matthearn.com

I must report a bit of sad news: despite my jury-rigging brilliance, the Hearn family’s venerable Playstation 2 appears to have met its sad but inevitable end.

It had been slowly dying for some time. A year or so ago I had to take most of it apart to clean the disc-reading laser and blow out 9 years of accumulated cat dander and other detritus. Earlier this year, the cooling fan built into it had gotten so noisy that I decided it was time to replace it, so I ordered a new one, popped the case open and put it in. Finally, last week, I noticed that it would occasionally turn itself off. I usually left it running all the time (I subscribe to a relatively-common theory among nerds that electrical devices prefer to actually have electricity flowing through them at all times, and that frequent power-off and -on shortens the life of the device) and I’d come into the room and notice that instead of the blue and green lights indicating the P2, as it was affectionately known, were off, and the red light was on, indicating that the power switch on the back was on, but the OS wasn’t running.

Then I noticed that when playing a game, the cooling fan wasn’t turning on. The poor thing was overheating and powering itself down to keep from melting. So, I took it to the kitchen table, popped it open, and started testing things. A long story short, I determined that the fan itself was fine, but that the system board wasn’t signalling it to turn on for some reason. I should probably have put the poor console out of its misery at that point, but instead I went online and ordered a cheap USB fan to stick to the front.

Then, I read a nerdy article about a fellow who took a similar fan, connected it to a USB cable, and used it to cool his enormous, sweaty forehead during extend sessions of Diablo 3. I realized that the P2 has USB ports on the front, and I have plenty of old USB cables lying about. So, I took the fan out, spliced it and a spare cable together, and plugged it in. Whirrrrrrr! Yay! I reinstalled the fan into the P2, with the fan wires going out and around to the USB connection on the front. Brilliant! Sure, the “boot OS” button didn’t work anymore. But you could simply turn the box off on the back and then press the CD load button to get things to come to life. Sadly, all I had done was delay the inevitable.

Just as I was planning another self-congratulatory post about my ability to hack anything and get it functioning again, I sat down for a few minutes of MLB: The Show last night. Powered the P2 up, inserted the disc, waited for David Wright to appear on my screen so that I could remind him that the Mets suck, and…nothing. Back to the red light. Hm. I ejected and reinserted the disc tray, which booted the OS, but again: down she went. O noes!

P2 came into our lives in January 2003, a highly-appreciated birthday present from Sarah to myself. Our first game together was Tiger Woods 2002. Over many years, we have spent many hours together playing many games of football, baseball, basketball; hundreds of rounds of golf; and slaughtered countless numbers of terrorists, Germans, rival gang members, and prostitutes. P2, we mourn you, and along with you all of the valuable saved games and customized athletes to which you gave life. Requiescat in pace.

Playstation 2, 2003-2012

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this in the past, but I am a genius. I am like Stephen Hawking and Yogi Berra rolled into one very strange tall gentleman with full use of his various limbs but very bad at sports. So maybe that was a poor simile. Or maybe it was just so smart it broke your brain. Who’s to know? Other than me, of course.

My brilliance was confirmed over the weekend when I attempted to mow my lawn. I have a fairly sizeable patch of property, so a few years ago a got a used riding mower that has taken every ounce of my considerable mechanical skills to keep running. I’ve replaced blades, batteries, and bearings; adjusted pulleys, decks, and brakes; and even managed to keep a tire inflated with that weird green tire patching goo they sell that’s pretty much useless in any automotive application.

I topped off the gas tank, fired the mower up, and pulled it out into the yard, at which point I remembered that a small bungee cord that holds on part of the mulcher had broken and a cover had been lost, such that the mower would throw “mow muffins” all over the place instead of turning them into a fine grass dust. I decided to simply replace the bungee with a piece of clothesline, and since I was going to be fiddling around only inches from the blades, I thought it best to turn the mower off rather than trust the little clutch that disengages the blades. I got the cover tied back on, sat down atop my trusty steed, and turned the key.

Nothing. Not a click. Not a whirr. Not the telltale grinding that indicates a bad starter, not the constant cycling of an engine that’s spinning but just won’t fire up, nothing. Usually when this happens it’s because I’m doing something stupid, like trying to start it in gear with the clutch up, or trying to start it with the blades engaged; Sears is smart AND lawsuit-conscious, so there are a million safety switches to keep you from starting the dang thing in top gear and flying off out of control at a breakneck 5.5mph. But I was satisfying all of them. Brake on, neutral gear, butt firmly weighting down the seat switch, and nothing. There’s a small ammeter on the dashboard that indicated that juice was being delivered somewhere, but where?

I suspected the battery might’ve been shot; I don’t start the thing between October and April, so the batteries tend to lose voltage as they wear out over the winter, but this one was only about 2 months old. After a few minutes of fruitless searching I was unable to locate my electronic multimeter (my genius does not extend to organization; my garage looks like a Katamari exploded in it) so I said to hell with it and decided to just bypass the battery and jump start the mower with my van.

I connected all the cables, turned the key: nothing. I heard a faint “click” when switching to the “running” position, which indicated to me that the mower could draw power if I could just get it going, but turning the key to “start” did nothing. I disconnected the jumper cables from the van and gently touched them together, getting sparks galore, so the battery seemed to be okay. I then had to spend a solid half an hour digging through my horrendously filthy garage to find the multimeter, which I finally located under various bicycle parts and something that smelled suspiciously like a raccoon turd. I stuck it on the battery, which reported 12.35 volts, about what one would expect. The plot, as they say, thickened.

I decided it was time to go inside and do a little research. I have the owner’s manual on my lappy, which includes a helpful schematic that looks like this (click to enlarge):

That looks crazy complicated, but it’s not too bad, particularly if you’re aware that only part of it pertains to actually starting the engine:

Basically what it says is that current flows from the battery, through a fuse and an ammeter, and then reaches the ignition switch, which when turned to “start” forwards that current through the clutch/brake sensor (to make sure the clutch is disengaged, and the brake on), then through the “attachment” clutch sensor (to make sure the blades are disengaged), and then to the solenoid, which is a special kind of switch then when fed a small amount of current, allows a much larger amount of current to flow through another circuit and activate the starter. In short, either one of the switches or sensors is broken, or the solenoid is broken. All of which are fairly cheap to replace, except that

1. They would take 5-6 days to arrive, and


2. We were having a barbecue on Sunday for which I’d prefer the grass be ankle-high instead of mid-shin.

Faced with the prospect of mowing 2/3 of an acre with a 30″ push mower (which would take 3-4 hours), I had the lightning bolt of genius that characterizes so much of my life: all the solenoid does is let those various switches and sensors tell it what to do, which is supply current to the starter. Theoretically I could just supply the current to the starter by pressing one end of a wire to the positive terminal on the battery, and the other end to the input connection on the starter. So I got some gloves and goggles, and did exactly that. VROOOOOM! It fired right up, and I finished mowing, being careful not to turn the sucker off no matter what.

The dilemma I’m faced with now is, do I order a whole bunch of new switches and sensors and a solenoid ($45), or do I simply get a nice heavy gauge wire and a cool-looking starter button to bypass all that stuff and just get this awesome switch and a thick wire. I think we know the answer.

I don’t know what the hell is wrong with people. Okay, I get it, there’s no iPhone 5 this October. I guess if you’re a complete idiot who knows nothing more about technology than “5 is a bigger number than 4,” this is a serious disappointment. But let’s go over a few important facts:

	iPhone 4	iPhone 4S
Processor	Apple A4	Dual-core Apple A5
Still camera	5MP	8MP
Video	720p HD	1080p HD
Incredible AI-Voice Recognition application	none	Siri

I’ve left out memory comparisons (because we don’t know what the memory in the 4S is, yet) and the new dual-antenna wireless connection (because I’m not sure how big a grain of salt to take with the prediction of doubling cellular data speeds). Still: in what ridiculous crack-den world are folks living in that this is anything less than a major upgrade? They could call it “iPhone Zero” and it would be completely awesome. Sure, if I already had an iPhone 4, I wouldn’t feel the need to upgrade. But if you have to upgrade your smartphone every single year, I’m going to predict that you’re a major douchekabibble anyway. Like, you know, this guy:

There’s nothing really notable, physically, about the iPhone 4S in comparison to the iPhone 4. Do you have an iPhone 4? Pick it up. Look at it. Turn it over. There, you’ve just done an iPhone 4S hands-on. Congratulations!

Seriously? Your initial reaction to the release of a new phone with twice the CPU is “Sigh, it’s the same shape!” I wonder if this idiot refuses to buy DVDs or BlueRays because they’re the same form-factor as a CD.

This phone is obviously an upgrade over the iPhone 4, and if you’re like me and still floundering along on an old 3G, it’s like going from an IBM XT to an Alienware scream machine. I’m not sure when Apple will actually open the store to get this phone, but I plan to stay up until midnight in case they’ll take my order at 12:01 on October 7th. A few other notes on the subject:

The “back” (or primary) camera went from 5 to 8 megapixels, but that may be the least of its improvements. They’ve opened the aperture to f/2.4 for better low-light shooting (I prefer using a fast aperture over using a flash), and the new lens has 5 elements to sharpen the photos. Plus, image stabilization in the video mode, which is now 1080p (better HD resolution than my Flip).

Siri looks totally rad, although I need to use it to really see if it’s useful. I’ve had other phones with voice recognition, and it was little more than a gimmick. I also don’t fully trust AI after being boned so many times over by that damned paperclip.

I’m largely indifferent to this iCloud thing as well; we’ll see how well it works. Having only 5GB of free storage makes it next to useless, really, although I guess being able to use it to back up your phone before doing a PC-less upgrade is pretty win.

Mostly, frankly, I’m just excited to have a phone that can background apps, do Facetime, and not have things constantly crash because 128MB of DRAM doesn’t cut it with iOS4 apps.

One of the problems with podcasting (something I am VERY in favor of, in general) is that since it’s usually produced by amateurs with inexpensive equipment, the sound quality is frequently bad. It’s not something you notice a lot of the time because they’re talking, not making music, but if you are trying to listen in circumstances where fidelity is otherwise affected, you’ll pick up on it.

For example, I enjoy listening to podcasts when I mow the lawn. It makes the time fairly fly by, I really enjoy it. The podcast I’m most likely to listen to is “The BS Report,” by the inimitable Bill Simmons; he produces 2-4 of them a week, averaging 45 minutes, and since it takes me about 45 minutes to mow my lawn, it’s ideal. The problem is, I’m walking behind what is essentially an unmuffled internal combustion engine. It’s loud. Even with headphones on, I often have to turn the volume on the podcast all the way up. It’s probably not good for my ears, but I justify it by saying my eardrums have already stiffened to protect themselves from the noise of the lawnmower. (Didn’t know they did that, did you? They do. When faced with a barrage of noise, your ears will adjust to prevent damage. It’s why someone surprising you by yelling in your ear hurts, but someone yelling in your ear to be heard over top of a Justin Timberlake concert is fine.)

The problem comes in the fact that whoever is in charge of mixing Bill’s podcasts down sets the EQ such that sibilants, specifically S, are insanely loud. This is not something that’s difficult to fix, even if Bill is using a headset to record instead of, say, a quality microphone with a pop filter. Just pull down a specific frequency, and boom. Done.

Another of my favorite podcasts, “On The DL with Dan Levy,” suffers from a bizarre growl problem. Dan always sounds a bit like a chainsaw. The worst, however, is “Real Time with Bill Maher,” a podcast made from the regular HBO show. There, the problems aren’t EQ, but levels: Bill is always audible, but frequently his guests are not, and invariably the ambient mics they set up to get audience reactions are ear-blowing loud. Not just when I’ve the volume cranked to hear over my lawnmower, but also when I’m in my car, aka the most common place that people listen to podcasts. This is just laziness, really.

Excuses abound: Bill Maher’s techs are undoubtedly setting the fidelity for TV broadcast, not podcasting; the others are limited by the settings they use to try and get the size of the podcast under 10MB, the limit imposed by Apple and AT&T for downloading items over the 3G network.

Bull.

First of all, most of these podcasts aren’t under 10MB. Simmons has actually split some longer podcasts in two, supposedly to get under the limit, and they’re still 15MB chunks that I can’t enjoy until I go somewhere that has a wifi connection for my phone to access. The Bill Maher podcasts are routinely 15MB.

Second: somehow, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow‘s podcasts of their live MSNBC shows (each about 45 minutes long) somehow manage to get quality EQ and proper levelling of mics for hosts and guests, achieve a decent audio fidelity (no scratchiness), get the filesizes at around 9.8MB, and have them online by the morning after (unlike Bill Maher’s show, which is on 4 days later at the earliest, and often goes weeks without posting anything and then throws 3 or 4 shows up at once).

Sure, Maddow and Olbermann have quality recording equipment and professional engineers on staff to handle it, but I guarantee Maher does as well. And as a further counterpoint, James Lileks’s “Diner” podcasts always had fantastic sound, with what I assume to be a “prosumer”-level setup run by the journalist himself. (Lileks’s biggest problem at the moment is that, if he’s still doing diners [he may have stopped when he got busy being the all-media journalist for the Star-Tribune], they aren’t available on iTunes, and haven’t been for years.)

C’mon, guys, put a little effort into your podcasts. None of them need to be longer than 45 minutes, the perfect size to get a nicely adjusted recording under 10MB. Get on it.

This puts a grin on the face of any old-school tech dweeb, which I only barely qualify as, due to my beautiful youth. Enjoy: Bohemian Rhapsody on Atari 800XL, TI-99, 8-inch floppy, 3.5-inch hard drive, and HP ScanJet 3C.

Since more and more people are going out and purchasing iPhones, and since I also have an iPhone, I thought I’d make everybody’s life a little better and talk about what applications I have and love. Here’s an abbreviated list:

• TwitterFon – Free – my preferred Twitter reader. Shows your whole timeline, but scrolls down to the first message you haven’t seen, so you can pick up wherever you may have left off. Can also track your conversations, so if someone replies to you days later, you can see what post they were talking about. Kinda nice feature.


• Facebook – Free – Meh. You can see people’s updates, post pictures, poke through a few things, but it’s kind of annoying, frankly. You can’t view other people’s friend lists to browse for people you might know. You can’t search for folks. The way it links to things is ridiculous; if someone makes a comment on something, and you click it, you don’t get linked to whatever was commented on, you get linked to the commenter. Little annoyances. I rarely use it, actually, unless I can’t get to my lappy for a day or two and want to see if I’ve missed anything important.


• iMafia – Free – Mildly entertaining game in which you steal money, rob banks, buy real estate. You log in every four or five hours, do a few minutes of stuff, and then log back out so your resources build back up. Not time-consuming, but still fun.


• WordPress – Free – Oh yeah man, WordPress has an app. I’m just starting to play around with it, but I can use it to post without having to open Safari and do it through a webpage, which is kludgey even on the iPhone.


• MLB.com At Bat – $9.99 – One of the few applications I’ve paid for, but I can use it not only to follow live games in a VERY detailed manner, but listen to the radio feeds for any game. Yesterday I listened to the Red Sox/Yanks game at work. Also has detailed player information, so if you hear that Jason Varitek just hit a home run, you can quickly bring up his stats. Useful for fantasy, particularly if you were dumb enough to draft Jason Varitek.


• Evernote – Free – If you’re not familiar with the Evernote application, you should. You use it to store notes, pictures, sounds, all kinds of stuff, for later follow up. See something in a store, and want to see if you can order it online? Snap a pic with your phone and store it at Evernote, then when you get home you bring it up on your lappy and search Amazon. I don’t use it as often as I should (mostly I just email myself).


• Dictionary – Free – The application version of Dictionary.com. Good search tools, reads the words to you if you’re unsure about pronunciation.


• Cleartune – $3.99 – The first app I ever decided to purchase. It is a chromatic tuner, accurate to fractions of a cent (1/100 of a semi-tone). An electronic device that does ONLY this costs 10 times as much. It is so awesome.


• Metronome – Free – Uh…it’s a metronome.


• Midomi – Free – Cute gimmick. If you hear a song you like, but don’t know the name or artist, open up Midomi, hold your phone to the speaker, and it’ll tell you what the tune is. Pretty accurate, although it’s not of much use outside of pop/rock/country. No knowledge of classical, for example.


• Slacker Radio – Free – Music program along the lines of Pandora, in addition to telling it a song you like and then having it guess at other possibilities, Slacker has prebuilt stations along normal lines (top 40, indie rock, buncha classical channels, etc.) There is a paid version that has no ads and allows you to “skip” as often as you want. Normally you can only “skip” songs 6 times an hour, although if you run out of skips and something by “Lady Gaga” comes on you can always switch stations. I also have Pandora installed, but rarely use it.


• Public Radio – Free – Finds and tunes into your local public radio stations. Wanna listen to NPR but no AM radio is handy? This is your app.


• Baseball – Free – The compiled statistics for teams and players dating back to the 19th century. Nice.

I have a lot of other stuff, but don’t necessarily use it much, or find cause to recommend it. I also have a lot of games, but c’mon, the iPhone is a business tool.

I’m finally settling into a format, I think. I got rid of that weird freaky header and just have the picture of Charles, as you can see. Much better. The color format is kinda blasé, but we’ll work on that.

Jessica asked if that’s a tear there on Charles’s cheek; indeed it is. I took that in the kitchen about 45 seconds after putting my new Sigma 24mm f/1.8 lens on my DSLR, and he was the handiest thing to use to see how well it worked. As 34-month-old kids are wont to be, he had just been sobbing over some slight (I think Sarah refused to let him eat cat food, or something like that) so he’d been telling a tale of woe to Mr. G (his stuffed giraffe). As I snapped, he went from “sad” to “interested” to “smiling freakishly and yelling ‘cheese,'” a transformation that took something like 8 seconds.

Would that I could so easily change my mood. To get me from “sad” to “happy” requires two hours, a fifth of Aberlour, a bag of redhots, and 5 new episodes of the Simpsons.

BTW, something I forgot: if you’ve been following me via RSS (as you should obviously do, duh) you’re going to have to update your feed. Click the RSS button at the top right lower left to get the new link.

(Lamest post title, EVER.)

So, as you may have deduced from previous posts in which I said I got an iPhone, I got an iPhone. HW got one as well, as getting the AT&T family plan saves money! Even so, our monthly phone bill is going up by about 50%, which is a relatively small price to pay for having completely changed our lives for the better.

Am I comparing the iPhone to organized religion? Of course not. There’s no comparison. The iPhone is far better. I have an idea for a comic in which Steve Jobs crashes through a brick wall, yells “OH YEAH!” and then I and several of my friends drink his contents with straws. Get it? He contains and/or is made of KoolAid! A KoolAid that I drink from with extreme prejudice.

If you haven’t played with one yet, here’s how the iPhone delivers the awesome: it is a phone, an mp3 player, a “camera,” an organizer, and let’s face it the thing is just a computer in hand-held form. There is little I can do on my MacBook that I can’t do on my iPhone. I can’t really compose and record music, or do photoediting, but those are not things I’m likely to have to do while, say, driving to work.

The interaction is entirely through the touch screen, which is basically “Star Trek: The Next Generation” come to life. It doesn’t need many physical buttons because if you need to hit a button it will provide one for you on the screen, and through the magic of electricity it detects your finger and makes FUN.

I’ve downloaded, conservatively, 3,481 applications to it (3,300 of which I’ve later removed for being sucky), with an ease that is rivaled only by every other Apple product. Even better, it has the ability to interact directly with the iTunes store over the 3G cellular network, so you can download podcasts and songs directly. There’s even an app or 10 that helps you figure out what song you may be listening to somewhere by starting the app and holding the phone to the speaker. Whaaaaaa? Yes. It works; at the hockey game last week, a song came over the loudspeakers that could be described as “reasonably boss,” and I just started the Midomi app and held my phone in the air. 10 seconds later, it reported: “Into Philadelphia,” by “IKE.” Whoever that is. Either way, I downloaded the tune on Amazon later (I don’t fully trust Apple’s DRM situation yet) and ’twas rad. It even has the ability to connect to local WiFi networks, if you want to do some hardcore downloads.

Okay, there are a few cons, that I’ve so far discovered:

• The keyboard, being completely non-tactile, can be challenging. It’s easier in landscape mode (in many applications, if you turn the phone sideways, an accelerometer in the phone detects this and turns the display to match…totally sweet), where the keyboard is wider, but you can’t do this in email or SMS text mode, also known as the applications where this would be most useful. That’s something I’d like to see fixed in an update, Apple.
• The iTunes system limits you to downloading files no larger than 10MB if you’re using the 3G cellular network. If you want anything bigger, which includes a lot of audio podcasts and virtually every videocast, you need to find a WiFi network or download it on your regular computer and sync it over. This is frustrating because the place where I’m most likely to want to download podcasts is at work, where we have no WiFi network and I can’t get to the iTunes store, let alone actually install iTunes on my work lappy. If I remember, I’ll grab them at home, but I am not good at remembering.
• Some of the applications are, let’s say, a tad unstable. Right now things are working okay, but sometimes I’ll install or uninstall an app, and suddenly almost every other downloaded app just crashes on startup. I usually have to delete and reinstall something, and then they all work fine. Weird, and a little disconcerting, given Apple’s usual reliability.
• The camera kinda sucks. The resolution isn’t actually too bad (I think it’s 2MP, which is about on par with a cheap digital camera from 2002), but there’s no flash, and the sensor is pretty noisy. It seems to do okay outdoors, but indoors, even with reasonably strong light, the pictures are fairly horrible; blurry and lots of artifacts. Also, it doesn’t do video. What the hell? Even my Crapberry does video.

Okay, that’s enough negativity. Let me tell you about some of the other awesomes:

• You can put Pandora on this thing, and it’s actually astoundingly reliable. No lag, no pauses in the tunes. It just does its Pandora thing. After I installed that, I also found the in-many-ways-better Slacker Radio, which just presents you with dozens of radio stations, instead of having you seed your own with song requests. You can still tell it to get rid of tunes you don’t like with the “ban” function, and you can mark favorites for more-frequent playing. Like Pandora, you’re limited as to how many songs you can ban or skip in an hour (6), but unlike Pandora you can upgrade to a paid version that lets you skip as much as you want. There’s also a Public Radio app, that basically finds the non-commercial radio stations to you and links you to their web feeds. Obviously you can just do this via FM if you have a regular radio handy, but you can also find stations all over the country, not just the ones nearest you.
• GPS. Oh, the GPS. It can do so many things. Obviously, it comes with a map application (Google Maps, in fact), but you can allow any application to use it, so people have come up with stuff that uses it to find local restaurants of great deliciousness (Urbanspoon) or even just track your own movements, if you find it useful to know where you’ve been (like after jogging or biking, if you want to know your distance). There’s even an app that automates finding your car, if you’re parked somewhere in a big city and got kinda lost.
• The Safari browser is so pimp compared to the Blackberry browser that I can’t even describe it. If you have Blackberry Curve, you know how you can’t view half of all websites because they’re too large or complicated for the BB browser to handle? Yeah, the iPhone doesn’t have that problem. You know how the BB browser handles java like I handle discussions of testicular surgery (lots of fainting and dispersions cast on my manliness)? The iPhone doesn’t have that problem.

  It doesn’t have Flash yet, which is weak, but apparently Top Men are Working On It.

• You know how, if you have your Blackberry set up for IMAP to a regular email account, deletions from a webmail or Outlook client aren’t reflected on the Blackberry? Yeah, not a problem with the iPhone. It was a little frustrating setting up my matthearn.com email address because I don’t have SSL working, but a little googling and I had it down. And this thing allows me to view all my folders (well, 200 messages max in each, but still), unlike the Blackberry which just sees my Inbox.
• I should stop burning the Blackberry, but the Facebook app for Blackberry sucks. You can see stuff, but can’t do much. The iPhone one works great, although it has some of its own problems (clicking on some of your notifications of photo comments doesn’t take you to the photo, but to the commenter’s wall).

HW is not as thoroughly excited about her iPhone, mostly because her last phone was made by Archimedes during his downtime between Peloponnesian Wars, and she’s confused by modern technology. But she’ll come around. I’ll have to buy her a MacBook Pro for Christmas, which is fine with me.

In which I hate technology, and technology hates me right back.(All up in my grill, yo.)

It’s heck of warm out today (low 60s), so, being a forward-thinking individual, I thought to myself yesterday “I should TOTALLY go running at work and try to eliminate the enormous amount of fat located between my crotch and my boobs,” and brought in running clothes and a towel to store in my locker downstairs in the poop room that has showers. And lo, I took an early lunch, went out, and ran 2.75 miles before the agonizing chest pain and developing foot blister made me stop.

Have I reached my point yet? Not even remotely.

So I came back in, showered, and grabbed lunch, which consisted of a Salisbury “Steak” made of, as far as I can tell, pressed gerbil cremains, along with green beans and cheesy potatoes au gratin (a quality side, to be sure). A few hours later, I realized I was still pretty hungry, so I said to myself, oh man, the SNACK machine will hook me up with FLAVOR.

So I wandered into the snack room, bought a bottle of Diet Coke, and then studied the snack machine for delectables. Sure enough, they had some kind of Apple/Cinnamon-flava’d Danish, all over which I desired to jump. I attempted to stick my dollar into the machine, but was foiled! It would accept no bills. And I had just used the bulk of my change on my drink. Bemused, I pressed a few buttons on the front of the machine, which showed no sign of even being powered on. Argh!

I wandered aimlessly around the halls, looking for another snack machine, and finally found one. Sadly, it had no Apple/Cinnamon-flava’d Danish. It did, however, have a three pack of chocolate cupcakes of the type I subsisted on in high school, so I inserted my dollar and pressed the proper buttons. The machine whirred for a moment, then beeped, and a small light appeared next to some words reading “Please make another selection.”

“What?” I replied. “But the other selections are not what I desire. Don’t mess with me, machine, I COLD RAN 2.75 MILES EARLIER AND AM NOT ONE WITH WHICH YOU SHOULD TRIFLE.” And I pressed the buttons again.

“Please make another selection.”

I tried to outwit the machine by requesting my dollar back, which came back in quarters, and inserting exact change, but I came to the conclusion that whoever inserted the latest supply of foodstuffs had improperly loaded the chocolate cupcakes. In the end I realized that the machines were involved in some kind of conspiracy not to sell me anything that might increase the amount of lipids bonded semi-permanently to my stern. I relented, bought a small package of peanut butter crackers, and went back to my desk to weep silently.

I’ve had my Sanyo Katana for almost four months now, so I figure it’s time a little review, so I can let you know whether or not it’s awesome or Teh Suczk.

You may recall my short post a few months ago when I bought it and alerted the world that you could actually call me (the previous phone had been broken for a while). At the time, I was totally enamored with my new little flip-phone, and now that the initial puppy love has dissipated, it’s time to take a hard look at the pros and cons, yo.

Pros:

• It’s super-slim. Seriously, it’s like a half-inch thick. It would fit comfortably in the rear pocket of my jeans, even with my gigundous black girl booty, if I wasn’t afraid of sitting on it and crushing it with Teh Fatne$$.
• I can hear people on it, and they can hear me. This may seem like a basic thing, but after the problems I had with the last phone, this is a major improvement.
• HUGE screen. For websurfing it’s still a tad small, but I was able to download Google Maps’ free mobile client for it, and now I never get lost! Which is teh sweet.

Cons:

• You can use it as a wireless broadband device, which is pretty cool, but Sprint wants you to pay $40 a month for the service. With Sarah’s phone, which is a bit older, you can do it for free. What a gyp. $40 a month, which is about what I pay for 3Mb/s cable modem access, for something no faster than about a 38400-baud modem. No thanks, losers.
• The ringtones are too soft. All the ringers are too soft, in my opinion. Most of the time, that’s good, since I don’t need the thing playing the theme from “The Greatest American Hero” (Sarah’s personal ringtone) at 110 decibels while I’m at, say, the proctologist, but when I’m driving in my car and singing along with “My Sweet Escape” by Gwen Stefani, I usually can’t hear it. Which of course is when wives, when they are pregnant, go into labor. (Note: HW is NOT currently pregnant, for which she thanks Baby Jesus.)
• This is a biggie: the stupid side button keyguard is set up in the most ridiculous possible way. The phone, like many others, has little buttons on the side that perform a variety of tasks, like controlling volume, scrolling through the phonebook, and, while the phone is closed, activating the speaker phone and dialing the most recent number. Since I keep my phone in my pocket, and since I wear very, very tight pants, this is bad, because if I don’t turn on the keyguard the phone continually dials people, the end result of which is my father-in-law saying “hello? hello?” over and over again to my junk.

  Not cool.

  You’d think you could just set the keyguard and not have a problem, but get this: you can disable the keyguard by just holding the button down long enough. Which happens at least twice a week because, as I mentioned, I WEAR TIGHT PANTS. (Everything’s tight when you are 45% ass.) This is the major flaw in the phone, in my opinion; I’m hoping they issue a firmware patch that allows you to completely disable the side buttons when the phone is closed.

Final verdict? A solid B+, which is far better than any other phone I’ve had. (The last phone probably started out a B and ended up as an F———— because by the end it didn’t actually function as a phone; it was more like a $30 a month pocket watch.)