I'm Going Back to BB...

Okay so after a more-than-fair 2 month evaluation of Android, using version 2.1 on the Samsung Captivate, I have to say that man do I ever miss my BlackBerry. I couldn't find any other perspectives like mine but I'm so sure of myself that I'll explain it here.
If you have a lot of things going on, and are constantly moving back and forth and talking to many people at once, and involved with many groups of people, Android can't hold a candle to the BlackBerry. On my BlackBerry Bold I'd be on BBM, playing Pandora through my car stereo, and using Google Maps to navigate, with nary a hitch. Email comes to you the second it's sent, and the entire device is centered around being, more or less, a 'super messenger'. Between 4 Email accounts, google chat, BBM, texts, and MMS, I was constantly a communications machine. Also, anyone who knows a lot of people can attest that at times you sort of become a gateway for people to reach other people. Even then, I was good to go.
The Captivate (Galaxy S) is a touchscreen only phone. Now, I gave touchscreens a go when I had an iPod Touch 2G a while ago and I didnt like it that much. 2 years later: nothing's changed. I will admit that Swype is pretty cool but it never picks the words I want to use.


BAD THINGS
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* Email, Email, Email. On this phone, sometimes Sync doesnt work, sometimes its iffy, sometimes it works. In any case, theres a lot of really stupid notifications that get top priority in the Notification bar, but all your email just gets one notification.

* When you save an email attachment it just says 'saved'. Doesn't tell you where, doesn't give you the option to choose. You have to save it and then go find it later and move it.

* Contacts prefix's are ignored. i.e. my Army buddies might be a SGT John Smith, and you save it as their prefix, but in the phone book it doesn't show it. You'd think there'd be a setting to toggle it on at least, but there sadly is not.

* Limited language configuration without tweaking. There's no Greek!!! I'm of Greek heritage, plus I'm in two fraternities, and I'm an engineering student (greek letters are heavy in upper level math). So to not have it as an input option is absurd.

* When I switch to the other caller in a Call Waiting scenario, a dialog box actually pops up asking me if i want to hold the first person or end the first person. Why would you STOP me from switching over to ask me that...i dont feel like stopping to pull the phone away from my face and press some stuff i just want to talk to the other person, as soon as humanly possible. So fucking annoying.

* The ringer is not even loud compared to the BlackBerry's i've owned...

* No direct control over the cellular radio (only bluetooth and wifi). On any BB, I could turn the cell radio on and off at the touch of a button without some extra widget, and could control 2g/3g operation (3g is faster but murders your battery)

* GPS ...at the time of release, it didnt work on my Captivate for a full month.

* battery life is downright pathetic. Always have to plug my phone in all the time...makes you look incompetent. Especially if you forgot the charger.

* if you have a new text, it wont let me scroll through a different text until you read the new one (keeps 'blinking' at the top and resending me to the top). Annoying if you already read the txt thru the 'preview'

* When i go to send a MMS it shows me ALL contacts (including the ones on my SIM card) even though I told the phone not to show SIM contacts. It only hides SIM contacts in the default view.

* When I want to use the phone as Removable Media on the PC, I have to manually pull down the notification bar, click the notification, and then click MOUNT for it to actually connect to the computer. Unnecessary extra step that makes zero sense.

* No built-in way to manage multiple apps running and close specific apps. That in and of itself requires another app. This should be intrinsic to any operating system.

* Going running with music? Forget it. Sweat (any amount at all) greatly confuses the touchscreen. That and shaking it makes it pick another song, and there's no way to turn that off.

* If the phone is remotely low on battery life, the camera application won't allow you to take a picture. It shows the camera working below a dialog box telling you the battery's low, then closes the app.

* Can't make 'folders' for app icons to organize the apps the way you want

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Good things about Android:

* TV/HDMI Out...really cool, actually.

* Tasker app is neat...u can make the phone do anything you set a condition for. Unprecedented levels of control. (i.e. from 9:58am to 9:59am shut off the screen and begin recording from the microphone and save it to folder x)

* The browser is amazing. Still no flash, but it's loads better than the BB5 browser (Opera Mini on BB helps alleviate the pain though)

* The AMOLED screen on the Captivate is to die for. The blacks/colors are really rich.

* The camera (although without flash) is really nice. Good for taking pictures of the board or of papers for class. Photo editing is amazing ON the phone.

* You can share multimedia content (like pictures, video, etc) through like 10 different ways

* Captivate can be soft-unlocked without any MSL code

* Scans media on the SD card extremely quickly compared to the blackberry

* The music player automatically saves the most recently added files, to any part of the filesystem (onboard or sd card) to a "Recently Added" playlist, so you can find the bluetooth received files, browser-downloaded files, or removable-media-copied files instantaneously

* Sexy formfactor...including usb port sliding door.

* A lot better for developing for than the BlackBerry
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All in all I'd say if you're a geek that loves to tinker and play and have a bunch of friends, then the Galaxy S/Captivate is great. But as you can see, all the pluses I listed aren't really important things...they're more like fun 'extras'. All the crucial basics of the device are the ones that irritate someone who needs things fast and efficient. (Notice I didn't even list the touchscreen as a minus...because I know thats my personal fat-fingered dilemma and not a de-facto negative feature)
If you run time critical applications all the time, like a full time college student with a job, a student organization, and 2 fraternities, I'd much more recommend a Blackberry any day of the week.

livelist- iconic ass-kicking musical properties: guitar riffs of rock/instrumental loops of rap

ROCK
Beastie Boys - No Sleep Till Brooklyn
Rage Against the Machine - Sleep Now In The Fire
Ozzy Osbourne - Crazy Train
Black Sabbath - Iron Man
Metallica - Enter Sandman
AC/DC - Thunderstruck, T.N.T., Back In Black
javascript:void(0)


RAP
Notorious B.I.G. - Kick In The Door
Wu-Tang Clan - C.R.E.A.M.
Mobb Deep - Shook Ones Part II

Torn...for the next mobile

Okay so having my Bold 9000 knocked into a mudpit at one of my fraternity's raucous pool parties, I've been succeeding in getting it to work anyways, albeit not with all cylinders firing... keys not working entirely, etc etc. Finally it randomly finally cut off. I disassembled it, cleaned the contacts, reassembled it and got it to fire up one last time to back it up to my laptop, right there in the car (clutch!) before it never turned on again.
Surviving on a trusty unlocked HTC Wizard 200 (WinMo 6.5 giving me a flashback to PocketPC 2002 days on the iPaq 3630...my first PDA haha), I'm now forced to choose. One would think my obvious choice would be the newly announced (today!) BlackBerry Torch 9800 slider. HOWEVER, being a firm believer in Costanzaism (facebook search it), and seeking a development platform for an App to control my senior design robot remotely, I was looking at both the iPhone 4 (hey gotta give it a chance at least) and Android OS. Samsung just released a gorgeous AMOLED-screen-having Galaxy S across all platforms...Motorola announced they plan to have a 2GHz (!) Android smartphone out by the end of the year...with nVidia Tegra dedicated mobile graphics (!!) but being as I dont see Moto crankin' out too many (read: 0) non-Verizon handsets as of late, I'd either go with the Captivate (AT&T version of the Galaxy S) or wait for Google's next 'developer phone'.

The only things i really hate about the Android phones are, 1, i'm forced to put my contacts list on Google's server, and thus connect my gmail account to my phone. and 2. not many of them customarily have any keyboard, which is irritating because you cant really text under the table in lecture so well when theres no textile feedback. :/

The good things about it (as opposed to an iPhone), from a developer's perspective, is:
1. $25 for a dev account (Apple is $100)
2. Java syntax, no need to learn Objective-C (enough issues to work out for senior design as is)
3. Multiplatform IDE (iPhone requires XCode, which is Mac OS X only) (all my group members can work on it, not just the mac-owners)
4. True multitasking

But I'm not going to lie to you, its not as pretty as the iPhone's interface.

More to come.

Opinion: just for Hassan

So, people keep saying all around me "new iPad doesnt have Flash" "gotta have Flash" "what about Flash". Suffice to say, Steve Jobs wrote a letter & put it on the Apple website regarding Flash and their stance on stepping around it, and actually ripped Adobe a new one. It was like he had been saving up for a long time and finally just let them have it, its pretty amazing but he makes some good points, mainly toward what is considered "open" and what's "closed."

Apple has amazing clarity and vision toward the future, which puts them ahead of the competition constantly, and for that I'll give them credit. And while I'm not sure how the iPad's going to change everything, as I still very much enjoy keyboards over touchscreens any day, I will say that the next big step is going toward mobile devices that sip power and don't slurp it, and pick & choose how they handle processes, without delaying or going slow, and emit very little heat, compared to the machines of the past.

Adobe Flash does not fall in this vision. Its a general one-size-fits-all solution to run on everything. The problem is, when "everything" includes the small army of mobile devices that has already started to appear in peoples hands, Flash finds itself fading away because it really doesnt even run efficiently on some desktops. Yeah it helped by creating a way that anyone with a browser could watch video, but it decodes in SOFTWARE, which is unnecessary work for a computer thats got the gearing & fittings to do it in HARDWARE, saving both heat & energy. Furthermore, its incredibly unstable. Mr. Jobs talks about how its the leading cause of Mac OS X crashing, and I'll go one more and say that using it on Linux is a complete pain. First, they always leave Linux for last, throwing them a bone when they have to. Second, watching Flash video on Linux is the equivalent of making your computer go running for like 8 miles and then wondering why the battery dies, because if you're on a laptop, forget it. I had an old 700MHz ThinkPad and it could only play one Flash movie if nothing else was running, in Crunchbang (very minimal Linux distro). And the battery would last about 30min, and the battery was still good.

There's other reasons why Flash probably wont make it into the future, but these are the most outstanding IMHO, and Adobe should create something new instead of making people update their Acrobat 3,284 times for no reason or sitting on the CS Suite.

Favorite Running Songs...

There's always songs to run to but these are the ones that, over years, I always leave in the mp3 player because I never tire of them. SO, in no particular order:

Prodigy - Breathe

Rage Against the Machine - Sleep Now In the Fire

Cake - Never There (breakbeat mix) *

Bomfunk MCs - Uprocking Beats (Speed Garage Mix)

Metallica - Enter Sandman

The Prodigy - Outta Space (DJ Deekline Booty Space Mix)

Naughty by Nature - Uptown Anthem

*pretty hard to find, dont expect to see them on youtube

Theres LOTS of other songs I run to, usually House or Rock, or really fast rap, but these songs are a constant so I hope whoever reads this somewhat enjoys it

- X

best characters

so in an effort to deviate from the usual technical BS, heres a list thats been in the back of my mind...

No matter how garbage the movie, most every time there's one side character that makes it bearable or even enjoyable to me. Here's the list
-----------

Monsters vs Aliens / B.O.B. / voiced by Seth Rogan

Dr. Cockroach: You must forgive my friend, but as you can see, he has no brain.
B.O.B.: Turns out, you don't need one. Totally overrated! I don't even have to...
[Starts gasping for air]
B.O.B.: I forgot how to breathe! Help me, Doctor Cockroach!
Dr. Cockroach: Suck in, B.O.B.
B.O.B.: [breathes normally] Thanks, Doc. You're a life saver.

---

Elf / Gimbel's Manager / Faizon Love

Gimbel's Manager: Why you smilin' like that?
Buddy: I just like to smile, smiling's my favorite
Gimbel's Manager: Make work your favorite. That's your new favorite.

---

Anchorman / Brick Tamland / Steve Carrell

Ron Burgundy: Last time I looked in the dictionary, my name's Ron Burgundy. What's your name?
Brian Fantana: Brian Fantana.
Champ Kind: Champ Kind.
Brick Tamland: Brian Fantana.
Brian Fantana: No, you're Brick.
Brick Tamland: Brian.
Brian Fantana: I'm Brian.
Brick Tamland: Veronica.

---

A Bug's Life: Tuck and Roll, the twin bugs

Tuck: You fired!
Roll: You fired!
Tuck: You fireeeeeed!
Rosie: [in disgust] Oh, will you *shut up*?
Tuck: Hey!
Roll: You fired!

---

The Simpsons / Dr. Nick Riviera

Dr. Nick: "Hi, everybody!"

Dr. Nick: "Hey, Mr. McGregg! If it isn't the man with a leg for an arm & an arm for a leg!"

Update for the sake of an update

Well...what's new. Apple's tablet came out...as a half-developed premature ugly concoction. But they made it cheap to compensate...hahaha. All I will even be willing to say about it is, for now, it's literally a giant iPod Touch. Until that changes, i don't care. i want an actual computer. the tablet conversions that 3rd party companies do to macbook pros look pretty slick but they're incredibly expensive. just want something i can take notes on for class, that's all i ask. then again...if the iPad gets a SERIOUS note-taking/organizing app that can sync with my laptop, it doesn't sound so bad. we'll see.

irritated because i got fat over the break and i can't run b/c of a foot problem that's taking weeks to resolve due to the way the healthcare system works. its incredulous.

alright i'm late to hackmiami. new laptop on the horizon...not even sure if it'll be mac, to be honest. i see half-decent laptops (now that 7's out) for half the cost my macbook pro was. in a day of $1k 3-d laptops, its getting harder to justify MBPs. where else do you pay $2k for a laptop with a 120GB HDD. that was small when i bought it Jan 2008...now its intolerable when running 2 O/S's :(

been playing with Arduino and Processing...have to learn to get them to work together via serial comms. dreading learning programming for communications but ...here goes nothing