Month: March 2006

From Denmark and back

Shopping for a Bluetooth headset makes you feel a bit like Goldilocks: you have to search a long time to find one that’s just right. BT headsets must be one of the last bastions of technology where you can still spend hundreds of dollars on something that doesn’t even work. It’s not like they’re brand new either.

bluetoothheadsets.jpg

*Motorola H500*
My first BT headset. No one could ever hear what I was saying. The mic is too far away from your mouth and pressed against your temple. Maybe the Moto engineer responsible has a very big maw or has a very small face…

*Motorola H700* [pictured, left]
The extendable boom makes it easier for people to hear me. Inbound sound quality is so-so and the noise cancellation is sometimes too zealous. Other factors weren’t great but not bad. The real deal killer was that I couldn’t even put my skinny arm between my phone and the headset without getting static. I really wanted to like this headset.

*Sony Ericsson HBH-610A*
I borrowed this from a co-worker for an afternoon. It’s got awesome range – I think I walked 20 feet and through a wall and still no static. A bit bulky, but if that’s what it needs to work, then so be it. I would have bought this except the ear loop was too rigid – after several minutes of use, my ear was in pain.

*Plantronics Discovery 640* [pictured, right]
Outbound sound quality is almost as good as my phone. Inbound is very loud and clear. It comes with a trio of sized silicone ear gels that are incredibly comfortable – so no more ear loops. It’s small and sexy looking. Finally, the radio range is several feet. In other words, just right.

Like that stupid robot says at the end of Millennium…

mrG whimsically writes about the so-called End of the World, kickin’ it live Mayan style in 2012:

The elders add that the tipping point acceding to the Fifth Sky doesn’t actually tip on its own; we must use our inner magic to tip it — Sun Ra told us we can change our destiny if we just ask Fate, when Fate is in a pleasant mood; on 12-12-21, say the Mayan elders, Fate will be in a very good mood indeed.

I personally love how he describes the death-and-rebirth prophecy to a laudromat – “changes in cycles are essential stages in any cleansing process”.

Real life spam

a920%20SSPX0027%20Vigora.jpg I saw this sign in front of a health food store on Bloor West Village. It’s for Vigora!

The first thing that came to my mind was those old Ricola commercials, the one with the Swedish yodeler and his, er, giant horn. Is that wrong?

Is it a knockoff of Viagra? Heavens no. They probably never heard of it. Just a coincidence. This is Vigora we’re talking about! Apparently it’s all natural, herbal, tested only on volunteer animals, and just super great. Or words to this effect. Personally, I find the only way to keep my “partner smiling for a week” – as the sign attests in that nudge nudge wink wink way – is to buy her a bag of tortilla chips and seven layer dip.

But hey, chicks dig guys who take placebos from signs written in endearing but broken English. I’ll let the sign speak for itself: “Get Super Energy!”

Property tax

Mother Jones has a short article listing some of the stranger side effects of today’s intellectual property laws in the United States.

NEARLY 20% of the 23,688 known human genes are patented in the United States. Private companies hold 63% of those patents.

RENTAMARK.COM makes money by claiming ownership of 10,000 phrases, including “chutzpah,” “casual Fridays,” “.com,” “fraud investigation,” and “big breasts.”

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.’s estate charges academic authors $50 for each sentence of the “I Have a Dream” speech that they reprint.

Although I must say, they’re wrong about the Bettman Archive: it isn’t buried underground to deny the world its treasures, but to preserve it. But the other examples are sadly true – yes, most people have never heard “I Have a Dream”, unless their school downloaded it (illegally, according to copyright laws).

Tom Vu and Robert Kiyosaki

Real estate mogul John Reed has written a lengthy but comprehensive deconstruction and critique of the book, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” [via MetaFilter] and its author, Robert Kiyosaki. Basically, Reed argues Kiyosaki’s advice to be useless at best, and his claims of fame and fortune unlikely. Even the very existence of the “Rich Dad” are brought into question, as well as much of Kiyosaki’s own biographical information:

There are probably many ways to became a financial genius, but Kiyosaki has certainly chosen an unlikely route:

* flunked sophomore year of high school and had to repeat
* U.S. Merchant Marine Academy
* 3rd mate oil tanker (or was it “Love Boat” type cruise ship?)
* Marine helicopter pilot (or was it fighters?)
* refused to return to ship when it was ordered to return to combat (or just missed the boat)
* Xerox salesman
* failed businessman (nylon surfer wallets)
* failed businessman (rock and roll memorabilia)
* failed author (1993 book If You Want to Be Rich & Happy, Don’t Go To School?)
* failed MBA student
* homeless person
* bankruptcy (or maybe not)

We have this book sitting on our shelf, and while I don’t share Reed’s feelings that it can cause financial disaster to those who follow it, it is pretty much the standard feel-good and vacuous fare that the Oprah Book Club just loves to lap up. Not surprisingly, like “Million Little Pieces”, it seems to be little more than a fanciful story, despite being categorized as non-fiction.

Mind you, Kiyosaki succeeds because he’s got razzle dazzle, and Reed himself could use a bit of razzle dazzle in his own work; since he is a self-professed millionaire, he really should invest in a website designer.

P.S. More financial schadenfreude: H&R Block, the tax return service for people who can’t or won’t fill out forms properly, discovers it miscalculated its own income tax by $32 million.

Jive is no turkey

sammya920%20003.jpgThe ol’ Samsung A500‘s hinge has been loosening up the past few months, and finally in January the LCD backlight broke. It was $80 to repair, and $99 to get a brand new phone, and my contract was nearing an end, so it was a no-brainer.

I picked up the Samsung a920, aka the Jive. I spent a Saturday squinting and angling the darkened screen of my old phone at the sun to copy down my phonebook. This is the fourth Samsung I’ve had the pleasure of purchasing, and I find it fascinating to trace the design lineage. With every phone that is released, features are added, removed, honed and improved.

It’s called the Jive for a good reason. There’s the unlimited EV-DO Internet access (once you had a taste of its ~1Mbps speeds you’ll never go back), the intelligent voice-dialling, an MP3 player with exterior stereo speakers, mobile TV, uncrippled Bluetooth, a megapixel camera/camcorder with flash and an expandable memory slot.

There’s also a few fine adjustments that make it a pleasure to use. For example, you can now toggle vibrate and ringer volume separately. The phone contains both the flat and pinhole power outlets, so you can charge the phone with any Samsung charger. The grey rubber outlet plugs that graced the older Samsungs which eventually got grubby, rotted away, and finally fell off has been replaced with flush mounted, colour-matching, hard plastic plugs on hinges.

There are a few beefs, though. For example, the a920 now remembers multiple missed calls vs. the a500’s one, but then the phone doesn’t remember the __times__ the calls were received. The phone is relatively big – it’s actually slightly bigger than my last phone.

There’s another complaint other users have had – low battery life – but I suspect it’s because everyone’s been spending every uneventful moment surfing the web or playing __Doom RPG__ and __Zuma__, like me!

Bonus: My favourite Bell Mobility “pixel” ad, featuring the a920.