Category: Uncategorized

Hey Sprint! Wanna lose my business after something like 10 years of continuous service? Fucking call me one more time and try to offer me “New, great services”

Stupid assholes.

I realized this morning that it’s been a really long time since I’ve gone to a music store and bought a CD. I’m not sure when the last one was.

I used to be really proud of my CD collection, and I guess I’m still proud of my music collection but there’s no longer a growing pile on my floor to show it off. Just a hard drive waiting to crash.

The reason for this, of course, is iTunes. I’ve always bought my music whether it was in plastic form or download form. It’s not really a legal vs. illegal or moral vs. immoral thing. I’ve always just wanted the best quality and that came in CD form. When the iTunes Music Store went live I decided their 128k AAC format was “good enough” and I’ve spent a lot of money there since.

iTunes just makes it so damn easy to buy music. I’ve always been the type of person to buy an album cause I like one song I heard and now it happens all the time. I’ll hear a song on XM, or the radio, or in a movie and I have the entire album like 10 minutes later. Talk about appealing to my restless nature.

I’ve had all my music on my computer since about 1999. Back then I ripped all my CDs using a really bad MP3 encoder and I recently had to do it all over again. So I’m starting to wonder why I’m keeping all the CDs. I don’t think I’ve actually put one in a CD player in years so they are just taking up space. I could probably sell them for a few thousand dollars, too. Of course, that would be illegal and immoral.

It’s funny, if I want to take an album with me on CD it’s usually faster to put a blank in the computer and burn it from iTunes than to find the CD in the pile.

The only problem with all of this is that if Apple ever suddenly goes out of business, or gets sued into oblivion, or even if their server is just down one day, I can’t listen to my music.

For a while I was converting all my iTunes music to straight AAC without DRM using JHymn but then Jon Lech Johansen (dvdjon) moved to the US, found out about girls, money, good food and wine and stopped working on it. Now the options are pretty slim and pretty much don’t work.

Was there a point here?

I’ve been super busy recently with vimoMail, vPod 2.0 and two other new projects that are still so secret that I’d have to hack your computer and delete all records of me ever saying anything if I said anything. That doesn’t mean I’m not still acting like a idiot on the weekends. I’m just too busy to write about it.

What else? I’ve got about 7000 miles on my bike now. Since March 31st. And… no one is buying vimoMail. Please buy vimoMail.

After a whole bunch of work and hiding in my cave of software development vimoMail is now for sale! vimoMail is a Java J2ME mail client for phones. It supports POP, IMAP, SMTP and all kinds of other good stuff. Go check it out!

This project has been a lot of fun, and will continue to be. It’s been a great learning experience. I learned a ton about J2ME, re-learned a bunch of Ruby + Rails, learned about SMS gateways and got to write some Java that actually requires decent performance, which is a big change from the norm.

Hopefully everyone thinks they just can’t live without vimoMail and I get absurdly rich. Yea!

Last night I missed my Mom for the first time since her death last August.

I’ve thought about her since she died, but I just never really had a moment where I missed her presence. Last night I had a dream where her and I were just sitting in our old kitchen at the table and talking. I can’t even remember what about, just that she called me “Jas” which is what she always called me. No one but her and a few other members of my family have used that name.

I woke up from the dream sad, and missing her, and it’s been on my mind since then.

Since both of my parents’ death last year I really just haven’t thought about it very much. I was never much of a family guy; we stayed in touch, but I wasn’t like a lot of people who talk to their parents every day or whatever.

I’ve had a few moments in the past year where the realization that my parents are gone has hit me and it came out of nowhere. I’ll be thinking about my future, usually, and I’ll think “I’ll never get to introduce someone to my parents again.” and that kills me. It’s such a mundane, and selfish thing, but it’s such a major part of life and it’s gone.

My Mom used to make fried dough, which is exactly what it sounds like, for a snack sometimes. Now and then when I was a kid, and for the last time during our family reunion in Orlando. I made some tonight for myself and thought about her.

Destroy everything you touch today
Destroy me this way
Anything that may desert you
So it cannot hurt you

You only have to look behind you
At who’s undermined you
Destroy everything you touch today
Destroy me this way

Everything you touch you don’t feel
Do not know what you steal
Shakes your hand
Takes your gun
Walks you out of the sun

What you touch you don’t feel
Do not know what you steal
Destroy everything you touch today
Please destroy me this way

Destroy everything you touch today
Destroy me this way
Anything that may delay you
Might just save you

You only have to look behind you
At who’s underlined you
Destroy everything you touch today
Destroy me this way

Everything you touch you don’t feel
Do not know what you steal
Shakes your hand
Takes your gun
Walks you out of the sun

What you touch you don’t feel
Do not know what you steal
Destroy everything you touch today
Please destroy me this way

Everything you touch you don’t feel
Do not know what you steal
Shakes your hand
Takes your gun
Walks you out of the sun

What you touch you don’t feel
Do not know what you steal
Destroy everything you touch today
Please destroy me this way

Everything you touch you don’t feel
Do not know what you steal
Shakes your hand
Takes your gun
Walks you out of the sun

What you touch you don’t feel
Do not know what you steal
Destroy everything you touch today
Please destroy me this way

I found my road!

Years ago, when I spent much time riding my Katana I used to ride on this road “somewhere up north” that was my favorite road. Lots of hills and twistys and blind curves and sand and hidden driveways to die on. At some point in the years since then I forgot where it was and I haven’t been able to find it. In my memory it was “NW Barry Road” but I’ve never been able to find the part of road I was missing with that kind of sign.

Well, last night I really needed to lube the ol’ motorcycle chain (if you know what I mean) and once I was finished I wanted to take a long ride to work it all in. I hopped on 35N, took 169 up to 435W and started looking for some other road. I was looking for the road I’ve taken to Weston a few times but couldn’t find it. I hopped off on some road I thought might be the one and it wasn’t, but it started looking like a fun road.

So I’m cruising along, having fun on the turns and hills and I blow past an orchard. That’s when I shouted into my helmet, “This is my road!!” and then tore ass the rest of the way back to 435. My road has an orchard on it, and I always remembered that too. I love orchards.

Turns out that the road is 152W. Funny. I’ve been down 152E plenty of times recently but never went west on it.

I had a hell of a ride. The weather was perfect, my bike was responding nicely (instead of missing gears because of a sticky chain), and I felt really good. I tore it up for a good hour and covered a bunch of miles.

Yea!

Also, vMail has a new name! It’s vimoMail and it will blow your mind. How’s that for marketing?

I decided to rewrite a huge portion of the client last night so the next release is going to be delayed a bit, but when I’m done with it it’s gonna be awesome.

I have tennis elbow, and I don’t even play tennis. How lame is that?

vMail has an official home now at vMail. So check it out!

I’ve been writing a new application I’m calling vMail. It’s a J2ME application that lets you manage your IMAP email on your MIDP 2.0 compliant phone or device. In people speak that means if you have a fairly recent phone that runs Java you can use vMail to check your mail on the go.

Today I finished the first version that I’m going to call an Alpha and let people start playing with. You can install it on your phone by browsing to http://vonnieda.org/vMail/vMail.jad on your phone. It should start to install automatically.

The application should be pretty self explanatory but there are a few notes. Even though you can select POP as a server type it doesn’t work yet. It will in the next release. For now it’s IMAP only.

When you delete a message it is deleted from the phone but not immediately from the server. The next time you “Check Mail” it will be deleted from the server as well.

On the setup screen there is a field for profile pin. You can ignore that for now. Eventually you’ll be able to store all your mail settings on vonnieda.org with a little form and then enter them all just by entering a short number instead of typing all that stuff in on your phone. The code for that all works but I haven’t made the page on vonnieda.org yet that will let you create your profile.

So, check it out! Give me feedback!

This version will expire on Sept. 6th so don’t be surprised when it stops working. By then I hope to have the final version available on this site. Be warned, I think I am gonna sell this, instead of making it open source. It’s gonna be cheap though. I am thinking like $4.99 for a forever license. Too high? Too low? Let me know.

A few things I already know about:

• There needs to be more commands on the Read Mail screen. For reply, forward, delete and so on.
• Go on the Read Mail screen doesn’t yet work. It will let you go to URLs embedded in the message eventually.
• Long emails will crash the application. Long is greater than the amount of memory you have available.
• Sometimes the local message store gets corrupt and has to rebuild itself. That just means it will have to redownload your mail. I’m not sure why yet.

Day three of not shaving my head for a month for $100. I’ve definitely progressed into the peach fuzz stage. It was really weird to shave my face today and not my head.

This weekend was Scotty’s 30th Birthday Bash at my place, with some dinner beforehand at Manny’s. It was great! Dinner was yummy and the party was a complete success. Started a little slow, as they always do, but once it picked up it never stopped till about 5am (10am for some people…)

We polished off 5 gallons of punch, the rest of the Pale, 8 lbs of strawberries and tons of whipped cream. We played Twister, people danced, people threw up (just a little bit, right?) and amazingly I was awake for all of it. Incredible.

Scotty got some great real, and joke gifts and Nicole totally made a mashed potatos cake for him. And someone ate a slice. Gross.

Sunday was ultra-omega lazy. I left the house once, early for food and then not again until like 5pm.

Yea!