Download Ring-De-Ding – Feel free to send this on to your friends.

A free way to add this to your Sprint Phone

Enjoy!

Answer:  Yes

This latest update I’m actually posting from the phone itself. It’s a little difficult to type on, but generally not too bad. Far better than the Samsung instink! I’m having a much more enjoyable time with it . I can definitely tell that the,display is capactive rather than resistive, so it should be capable of multitouch when the next iteration of android comes out.

Schmexy!

Without further ado, have a listen!

Not that they’re particularly horrid phones, they place and receive calls, texts, pictures, and videos, they even have a small embedded web browser which is capable of rendering most static websites to at least a functional level.  The S30 is stable and useable on a daily basis.  Its battery life is acceptable, especially for a smartphone, though like most battery guages, this one floats at 70% for hours before dropping rapidly at the end of its life.  This is a function of the Li-ion chemistry used in the battery.

The phone’s worst features include: the fact that the calendar is COMPLTELY AND UTTERLY USELESS, the tendency for bluetooth presence to unlock the phone, and the thoughtless implimentation of a resistive touchscreen.

First, said calendar:  it syncs to absolutely nothing at all, which restricts its functionality for single events considerably.  Whats wors is that any repeating event put into the calendar will work correctly, alerting you at the correct time for its first instance.  After that, ZERO alerts will occur.  This is a known issue since the first Instinct came out, and was never fixed.  [insert appropriate WTF?? here].

The bluetooth problem only occurs when one pairs the phone with a laptop (running the Microshaft blowtooth stack at least).  When the phone comes in range of the laptop, it often notifies me that it is ‘connected as data modem’ – which incidently also wakes it from the sleep state and leaves the screen unlocked.  Bluetooth headsets are also difficult to use because the phone’s screen can’t be left in the sleep state, therefore when in a pocket or holstered while using a bluetooth headset, the phone is liable to hang up on your caller, dial random numbers, change to speakerphone, or drop your bluetooth link.

That leads me to the final point: what a stupid touch screen?!? Slide to answer, ok fine but slide towards the top of the screen?? Ok follow me here.  Phone is in holster, top side up, it rings.  Slide the phone out of the holster and what happens?  The phone will detect something sliding on the screen, towards the bottom of the screen, which will ignore the call!?  What dipsHoker thought of that?  Solution: holster the phone upside down, problem solved.  Ok, but what if I’m working and I just want to look at the screen to see who’s calling (whether or not I should excuse myself to the back room to answer the call, or let them go to voice mail).  Slide the now upside down phone from its holster, and what happens? you just picked up the call, congratulations you now have two confused people on your hands, the person you’re talking to in person, and your caller – whom you must now tell “sorry, I can’t talk now.”

In short: If you’re considering this phone, move on to something else.  There was very little thought or reasearch put into this device, it was rushed to market without undergoing real-life testing.  I’m sure it looked good on paper before it was built, but in the real world… Fail

</rant>

I find myself, being immersed in the retail industry, having more and more difficulty remembering the true reason that I believe we celebrate Christmas.  The story that indeed most of us are familiar with, written 2000-odd years ago about a little baby, born of a 14-15ish year old virgin girl in a cave near a town no bigger than my own hometown.  A boy who grew up the son of a woodworker, “became a philosopher” in his early years, and indeed claimed to be the Son of Yahweh.  A man who was killed by crucifixion at the age of 33 for this claim to be God, and who millions believe was dead for three days before spontaneously and of ~his own~ power he returned to life again.  Thats the original reason behind the celebration, though we celebrate it on a semi-arbitrary day» .

In the midst of the chaos, and contrary to the popular belief, the first Christmas was likely a bit chaotic – a silent night it was definitely not, at least not initially.  A woman in labor is not inclined to peace and serenity to say the least.  Combine this with a frustrating search through an overloaded city full of impatient people who are, of all things, paying their taxes.  How do you feel around tax time?  Pissed off might be a good description.  Sohck, everybody in town is pissed, your girlfriend is pregnant with someone elses baby, and in labor, and you can’t find a private freaking room, much less a hospital to have her baby in.  Silent night?  yeah NO.

Through it all, the God of the universe is in absolute control, even letting the ‘angels’ hold an open-air concert on a nearby hillside.  (can we say impressive choir? oh I really hope there was a concert orchestra as well.)  Christmas is chaotic, ’s just the nature of the season.  In the midst of the chaos, find some time to sit down, without any background distractions or other noise, and just think about what and why we celebrate.

Merry Christ-mas.

I took two different passes at “mastering” – which I place in quotes because I have had no formal training in mastering audio as of yet – and was relatively pleased with the results, he left me a lot of headroom to play with, which came in very handy.  The mix went through at least 3 different phases, which I will detail in the soon-to-be-released podcast about what I did to this clip.  For now, the results have been posted!

Original track before I touched it:

After I touched it up a bit:

This website is built on the Arras theme. I don’t know how many other theme users there are, but the latest version of wordpress has broken our beloved image rotator, to fix it, I simply added the following code to my Sidebar.php file:

***Beginning of file***
</div><!– #container –>

<div id=”primary”>
<?php arras_above_sidebar() ?>
<ul>
<?php
wp_reset_query();
?>
<?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(‘Primary Sidebar’) ) : ?> … … …