December 2006 Archives

I purchased a Palm Treo 700p from Sprint in mid-2006, and the experience six months in has been nothing less than excellent.

The Palm Treo 700p smartphone delivers everything you need in one go-anywhere, Palm OS device. It combines a smarter phone with wireless email and messaging, built-in web browser, and rich media capabilities

We had Erik, Blake, Matt & Tonya, Sarah (but no Josh), Dani (but no Nick), Steph, Shana & moi. It was a wonderful evening, and something we both needed. A chance to strengthen friendships less traveled, share stories, and eat good food. I think we succeeded on all counts. We've got Steph with her tongue. Danielle was sick, but feeling better. Sarah didn't have Josh but was Jolly none-the-less [squawk squawk motherfucker]. Tonya & Matt had fun too, but he unfortunately only has two weeks off from his schooling during the break.

Later on tonight I will be joining with ten other people to celebrate Thanksmas 2006. Thanksmas is our first-ever-annual-inbetween-Thanksgiving-and-Christmas holiday for our little group of friends that cannot spend the real aforementioned holidays together because they have family obligations. Hopefully it will be the beginning of a great new tradition for us. However, it does make me wonder: what can we do to balance the pressures of family with friends as a certified grown-up? As a genuine contributing member of society, a grown up, a twentysomething with spouse, new demands are constantly being placed on our already precious time. The need exists for balancing our private time with family time and friend time, all separate from work time. The past four months have brought changes to the dynamic of my daily life: Shana and I had been fairly sedentary with our after-work time. We saw friends anywhere between one and four times a month; now we barely spend two nights at home a night due to friends coming back into our routine. I started employing one of Shana's friends, a bright girl named Stephanie, and now I spend more than 60 hours a week with her. And because she is coming out of her shell after a failed relationship, we are spending more and more time at hot spots around town. My exercise regiment has since vanished (I got in my first 30 minutes in the last five weeks this afternoon); I've put on weight; constantly felt crammed for time; and the toll has been even harder on my wife. But events like tonight should help alleviate some of our concerns. We're likely to have a better time tonight with a larger group, still feel relaxed in someone's home, and be able to get home at a reasonable hour. One of my primary joys in life is social interaction: I discovered sometime in college that I enjoy it far more than I should. Being able to control, and enjoy, the time we spend together and with others is an important skill as we grow older together.

The web is currently exploding with news about Gmail:

Get mail from other accounts Now Gmail can check for the mail you receive at your other email accounts. You can retrieve your mail (new and old) from up to five other email accounts and have them all in Gmail. Then you can even create a customized 'From:' address, which lets you send messages from Gmail, but have them look like they were sent from another one of your email accounts. Please note that you can only retrieve mail from accounts that have POP3 access enabled. Learn more This feature is currently only enabled for a limited number of users. We're working on making it more available soon. Look for it in the 'Accounts' tab in Settings.

As TechCrunch points out, Gmail is now the perfect webmail client. The AJAX interface is, in my opinion, still spades above the new Yahoo mail beta and Windows Live mail. But are there things that can still be improved? Yes. My primary concern with Gmail earlier this year was merging my andrew at ruess dot us email address with my Google address. When I would send an email from Gmail, it would say this is from andrew dot ruess at gmail dot com on behalf of Andrew Ruess (andrew at ruess dot us). This of course didn't affect much with computer interactions, but my human friends always saw this longer 'From' field in their preferred email clients. "Why is Gmail sending email on behalf of your domain?" they would ask me. This of course was rectified with the introduction of Google Applications for your domain. In fact, I quickly switched over and setup our domain accounts there. We also got an ruess.us Jabber client thrown in, which is extra nice. But then the problem remained in integration: Firefox would sometimes show my logged-in Google account as /html/pref/user/00x01212 (or something) instead of either of my real addresses. Tech support at Google confirmed this is a problem with how logins are managed across the Google domain: when logged into Google Hosted Applications it did not transfer over to general google.com, and browsers would use a strange cookie to identify us as a random account. It was hard to deal with checking email, opening Google Reader, but having no feeds because I was using a temporary Google login. Extra steps started to frustrate me. Then the problem became remote access from my cell phone once I upgraded to a Treo 700p. The released Gmail phone app sometimes does not work (for me; others have experienced no problems) with the the Google Hosted Applications framework. And the actual application leaves a lot to be desired when run on a Palm OS Treo; its kind of ugly. It became tedious to write emails, whereas my previous experience with VersaMail was much quicker (and possible one-handed). So now all of the ruess.us email infrastructure sits on an Exchange 2003 box. Accessible over the browser, on the road via RPC call from Outlook or Entourage, and on our Treo 700ps via over-the-air synchronization. If Google can solve these problems, they will at least gain back my domain.

February 1, 2003 marked the beginning of an amazing detective series, with a book called Along Came a Spider. Sadly, it also got turned into a sub-par movie staring Morgan Freeman, but that is a tangent for another day. It begins, like every good mystery novel, by showing us the villain and his crime. This time we are introduced to Gary Soneji: every parent's worst nightmare. He calls himself "the son of Lindbergh." His family and colleagues know him as a mild-mannered, unassuming guy, and would find it impossible to imagine him as a psychopath, a serial murderer, and now, the perpetrator of the most notorious kidnapping of the century. Only Soneji knows himself as the killer of countless victims and as the merciless kidnapper of Maggie Rose, the golden-haired daughter of a famous actress, and Shrimpie Goldberg, the young son of the Secretary of the Treasury. The unenviable task of tracking down Soneji has been assigned to Alec Cross, a black Washington, D.C., homicide detective with a Ph.D. in psychology and a soft spot for the mysterious, seductive, blonde Secret Service supervisor who has also been drawn into the case. Suddenly, everything in Cross's personal and professional life has become explosive. As a man, Cross must deal with the conflicts and dangers of a forbidden love affair. As a psychologist, he must face the toughest test of his career: How do you outsmart a brilliant psychopath, especially one who appears to have a split personality -- one who won't let the other half remember those horrific acts? So far, Soneji has eluded the FBI, the Secret Service, and the police. Who will be his next victim? Thankfully a couple of people, most undeserving of his brutal actions. It was the first book I read that spent a significant amount of time focused on the psychology of the actual criminal, rather than just following his actions. I just reread it again last weekend and still consider it one of the best mystery novels I've read. Oh, and it is also available as an ebook from eReader.com, which is my new favorite medium for the written word. Plus, you can't beat $4 and change for a novel you can keep on your desktop, your Treo, your laptop, etc...

Early 2001 found me tooling around in the blogosphere and creating a home on LiveJournal. I recently realized my space there, the original Andyverse, never disappeared, and has been sitting dormant for years. As one commenter stated:

Poor abandoned journal! *Hugs it*

I also fooled around with Andrew's Advent on Blogger, along with Krepta's Recent Thoughts. But I think now is the time to retire them.

Should this episode be watching in a vacuum, it is extremely satisfying. It continues an exciting story and has interesting characters. Should you have watched this and expected something big from the previous week's previews, you might be disappointed. It was oversold as the end-all-be-all before January 22, 2007. It isn't. The aptly named episode concerning the save cheerleader brings more of the heroes to Texas. Peter has been arrested by the local police, and his brother Nathan shows up with lawyers and bail to secure his freedom. Isaac, the precognitive artist, also finds time to meet with his Japanese comic-book fans Hiro and Ando. Hiro flashes him the traditional greeting of Vulcans, something I thought was both cute and appropriate for the character. I'm also glad we get to see Isaac a little out of his element, no longer doped up, and do something more than acing out the symptoms of addiction and withdrawal. We get a powerful vision at the end of the episode thanks to Peter, enough to keep the hardcore fans debating its relevance for the coming 6 weeks until new content. The vision itself is more surreal than past episodes: an empty New York City finds Peter confused in the middle of empty cars, but the other Heroes see him and approach; unfortunately his hands start glowing (or... irradiating?), Claire mouths, "I'm sorry," and the other Heroes run away while New York City is destroyed behind them with Peter at its core. Its enough to keep me interested.