right?

PIC: Coup de Fun

Me and Ray Shelton on a ride at the Coup 'de fun during a birthday party for me. 198?

Picture of the day, or week...

I decided that I have loads of pictures. I should post some sometimes. So here is the first in a series of pictures of the (howeveroftenIwant).


Elise in the trooper, wearing my Tigers hat and sunglasses. I love this photo. Before Drili, there was Eliathew.

New Pedals...

This...

Minus these...

Plus these...

Equals this. I'm such a n00b.

Some of my regular Riding crew. Missing: Dave, Esther, Chris.

No no...but seriously. We have been riding once or twice a week these days. Such a high. Anyone around? Come ride with us. Mostly in Alpine, soon to expand to AF Canyon.

Yeah, go for it...

This goes along with Ambers theme that "everything [I] do is rediculous". I'm the guy lying down.

My work here is done...

Finally. The whole reason we chose to have the boy in the first place.

His first time doing the whole lawn by himself.

$.50 well spent.





Thanks for the mower Todd/Dad. It's great.

Another misplaed call

Previous incident.

Elizabeth this is **** **** calling.

Elizabeth I don't know why you're being so stubborn..um...and why you think that I should be ashamed of myself. You're the one that told the lie, not me.

Now, I am trying to get a payoff and you've been ordered by the court to get that payoff. I keep calling in, there's still a password on your account. They will not give me a payoff.

You are hurting yourself! Because I am not making another payment on that account. You're gonna go thirty days over due, sixty days past due... and it's your own credit you're destroying not mine. Because the judge ordered you to give me a payoff...I have the money to pay it off and you will not allow me to pay it off. So you are hurting just yourself.

I suggest you call in the city and you authorize me to get a payoff, or get one to me. It's up to you because you're just...sinking your own boat.

And I'm...I'm going to the Judge today, I'm going before him...to tell him that you are in contempt. And you'll be lucky if he doesn't pick you up on a warrant and bring you in and ask you why you haven't done what he told you to do. <click>

In the time of the chimpanzee...

...jack was a monkey.  Once again, I'm not sure how this will work since I'm submitting it via email. 

A few shots from Master Jacksons dance thingy at his school.  The one with his arms spread out happened at the climax of "Also sprach Zarathustra".  It was an homage to a scene from 2001 (which I found strange for a 1st grade class), but cute nonethe. 

Area hero saves dog...

Not the best photo, I know.  I took it this morning from my car, stalker style.  I even got a few looks from passers-by, which was awesome.  I'm posting this via email as well, to see how it works.

I was scooting to work the other day and I saw this dog walking on the freeway overpass in American Fork.  I thought "That dude is in the wrong place."  I swung around and caught up to him, and he seemed really glad to see me.  Ran right up to me and huddled close.  After calling the Humane Society and giving them the tag number, I got the owners phone number.  I called, and they came to retrieve their dog.  They were relieved to have found him.  To quote Gordon (the owner):  "We're retired, and he's all we have left."   He described where they lived, so I was able to drive over there this morning and find it (again...stalker style.)  There was my little dog buddy hanging out. 

I've never liked dogs really, but this experience has softened me a bit.  Maybe I won't hate it if Blackson has a dog after all. 

Blogger (google) drops the ball...

You may notice that in my last post the photo layout is broken. I think I can fix it manually, but I shouldn't have to. For nearly 5 days now users of blogger.com's FTP or SFTP publishing feature (we publish our weblogs to our own domains via ftp, rather than using whatever.blogspot.com) have been unable to publish photos, and publishing text has been spotty.

There is some pretty heated public outcry on blogger.com's help forum here.

Blogger.com (owned and operated by google) remains frustratingly silent about this. So much so that ftp publishers are starting to leave blogger for other weblog services (like wordpress). I don't post very much lately, so I tend to take a wait-and-see stance here. But I admit, this problem is lasting too long, and googles absolute silence approaches infuriating.

My personal belief is that blogger no longer wants to support ftp as a mode of publishing. Blogger.com offers some pretty great features for embedding photos and videos and they offer a wide variety of cool layout features. Nearly all of these are not available to those of us who use ftp publishing. I'm ok with that. I'm running my weblog on my own simple apache server in my basement. The weblogs hosted on blogspot run on googles servers which support all those neat advanced features. I think Google is tired of providing a dumbed-down version of their software and is hoping we'll all just go away. And I will, if that's how it's going to be.

Hey Google, either give us an ETA for a fix here, or give us our walking papers and maybe some tips on migrating. You're not making any friends staying silent.

Legos...

I've been working on a bit of macro photography (if you can call this that), and I got one that I like. There is room for improvement, but I like where it's going. I've been getting help from this forum.

J has been building the coolest stuff lately. He and I think it would be fun to have largish prints of these types of shots in his room. A 12x18 of this looks pretty cool. Anyone remember that reflections project that got rejected? Pictures of legos. :)

Plus, I think this would make a neat photo book after 50 or 100 of them. What kid wouldn't love to see his old lego creations after 20 years?



55mm, ISO 400 1/8 @ f/32

..this bird had flown

Working late last night, I received a call from my wife saying that there was a bird in my room. I scooted home and sure enough, there she was. Flapping around like she owned the place. It was pretty harmless and obviously scared so it didn't take long to get it out. I'm glad it was in the bedroom too, instead of flying around the whole house. It was actually a fun and hilarious time getting it to leave. Me with my scooter helmet and head lamp on flapping a blanket around to get the bird to find the open window.

We wondered where it came from, but quickly found out. See below.

It's favorite perch. Anywhere on the fan. It would land on one of the blades, and would hang on while I spun it around. Fun.

This perch was more precarious. Note the cameo from the red tree photo from Kansas.

On the rabbit ear, messin up my reception.

So we found this in the morning. Before I took this picture, the bird was there in the nest. Look closely and you can see 2 eggs. Yep, it's not just a bird, it's a bird family. Where is this nest you ask?

On the front door! My wife opened it last night to fix some wind related turbulence, and when she came back the bird was in. It looks like we brought it in outselves. Ho!

Anyway, funny right?

"...And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown."

Warning: Mouse picture included

Caught this guy at work. Peanut butter always does the job.

We think he was a bachelor.

It's kinda sad, actually.

Server back up, but crippled...

Hi everyone.

Just letting you know that my server is back up after having been hacked. But it's just barely up. Static web sites will work, but anything else won't work quite yet. That means almost all other sites are still hosed. Don't worry, the recovery effort is still underway. It should only be a few more days. Hang in there.

800 cute little dogs on the wall...

Sorry...it's pretty random...but I couldn't pass this one up. This is quite possibly the most interesting news story I've ever read in my life. Ever.

My son wants a dog, and asks regularly. After reading this, I'm feeling lucky that he doesn't continually ask for hundreds of dogs.

Here is a story about a triple-wide-trailer house in AZ where police found 800 small dogs and 87 parrots living with an elderly couple. Think about that. 800 dogs. 800. My word. Read the article. There were even some dogs giving birth while being rescued.

Just to give you an idea of how many dogs that is, here are 800 small dog images (and 87 parrots).