Day In The Life of Baz

Sigh, I don’t even really know where to begin. I finally got a hold of this new phone of mine and I’m having a problems with it. If you don’t know this phone, it’s the Silver Plum as I like to call it. It’s supposed to be Samsung’s answer to Motorola’s SLVR L7.

The Good

There are a few things that I like about this phone: it’s thin, it’s slick, it’s stylish, and the display looks good. I also like the navigation they got on this phone. The main menu has nine (9) items on it. When you pull up one, the nice thing is that you can move to the other menus by hitting left and right. This means you can go from the Phonebook to Messages without having to exit Phonebook and hunting for Messages. This premise also works for submenus; in messages you can go from the Inbox to Sent messages just like that.

While we’re on the subject of messages. There is something that I experienced with my old phone, the Nokia 6101. You couldn’t go from one message to the next. I mean, what gives? You wake up one morning and have 5 new messages. You read the first one, then have to exit, scroll, THEN go to the next message. That really sucked. So I’m glad that Samsung has made things a little bit easier in this respect.

I came straight over from millionster.com who has a horror story about 1and1 hosting , which would easily qualify for any Dean Koontz novel. Reading it makes you want to cringe, it sure made me want to.

What I Hate

There are things that I don’t like about 1and1:

1. They give you these cryptic logins for your MySQL account and for your FTP username.
2. They host MySQL databases on different servers, so all your PHP scripts that naturally go to localhost will have to have something else defined.
3. There is no statistics package installed. Now AwStats or anything and you don’t have access to the logs so you can’t install your own.
4. And they are shared, and shared hosts in general usually suck.

What I Like

There are a few things I like about them:

1. They’re cheap
2. They’re low priced
3. They’re inexpensive
4. They allow multiple domains.

Looks like we have a tie: 4-4 :-). But seriously, 1and1 hasn’t given me much of a problem since I’ve signed up to them about 7 months ago. I just renewed my subscription and purchased two new domains from them.

Now I’ve seen a number of people talking about PassPack. It’s, well, an online password management system. You can store all your passwords here s othat in the rare event that you forget them, you’ll have something to fall back on.

Now, not trying to be difficult, but I just don’t feel comfortable with the whole idea. I’ll give a try anyways and I’ll keep you guys posted But my real use for it would be for those User IDs that some sites think they need to give you: long and numerical. Can’t I just pick a username like I do on thousands of other sites? Oh well. My web host seems to find it funny to dynamically generate my FTP login. I wonder if that’s because I have the cheapest plan possible?

Also check out the PassPack Blog for latest news.

Popularity: 11%

So you live in Wichita Falls, TX and you decide Easter is coming up so you’re going to take some time off and go on vacation. Paris, France should be nice this time of your right? So you head over to Orbitz.com and look up the cost of a flight only to be disappointed at the outrageous cost of tickets right now. What’s the alternative? You could always swim.

Hey, it’s not my idea. It comes straight from our friends at Google Maps. So I was trying to find out how long it takes to get from Wichita Falls, to Paris, TX. The guys at Google thought it would be funny to map out my trip to Paris, TX instead.

Now here’s the real hilarious part, check out step 30: “Swim across the Atlantic”. Yes people, we’re swimming. This from the same people who brought you error messages such as “Oops, something went wrong. Try again in a few minutes” or “Keep your fingers crossed and try again”. So I guess it’s really not that unexpected. Very funny though. Click the images for a direct link to the map.

Popularity: 9%

The Specs

After selling my computer a while back, I got parts for a new one. It was cheaper to purchase parts and build a computer than to get a ready-made system. Here are the specifications on what I got:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600
• 256M Radeon X1300PRO GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card
• KWORLD PCI Interface TV Tuner Card
• 1 GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Memory
• LITE-ON 18X DVD±R DVD Burner
• Hanns·G Black 19″ 5ms Widescreen LCD Monitor
• 250 GB SATA Hard Drive + Plus one of my old 120 GB IDE Hard Drives
• Some cheap Creative Labs Speakers (In a noise free apartment complex)