I purchased some cordless headphones a while back on eBay. Two comments:
1) eBay needs to have a non-smoking symbol for products. These bitches smelled like smoke for a month after I got them, and I think it discolored some of the rubber on them. I would never buy from a smoker for any product that I am going to wrap around my head.
2) The brand is InfraSound and it basically has an ifrared base that transmits to the headphone with receivers on either ear. The work ok, but they seem to be getting interference from my monitor, and GOD forbid if I turn my head the wrong direction or raise my hand to adjust the volume (which is located on the bottom side of the ear) and block the receiver... whole fuzz sound, batman. You would think that they could cancel out the fuzz and not bust your ear drums every time the signal cannot be received.

Anyways, don't waste your money if Smoky Smokerton from Smokerville is trying to sell you some cordless infrared headphones, it will be money poorly spend.

So I had previously mentioned Skype and GoToMeeting as good tools... but here are some other open source projects that I would recommend.

• For Zipping, screw WinZip, checkout 7-Zip
  
• For saving documents to PDF checkout CutePDF Writer (you will need the writer and the converter
  
• For Cool Windows tools like Graphical AltTabs, and an enhanced calculator and a unix like window manager, check out XP PowerToys from the windows developers
  

So I really like these two videos from this band OK Go. I know that they have pretty much hit it big time, but since my Mom still reads this blog I figured I would help keep her in the know and show the two videos that pretty much secured their fate as the coolest homemade movie band ever.

Video #1: A Million Ways
This video caused a dancing revolution across high school world wide. I have seen countless teenagers reinact this dance...



Video #2: Here It Goes Again
The follow up video, which I don't find quite as funny, but still entertaining and the whole speed skating look across the tread mills is pretty cool.



For more check out their MySpace page or their videos on YouTube.

For any of you living in the Silicon Valley, you should go check out my friend Darren at the Code Camp this weekend at the Foothill College in Los Altos Hills.

Sherry and I both got new phones this week. Always fun to get a new phone :)

I am excited about this one, it seems to have access to the web down, and at much faster speeds. It is the new Samsung a900 by Sprint. My major complaint is that it does not easily sync to outlook, but that just made me look harder at ways to get around this.

I tried different freeware programs and different services (like AirSet which is kinda cool, but I don't want to have a special app just to have my contacts and calendar up to date). But nothing yet. I did find an open source project BitPim that will eventually get around to it I imagine but they have not added support for the a900 yet.

I have already uploaded my Jack Johnson CD (On and On) and taken video of a burning car that I passed on the way to the airport, and pictures of Sherry and Noah. I will be able to send video mail easily I think so those of you in the inner circle get ready.

In my explorations I did find (and play with) some cool tools to add anything you want as a Java app to the phone. Below are the details:

Borrowed from the Sprint Users Forum

So I got bored last night and started exploring my a900's file system to see what I could see. I didn't realize it when I first used QPST, but you can in fact use QPST to upload files, this made me very happy. So what follows is how to fill up the 11mb of allotted space on your A900 without having to use uploading sites

First head out to http://www.samsung.com and search for A900 drivers. Download and install them, then reboot (Yes, you must reboot)

Next, download and install QPST if you don't already have it (seriously, just search google for QPST2_7.zip, you WILL find it)

Call Sprint (*2) and ask a rep for the MSL for your phone. They will give it to you with no problems, if you get an ass on the line, thank him/her for their time, hang up and try again.

Once you have your MSL, start up QPST from your start menu and click the "Ports" tab. Click "Add new port" and type in COM3 for both fields. If your phone doesn't come up on that one then try also adding COM4.

Once your phone shows up in the Active Phones field click the "Start Clients" menu and click "EFS Explorer"

Put your MSL in the SPC field and click OK. Let EFS explore traverse your file system.

Now comes the fun part which I'm going to copy and paste from notepad, hopefully it will be nice and complete for you

Browse to /brew/mod/obione/jas/index/ In there you'll find a bunch of .txt files, these files are references to all the custom files on your phone. 1.txt and 2.txt are OnDemand and Sprint Music Store, respectively. The rest are the various demos sprint has put on your phone from the factory.

What you want to do is find the .txt file for what you want to upload. If you want to upload an app grab 8.txt, which is the Weather Channel reference file. If you want to upload a game, grab 3.txt (tetris demo). im or email app - 10.txt. ringer - 12.txt. screen saver - 13.txt.

Once it's on your computer, save it to the next available number for that directory (the largest number in mine is 15.txt, so i would rename 8.txt to 16.txt).

For games, apps and IM/Email apps:

1. Open up your .txt file and change JARF to 16 and JADF to 16 (in my example). If you don't have a jad for the file I think you can leave the number field blank.
2. Right click on the jar you want to upload and put the size in bytes of the file into MSIZ
3. The PERM field is what you would find under settings. there are six menu items when you view settings on a file using your phone, and coincidentally there is a 0 based array of 6 fields in the PERM field with different values:
0 - Network
1 - Location (GPS)
2 - File Connection
3 - PIM
4 - Sprint Extensions
5 - Bluetooth
4. If you want you can change the download URL (DURL), but it's not that important.
5. You'll obviously want to change the NAME and VEND fields to their respective values (JAMDAT Bowling, JAMDAT Mobile, Inc. - for JAMDAT bowling)
6. After you've done that find the .JAD and .JAR you want to upload and rename them to (in my example) 16.jad and 16.jar
7. Click and drag your .txt file into the /brew/mod/obione/jas/index/ directory, and click and drag your jad and jar files into the /brew/shared/jas/content/ directory
8. Check your games or apps directory for what you've just uploaded and rejoice in knowing that you don't have to pay for data rates anymore

For Ringers and Screen savers:
*I haven't actually done either of these, but judging by the layout of the reference file it would be pretty easy.*

1. Open up your .txt file and change CONF and CONH to the next available number (16 in my example).
2. As for TYPE, the sample video ringer has video/3gpp and the screen saver has image/x-pmd. I'm guessing these are just your standard mime-types, so feel free to put whatever you need in here to get it working.
3. Right click the file you are uploading and put the size in bytes into the SIZE field
4. Change the path to shared/jas/content/16.gc (in my example)
5. And then of course you can change the NAME and VEND fields to suit your needs.
6. Change the name of the file you are uploading to 16.gc (in my example).
7. Click and drag your .txt file into the /brew/mod/obione/jas/index/ directory, and click and drag your media file into the /brew/shared/jas/content/ directory
8. Check your respective folder on your phone to see if it works.

The CATE (category) field is described as follows:
1 - Games
2 - Ringers
4 - Screen Savers
8 - Apps
16 - IM & Email
256 - Sprint stuff

For those of you that don't know. I took a job at Koders, Inc. The adventure with my step-father, VyMed Data Services, do not work out as I hoped, but I feel like I am in a better place now.

Koders was started by a fraternity brother of mine at Georgia Tech. He started it around 2 years ago, and we are having some great success now as a company, too early to talk about some of them now, but hopefully I will be able to point you to some press releases soon.

But I wanted to talk about the basics of what you need to work from home, aka telecommute. Our team consists of people in Santa Monica, CA, one person in San Francisco, CA, a few developers in St Petersberg, Russia, and myself in Jacksonville, FL. So how do we keep up the communication while keeping the costs down?

Answer: Skype and GoToMeeting.

Skype is a free IP based service that lets you call other Skype users as well as other land based phones. We sometimes hold sales calls with skype. It also supports video calls, so I am virtually in the room with the other developers most of the day, because they have a dedicated computer setup to host a "Max Headroom" version of myself.

And then when it comes to do paired programming or when I need help, I simple create a GoToMeeting session and share my screen so that others can view it while we talk about thing over Skype. I can also give them control over my computer so that they can control my keyboard and mouse from their computer.

The total cost of this setup for a year is $39 a month.

What do you call it when you basically punk yourself? I was looking at an old post of mine and fell for the trick that I was trying to get all the readers to fall for. So I guess I will just cal it a Sotcha (for Self Gotcha).

If you are curious the link was here.

Does anyone still read this? If so then here is what is going to happen. I have decided that I am going to blog things that I find interesting, funny or just plain stupid. I have finally changed jobs to a company that fits me perfectly and I am being exposed to a bunch of cool new things. These things are going to be technical and I am not going to slow down for those of you that don't understand. So hold on tight cause I am going to lay down some science here, and be painfully honest... because my hiatus has taught me that, honesty and introspection along with pointing people to something new is that makes for a good read.

And for those of you wondering... here is why I have been so slack about posting: