I have no idea what happened, but my Nokia decided to die this past weekend. Not completely dead, but it has decided to just turn itself off after being on 10-15 minutes. I have charged the battery overnight, pulled the battery out and reinstalled, and even today performed a factory reset on it. Nothing helps. This did not follow any particular impact event or anything, so I just don't know what happened. Since my desired Palm Pre does not arrive until later this year (one rumour says early August), I needed to find something to keep me going.

The beauty of using GSM is that I can just pop my SIM card in another phone. The only working old phone I have left, though, is a very beat up and scratched up Cingular 2125 (HTC Faraday). The joystick doesn't work very well. I think I have already opened it up once a long time ago to try and clean it out and make it work better, but I can't remember. So I am going to try again.

And to make it feel newer, today I installed a hacked version of Windows Mobile 6.1 (it came with 5.0) in it. I had checked on doing this before and didn't find anything. But today I found out it runs the same firmware as a similar phone and was able to install that. I really only gained some minor functionality, but it at least looks nicer now.

Someone has a real first experience with the now-on-the-market "Big ass Table" from Microsoft:

http://kinesismomentum.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/skin-deep-usability/

Kinda funny, and kinda sad. And who the hell has ever heard of the colour rhodamine? (Apparently not even my spell checker.)

While I am over my cold, I have yet to make it back to the gym. Partly my shoulder was really still hurting. It's getting better again, but I still hurt each morning, mostly. I have an appointment with an RMT on Friday to work on it. She's kind of expensive, but conveniently located. Thank you insurance for paying for it (My previous employer didn't cover massage). Though at her rate, I'll only get 5.5 sessions covered for the year before I max out my benefit. If it helps, it will be worth it.

I also have a new pillow an order. I have particular demands in the pillow department and use a specific one from Temper-Pedic that no one seems to carry in stock around here (I had bought this one at the Relax the Back Store in San Jose). So I had to order it. Hopefully replacing the 3+ year old thing will help too.

Oh, and I'm going to the Toronto zoo on Saturday (never been) with James & Dustin, weather permitting.

I hate that this cold has interrupted my recently renewed motivation for going to the gym and working out. I've had to take the past week off. And now today I was going to go for a swim, but my shoulder/neck is acting up again. I called the massage therapist that does appointments in my condo building, but she hasn't called back. Hopefully she'll be able to help.

Speaking of swimming. I gave up on doing laps here at the condo because the pool is just to small. It gets frustrating having to turn around every 5 strokes or so. I just went out on an exploratory mission and think that the Trinity Community Rec Centre should do nicely. It's not quite so conveniently across the street like when I was living in Campbell, but it's the best I've got, without exploring expensive gym memberships. And since my condo gym is quite sufficient for basic work outs, I don't want to go that route. I would have gone swimming right then, but their lap hours on Saturday are only 12-2. I showed up at 11. And then I got hungry. And then I decided my neck hurts to much.

I plan on going once a week. That summer I did that back in Cali did amazing things for my body's fitness level. (That was in addition to the regular workouts). I'm trying to do something about the 13-15 lbs I've put on since moving to Toronto. Summer's coming and damn it, I'm going to explore the island beach this year.

Thursday I briefly sampled the scene of the Canadian Music Fest '09. I went out to "Wrongbar" to see the band Plushgun. I only discovered them the middle of last week after clicking a link I saw on 365gay.com. The song they talk about in that article, Dancing in a Minefield, is really good. I also like what I think is their headlining track for the album, Just Impolite.

I just happened to check if they were coming to Toronto anytime soon, and that's when I found out they were going to be here playing at a bar as part of the Fest. I wanted to go out to see them with skycaptain76, but he wasn't going to be able to make it after work in time, they were the first band of the night at the venue. As it is they started 30 minutes late, wouldn't even let us inside the bar until after 9:00 (when the show was supposed to start) and then had major issues with the sound system all too frequently. I still had fun. You could tell the band wasn't too happy about the sound situation either, but they just kept going.

Yesterday we bought a new coffee maker. We got one of those Keurig machines that uses the K'cups which are similar to the T-disc things we used with our Tassimo coffee maker. But this one has an extra accessory for it that lets you use any ground coffee you buy to make the cup of coffee (And they have more variety of the pre-pack cups available than Tassimo).

I now have another niece. That now makes one child for each of my 3 siblings. You'd think they were all worried that the species is going to end or something. What with the reproducing and all. :-P

No pictures yet, apparently my brother forgot to take the camera to the hospital and my mom hasn't had a chance to make it yet as she is recovering from a minor bit of food poisoning from last night. They haven't even picked out which of their 4 name choices they are going with.

I think Priscilla is a good choice.

Credit to my friend Eric on Facebook for linking to this.

Sometimes it's healthy to step back and gain a little perspective.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoGYx35ypus

Well, this past weekend was pretty stressful. It started off Friday night when I couldn't get to sleep. I finally ended up taking a Klonopin and then falling asleep around 3 AM. The problem with taking the medicine that late is that I feel kind of drowsy for a long time the next day. It was compounded by the fact that I was woken up at 7:30 AM and had things to take care of before skycaptain76 went off to work. I read for a while and then decided around 11:30 AM to take a short nap to get me through the rest of the day. But then I slept until 4:30 PM.

So pretty much my whole day Saturday was wasted. Which really sucked because I had a lot of things I needed to get done. We had purchased a 1 TB SATA hard drive to replace our 230 GB PATA hard drive in our Media Center PC. That sort of thing never goes as planned and I knew it would take a long time which is why I wanted to get started early on Saturday. But that didn't happen, obviously.

Shortly after I started I got a call from Charles saying he wanted to meet me for dinner after work. This was fine but I had only managed to get so far as to dust out the inside of the computer. (Which was quite a feat on its own).

So on Sunday began the big effort. We had already backed up the hard drive to our external drive on Saturday. The trouble began with the fact that the only copy of Windows Vista we had was a digital download (legitimate, from Microsoft) that was an upgrade only and so we had to install XP before we could upgrade. But then it turns out to restore from backup we had to boot from the installer disk and just run the restore. But the digital download upgrade doesn't come with a boot disk. We ended up having to use bit torrent to get a full disk image of Windows Vista to boot off of so we could restore. Downloading that took the rest of the day which meant Sunday was gone.

Charles did manage to get it restored today, mostly. He ran into some minor snags. But it was all compounded by the fact that this weekend we got three orders in, after having had no orders for a couple weeks. Ahhh, when it rains it pours, doesn't it?

I have some updated pictures and video of Mushu climbing about in my Christmas tree from. These were all taken early January.

Check them out.

Valentine's day yesterday was low-key. We just went out shopping for a new coffee maker. We have been using a Tassimo since right after we arrived in Canada because it is so damn easy. But the coffee selection is very limited, and expensive of you move beyond the Maxwell House brand. And after awhile you realize just how wasteful the thing is, throwing away the little pods.

The ideal coffee maker for us would take whole beans, grind them, and them brew them in quantities as little as one or two cups. Many mornings all skycaptain76 has time for is one cup, so it is annoying to have to brew a whole pot for that. That was what was great about the Tassimo. We went to some coffee shop that had this special machine that did exactly what all that, but it is a commercial machine. If they had a consumer version, that would be great. The closest we found yesterday is the Cuisinart Cup-o-Matic. But it doesn't grind the beans. It takes pre-ground or those "pods" (similar to the T-discs we use now, I guess.) While we could buy pre-ground, that isn't as good. And buying a separate grinder completely takes away from the fast and easy aspect.

Today our friends from Waterloo are coming to the city and we are going to hang out. I want to take them to this new coffee shop on Bloor & Bathurst that looks like it might sell coffee makers. I can turn socializing into productive shopping!