I am now plus one Lenovo S10-3 netbook. Seems fun. The Fry's in Burbank had a much better selection of them than the one in Houston. Also, I couldn't get anyone at the Fry's in Houston to talk to me (at least nobody in the computer department). The touchpad is ... OK. Still getting used to it. The IdeaPad I played with in the store was apparently an S10-2, which had actual physical mouse buttons just below the touchpad; the one I took home has a single-piece thing which looks nice but is a bit awkward if you want to click and drag.
The thing that really surprised me about the netbooks is the lack of Bluetooth support. Bluetooth isn't great for a lot of things because it's not blazing fast, but ... it is great for things like wireless mice, cell phones, headphones, and so on. No stores I went to had any netbooks with built-in Bluetooth in stock; online I found an HP Mini 210 with a Bluetooth option, but the Mini 210 in the store didn't have it. I ended up with a dongle, which is fine but it eats up a USB port and sticks out the side a bit. Oh well.
Historical note: the N8 was, and still is, awesome. I still have it and somehow it still works.
The e-mail thing works now! I don't know why it wasn't working before, and I didn't really do anything to fix it, but it started working. Whatever.
In other Nokia news: the N8 looks AWESOME. *drool*
Got my tax refund, and promptly spent it. My $400 "make working pay" (or whatever it was called) bonus went entirely to car parts, and then some. I also blew a bunch of money at Target, TJ Maxx, and Home Depot. That's right: I used my tax refund to help the economy. You're welcome!
Nokia has a push e-mail service that you can hook your personal e-mail account in to; it is a backend for a Blackberry-like service which I find VERY convenient. Their e-mail application on the phone leaves a little to be desired, but overall it's stable and it works. The only trouble I've had, since the beginning, is that I can receive e-mail just fine, but sending never worked through their service. I had always worked around this by either not replying until I got home, or sending MMS messages to e-mail if something was time critical, or using a second e-mail client that worked for sending (but didn't support HTML). Kind of gross.
Supposedly, the thing that was keeping me from sending e-mail was fixed, so I was fiddling around with that, uninstalling and reinstalling and such trying to get it to work.
The outcome of that (about half an hour of fiddling and cursing) is that I still can't send e-mail, but now all of the e-mails in my inbox between 3/3 and today are gone. That's a lot of e-mail ... I keep a messy inbox. I'm very annoyed.
Historical note: @wilwheaton has since been run off twitter.
Got my phone back today! I'm in the process of putting everything back on it, but I'm very happy. In addition to not charging to replace the keypad lock key, they also replaced the camera lens, which was a bit scratched. They also tossed a $10 gift card in the box, which is pretty freaking neat. They refreshed the standard software load on the phone, which includes a lot of stuff I don't want (Bloomberg: never use it; Elle: who cares? CNN Video: never use it; ESPNsoccernet: never use it; Facebook: not on Facebook; Friendster: whatever; MySpace: not on MySpace; etc etc etc), but that's not too surprising. They do have the Amazon.com application installed, which is cool because I actually liked having that one and for some reason it's not on the Ovi store.
So now I'm going through the process of installing all of the stuff that goes on the phone. It takes a little while, but when it's done I've got my MP3 player (currently 25GB of MP3s on the phone), GPS (preloading maps speeds up the GPS software significantly).
As I go through the process, I'm noticing more cool stuff that never appeared before. For all of the little applications installed on the phone, they stuck the actual install files on the phone too, so I can re-install them without having to poke around Ovi store. This is especially nice for the Amazon.com application, since it's not on the Ovi store. Also, they stuck a bunch of random MP3s of actual music on there. Neat! It's actually good music, too. Also: they appear to have preloaded ALL of their maps onto the phone. That helps explain why the 36GB internal storage only has 28GB free (road maps of the entire planet take up about 1.6GB). Not going to complain, though I was going to dump those on the microSD card instead of the internal storage. But it takes a while to download all of that, so ... score! I'll take it!
The N97 hasn't been a perfect phone, and Nokia was a bit slow to react to some of the problems. However: the latest firmware update has resolved a lot of problems, and it seems like they treated me right with this bit of hardware trouble I had. I feel much better about Nokia today than I did a week ago. Nokia appears to have officially acknowledged that they screwed up with the phone and their handling of it, which is somewhat unusual so that's nice. Maybe I'll buy the N98 after all ...
Update: It's around 11:30pm, I'm still working on this. Went to add some stuff to the front page of the phone. All of the options I expected at this point, plus: "wilwheatons Tweets." Huh? That's new ...
Worked on the hovercraft some more yesterday. Got the engine mount figured out ... it's not perfect, but it looks like it'll work pretty well. We also did a little work on the engine cover. It was a moderately productive afternoon, considering we only had a few hours to spend on it. I think in a couple of weeks, we may have this thing hovering again!
Before next weekend I'm going to do some cleanup tasks on it; sanding drips in the paint and rasping off a particularly ugly jigsaw cut we made last night so that the engine cover would fit right. Onward!
Historical note: I'll say that Nokia was really good about warranty repairs. Also, fuck Stephen Elop for destroying the company.
On the plus side: my cell phone is on its way back from the Nokia repair center. Supposedly. I've got a UPS tracking number, but it's not in the system yet. Surprisingly, the phone was fixed free, under warranty, even though the warranty specifically excludes physical damage. Perhaps they backed down a bit on that for this particular problem, since apparently it happens to a lot of people. The sliding unlock switch is definitely a questionable design.
Really anxious to get the phone back. It's amazing how quickly you get used to certain features. Browsing the web, alarms, watching movies, connecting the phone to the computer, opening files, GPS, nice camera, etc.
whine
Saw 2012 the other day. What a ridiculous movie. It was fun to watch the disasters unfolding, but every time someone opened their mouth, they said something stupid. Also, as a general rule, everyone's actions were always stupid (except for the "bad guy" who turned out to have practical ideas that nobody listened to). It also appeared that the fate of humanity was that most of the smart people died, while the rich, well-connected, and/or tricky survive. Could Idiocracy be the sequel to this movie?
2.5 hours I wish I could get back.