Web link of note: Bounty Mutineers Want Internet Access
(At http://www.iana.org/reports/pn-report-11feb00.htm)

I keeping hearing rumors of Canadian Mountain Dew being caffeine free…

umm doesn’t that just seem.. wrong?

In an earlier entry I mentioned that I broke another cell phone… well that was 5 months ago, and now I have ANOTHER dead phone. Doing the math, that comes to 3 dead phones in 18 months.

First phone: Samsung SCH-8500 speaker suddenly died one day. I answered at least 5 calls before I realized it, “hello? HELLOOO??? what the hell?” Total life was about 18 months.

Second phone: Samsung A400. After just over a year it began randomly powering off. The thing is, it wouldn’t power back on unless you took the battery off for a few seconds. Now the real strange thing… I thought I would have to argue with Sprint about this since it wasn’t easily reproduced. When I explained it to th rep at the store he basically said, “oh yeah there’s definitely something wrong… let’s get you a replacement right now.”

Third phone: Samsung A400 (the replacement). This one lasted 5 months. One day I’m… doing stuff… and checked the phone to see if the ringer was on only to see a jumbled screen. Power off and back on…. no screen at all anymore…. that’s that!

So what am I doing wrong? I hope nothing. I am however losing faith in Samsung cell phones.

Too bad they keep getting replaced under warranty. I need a good excuse to buy a new cell phone!

If you’re a geek you almost definitely know what Bluetooth is… but if you aren’t, you probably don’t. So what?

So if you don’t know, then let me oversimplify it. Would you like to sync your palm w/o a cable? How about use a handsfree headset w/o plugging in something? What if your Palm could tell your phone to dial a contact, but then take the call through your cars build in handsfree, and at the same time web browse from your laptop… all w/o wires? That’s what Bluetooth can do even right now.

What’s I find surprising is that alot of people still don’t even know what Bluetooth is. For something so promising and useful, the marketing is just not there. With headsets costing less than $60 and Bluetooth enabled phones offered free as contract incentives… why not hype it?

Web link of note: Liver Flush
(At http://www.vh1.com/shows/dyn/rock_bodies/67853/episode_featured_copy.jhtml)

Web link of note: Palm Bluetooth GPS
(At http://www.transplantcomputing.com/btgpspalm.html)

Web link of note: Sovietski
(At http://www.sovietski.com)

Web link of note: Phones cooler than you are
(At http://www.xelibri.com/)

Web link of note: BlogRolling
(At http://www.blogrolling.com)

I was originally hesitant to adopt Rand’s idea for editting the Links section in Movable Type. Then Brian adopted it with a couple minor changes… but I was still hesitant. For some reason yesterday I decided that there had to be a better way of doing this. That’s when I stumbled upon a concept called a BlogRoll.

They way I understand it, a BlogRoll is a list of URL’s you feel are pertinent to your blogs content. There are a few blog packages that support doing this, one of which is Radio UserLand. It’s an interesting package, but it’s not free. Then I stumbled across something a bit cooler, BlogRolling, which is a hosted service.

BlogRolling seems to store your lists for you. They then provide you with the html and/or php to add to your site… ideally to populate your Links frame… then they provide I guess what could be described as a bookmarklet to add a link to your list straight from your browser… blah blah blah.. you can find out all you want at the BlogRolling FAQ.

So the BlogRolling service isn’t free… and it’s hosted.. which means if their site goes down, your blog might suck for a while. So then what are other people using? That’s when I stumbled upon OPML…
There’s alot of hype about OPML for a blogroll. So maybe I’m a bit confused… but why use something relatively complex for something so simple as maintaining a list of URLs?!? Am I missing something? Here’s my path:

What essentially is OPML?
Essentially an XML based standard for doing outlining…
What is generating the OPML these guys are using?
RSS readers?!? But I expected a list of URLs…
Why would a news aggregator spit out a list of URLs?
I suppose a list of RSS feeds they are watching….
Why would a news aggregator do that? … and why OPML?
because they can store WAY more than just a list of links…

Okay so now I get it. Most of the people using OPML for doing their blogroll aren’t just listing out a set of HTTP URLs… they are listing out what they watch in their aggregator. So wait… that’s not what I want to do at all!

So what’s the point of this random rant? Rand and Brian did it right.

SUCKERS!!!