Over the past few months, I’ve neglected regular posts. I don’t like that one bit. Many interesting articles have passed me by, and I’m not going to let that happen again. While I can’t promise a complete turnaround, I will promise I’ll do my best to catch you up, starting right now.
Phone Review: Motorola RIZR Z6tv
Back in November I purchased a new phone, and I promised I would review it. While this will be no spectacular review, here are my thoughts on my new phone.
I absolutely love the RIZR Z6tv. Although the Z6tv has nowhere near the functionality of the iPhone (I have an iPod touch for that), it functions just fine as a traditional cellular headset. The features are great, all Bluetooth profiles are enabled, the new Verizon user interface is a welcome improvement, and the reception is marvelous. In fact, I would say the reception is the best “new” feature of the phone. I’m seeing coverage in areas where I previously had little to no signal, and I’m picking up EVDO in areas where I previously had a weak 1x signal. If you’re in the market for a traditional cell phone with Verizon, I would not hesitate picking up a Motorola RIZR Z6tv.
FreeNAS Revisted
Early February, Paul Stamatiou managed to generate some buzz with his 200 Dollar PC series. I took the bait and ended up significantly upgrading my FreeNAS box. While I had originally planned the upgrade purely around saving space with the Mini-ITX form factor, a few weeks later I found myself completely overhauling the storage as well. I’m glad I did, as my FreeNAS box is now my central storage hub. I backup with Time Machine, rsync website backups, connect remotely over FTP, and store nearly every season of my favorite television shows directly to my small, slick server. Here are the specs to get your geek on:
- Apex MI-100 Mini-ITX Case
- Intel BLKD201GLYL Mini-ITX Motherboard with Integrated Celeron 215
- Kingston 512MB DDR2 RAM
- 3×500GB Western Digital Caviar Hard Drives in 1TB RAID5
- Secondary NIC for Wireless and Wired Backups
- External USB 320GB Seagate Barracuda (Time Machine)
WordPress 2.5
I’d like to now give an awesome shout-out to the WordPress commit crew and Happy Cog for a great release of WordPress 2.5. I’ve upgraded my blog earlier this week and couldn’t be happier. I thought WordPress 2.3 was amazing from a developer standpoint, but you blew that out of the water with an even better user release. Here’s to many more.
With that said, earlier in the week I completed my plugin and theme upgrades to WordPress 2.5. All plugins that I currently support should now work fine under WordPress 2.5. However, WordPress 2.3 users be weary. I dropped support for WordPress 2.3 in the majority of my releases to help speed up adoption of WordPress 2.5.
Funny Moment of the Week
I’d like to bring this post to close with perhaps the greatest moment of this South Park season so far. I don’t want to spoil the funny, so just sit back and enjoy the next two clips. If you like what you see, watch the full episode.
4 Comments
South Park was so effing funny! Great ep!
I have to say, ever since junior year in college, I started to really hate Motorola. Especially with Verizon. I am so, so glad to start using Nokia again, with AT&T again. When I was a senior in HS, I got my first Nokia 5160 with AT&T Wireless Services. Then the rest of the family got Verizon so I switched to the family plan.
When my dad started to make me pay, I wanted to just ditch it, and get Cingular instead, bought an unlocked phone and it was great.
But now, my new phone, Nokia E51, unlocked from ebay is my new favourite phone. I missed the candybar phones from Nokia, I had too many flip phones that caused so many problems. I would of loved though to gotten the Communicator E90 (or is 91? — too lazy to Google it)… but wow, at a grand, way too much, especially when the 3G isn’t compatible with US networks, not that I care too much about 3G since I have WiFi and got a 5 meg data plan anyways. Though the 91 does have built in GPS, though triangulation works well enough for me using Google Maps.
As for blogging, I am really liking Drupal a lot. I use it at work for our corporate intranet, and its pretty neat stuff.
So Ron, how is school going? You enjoying it?? I have to say, I really regret my computer science degree. I hate programming now! I found out I much rather do computer graphics, so I am going to take some photoshop/illustrator courses.
I do IT/IS sort of stuff now, but it really isn’t fun, since it is all helpdesk shit. Like I tripped over the power plug, and I can’t figure out how to put it back in, HELP!! I was so ready to shoot myself!
I am going to take a Learning Tree course in NYC in June about networking, so at least I get out of work for four days, though it does involve commuting into the city. At least I get paid to sit in a course they are paying for!
Well, that’s the situation I’m in now. My parents pay for my phone service on a shared family plan, and I just pay them for text messaging. When my family starts making me pay, I’m probably going to switch to AT&T and get a second-generation 3G iPhone.
I’m loving Penn State, but hating the Lehigh Valley campus. It’s just way to small for my tastes. Thankfully this is my last semester there; I’m moving out over the summer and heading up to the main campus with three friends. It should be good as we have an apartment five blocks from my major’s building.
As far as academics, so far I’m really happy with my major. It’s like a mixture of business and technology, which I’m finding is suiting me very well. It’s very oriented around the startup nature and working at a traditional technology-based company.
I’m hoping to move out to San Francisco / Silicon Valley after college and actually work at some company making technology. I really don’t want to get into tech support or anything of that sorts, and unfortunately that’s really all that’s around here. I feel I will be much happier creating something new, rather than supporting five year old technology.
New is definitely more exciting! I just read iWoz and it was a fantastic book. I definitely would recommend it to you!
I mention the book only because he has a great story to tell, not just being an Apple fan, but since he practically started the modern PC, in the sense of personal computer being a computer at home and what goes on in Silicon Valley, and you wanting to do a startup, he can definitely teach you some things!
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