Slim and Smart

I am loving the Blackjack II. It turned out to be compatible with my 8-year-old version of Outlook, and Outlook turned out to have useful features I thought it did not have, and everything is peachy.

The phone tells me to take my vitamins. It tells me when to take a break for prayer in the middle of the day. It makes sure I take Marv and Maynard out early enough to avoid conflicting with my bedtime. It tells me to get ready for bed. It tells me to go to bed. And I even programmed it to wake me up.

There is some kind of power problem here that makes electronic clock radios make funny noises in the middle of the night. I just discovered this. It’s infuriating; I think it explains why I keep waking up. Let’s see it make the phone buzz! HA! No way!

I’m just like Canadian inventor Le Trung, who built his own wife from parts. Drudge linked to the story today. She can’t have sex–he claims–but she does all sorts of other stuff. He spent his life savings on her; what a fool. My phone was way cheaper. And unlike his robot, it doesn’t slap me when I squeeze it.

Interesting detail: the robot looks like a Japanese anime babe, proving once and for all that even Asians think Asian women are the hottest. Sadly, if Asian women start designing husbands, they will probably take a different tack. After all, there are bars around the Pacific where Asian women go for the express purpose of meeting men who are not Asian.

Oddly, the robot is Japanese, while Trung appears to be Vietnamese. But I guess if he had a history of doing well with Vietnamese women, he’d be married instead of cohabitating with an erector set.

Two Kinds of Things That Suffer Blights

I keep harping on the notion that my family is afflicted because of bad things our ancestors did, such as growing and selling cigarette tobacco. And I often cite the misfortunes we’ve suffered. On reflection, I have realized that we’ve had more problems than I thought.

I used to cite my mother, my aunt, and my uncle, who died from cancer. And I have said that my grandfather’s cardiac surgeon opined that the death of my aunt contributed to the heart attack that killed him a month later. But there’s more to it than that. We have had other atypical problems, some clearly caused by addiction or drug or alcohol abuse.

This week I realized none of my grandfather’s four daughters had been spared. I have two aunts left. Both are smokers. One has problems I would rather not go into. The other has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. So two are gone, one has terrible problems, and another has a terrible disease. And most of the grandchildren have failed to prosper as they should have.

That is four for four. Out of four families, not one has turned out as hoped. All families have troubles, but it’s not exactly rare for a man and wife to grow old and die together, with children who are healthy and happy, and who have fairly healthy families of their own. My grandfather had four daughters. Three divorced, and the fourth is a widow. Most of the kids have had serious setbacks. I’m sure many people who read this blog have families with statistics that are considerably brighter.

I am told that the Parkinson’s is getting worse. My aunt is complaining about the dementia that goes with it. She forgets things, for example. I’ve been looking around on the web for helpful information. They say coconut oil, vitamin D, and omega 3’s may be helpful.

I’d appreciate it if some of you would offer a prayer for her sake. I believe my family faces special challenges, but I also believe in deliverance by faith. Almost anything can be turned around and made into a blessing. I think I’m out of the woods, personally, and I hope I can help the others get out.

I asked Aaron what the Jewish position on curses was, and he said a subsequent generation can suffer for the sins of its predecessors, if they don’t disapprove of those sins. That is pretty consistent with what I believe. If you go on in blindness, not realizing wrong has been done, that’s nearly equivalent with approval. I think that describes our situation.

By the way, don’t forget Mish Weiss. She continues waiting for her bone marrow transplant to have the desired effects.

Thanks.

Finally, a Tool I Refuse to Buy

Here’s another reason to beat everyone who works for Harley-Davidson.

It looks like I have a bad diaphragm on my fuel supply valve. The solution? Remove the vacuum hose, remove the fuel hose, take off the valve, and open it up. BUT Harley-Davidson uses stupid spring band hose clamps, and you have to have special hose clamp pliers to remove them. This is brilliance at its best. You save maybe five cents on the cost of the bike by using the crappy clamp, but you lose ten dollars when you buy the special hose clamp pliers to take the clamp off.

I can’t think of one good reason not to replace it with a nice AWAB worm drive hose clamp. That’s what I did to the carb, and it worked out fine. It will save me the price of those stupid pliers.

I love the little touches manufacturers put on their products, to quadruple the time and money it costs to fix them.

More

Harley-Davidson used to make a replacement diaphragm that cost around seven bucks. Then they decided that was too cheap. Now you have to buy the whole valve, for almost thirty bucks. Supposedly, you can buy the diaphragm by itself, but they make you pay the cost of a valve.

No wonder people hate Harley-Davidson.

I’m getting a Golan aftermarket petcock. I’m tempted to eliminate the diaphragm and replace it with a gasket, but I’d have to remember to turn the petcock off whenever the bike wasn’t running.

This is how Harleys are. The stock parts fail, and when you try to replace them, they screw you so badly you pretty much have to buy aftermarket if you want to retain your self-respect.

I am Never Lonely or Bored

Marv’s new annoying phrase: “Can I squeeze your fat carcass?”

No Reasonable Bribe Rejected

My cellphone has been running me ragged today. Every time I try to sit down and think for two seconds, it beeps and tells me I’m supposed to be somewhere else. Deposit a check. Charge the Harley’s battery. Put my old crap on Craigslist so I’ll have room for new crap. It never ends.

I want a divorce.

I’ll try to catch up with blogging before long. Right now I’m busy trying to sell a piece of merchandise that just became available. I’m referring to the office of Governor of the State of Illinois. Place your bid, and I’ll see if I can get you appointed.

I’d love to give it to you as a gift, but it’s a valuable thing — you just don’t give it away for nothing. I want to make money. Hurry up, or I’ll take the office myself. If you’re not going to offer me anything of value I might as well take it.

Reverend Jackson, please stop calling.

Soup & Planers

The stuff from Woodpeck.com arrived a while back. It looks pretty good. Maybe it was stupid to get a router lift, but people who use them seem to like them.

I got my sliding miter saw set up on the woodworking table. I am still amazed at how big the saw is. I’m worried it may interfere with some router work, because it’s to the left of the router. But it will only matter for pretty big items. I think the answer is to mount the miter saw using lag shields and easily removed bolts. That way I can yank the saw off the table when necessary.

One problem: the table has an edge near the right side of the router, but the left edge is over three feet away, and between the router and the edge, there’s a saw. So I can’t use a conventional router sled. But I can think of ways to get around that.

I need a jointer. Or rather, I need boards that aren’t crooked. I know very little about tools, but I have learned that you can avoid buying a big, noisy, expensive jointer if you are willing to buy a hand plane and use a clamp. You learn something new every day.

The vegetable soup came out great, although I should have stuck some herbs in it. I know absolutely nothing about vegetable soup, but it seems to be programmed to taste good no matter what you put in it. One hazard I am aware of: soup made with red cabbage looks so disgusting it’s hard to eat.

It’s really sad; for 13 bucks I made like a gallon and a half of soup that is like ten times as good as anything you can get in a can, and I am sure a person who actually knows how to make soup can do it much better than I did.

Fling Ingredients at Will

I have been worried that I don’t eat enough fruit and vegetables. I have made a real effort, but there are days when my only vegetable is a nuked potato with butter. Luckily, this morning I remembered I had a bunch of rib-roast bones and a bacon wreath in the freezer.

Why is this lucky? Because these are things you can use to flavor vegetable soup.

The wreath is something I created when I was making bacon grease for Thanksgiving. I nuked a bunch of bacon strips laid out in a circle, and they contracted into a nice coherent ring. I also refer to these as “bacon pucks.”

I tossed these items in a pot containing tomato soup, and I proceeded to add vegetables.

Here’s a question: is it even possible to make bad vegetable soup? I have no recipe. I throw things in almost at random. It’s always good. Here’s what I used today:

Bones from 6-pound rib roast
bacon wreath
bottle of cheap tomato juice
can of cheap corn
2 cans cheap peas
3/4 head of cabbage, sliced
4 carrots, sliced
2 yellow squash, diced
4 red potatoes, diced
1 lb. fresh green beans, broken
1/2 cup wild rice
1 Jamaican hot chocolate pepper, sliced
sea salt
splash of Carlo Rossi Paisano
2 cloves garlic
water

I think that’s it. It’s blerping away on the stove. I may have to adjust it later. I suppose I could throw in some herbs. The only fresh ones on hand are rosemary, thyme, and sage. I have fresh oregano, but it tastes disgusting. I hate to admit this, but after tasting thyme over and over, I am still not quite sure what it tastes like. It’s one of those flavors that are so boring it’s hard to remember them.

I have another question. Are we buying cans from China now? Seems like every time I try to open a can, it folds up so the opener misses some places in the lid. Something is wrong, and it smells Chinese.

Without muh Sleeve…

I am anxiously awaiting the delivery of my router lift. Very exciting. The desk I am converting into a woodworking table looks viable, and I can’t wait to install a router.

I’ve been reading Bill Hylton’s router books. This man is not a fan of gadgetry. For example, I thought I needed a miter track in my table, but he says only a FOOL would have a router track. Actually, he uses the phrase “completely unnecessary.” He even thinks lifts are silly. I think. It sure looks that way.

I don’t care. I want convenience. I don’t want to pull the fricking router out from under the table over and over, and I don’t want to suffer with under-the-table adjustments. Maybe it will turn out that I’m stupid and wrong. I’ll get over it. I always have.

I thought I needed a fancy aluminum fence, but I was utterly lost and consumed with ignorance. Hylton uses crappy bits of MDF and scrap wood. So there’s a big expenditure I won’t be making. But I’ll have to be all manly and craft a dust thing to put on my scrap fences. I also need something to catch dust that falls through the hole in the table.

For the three times a year when I actually use this thing.

I seriously think I should hook up a blower and make a hole in the garage wall, so the sawdust goes out in the grass. It’s MULCH! It IS! Really! Sort of.

You could eject three hundred pounds of dust out there, and two days later, you would see no evidence. But while it’s easy to suck dust, and it’s easy to blow dust, it’s not easy to make a thing that sucks it while also blowing it.

I have a template for the router lift. Naturally, that turned out to be a total waste of money. Hylton says he-men make their own templates by routing around a lift plate’s edge.

Once the rabbet for the lift is cut, I’ll have to get rid of all the material inside it. How on earth do I do that? I never thought about it. Some people use a jigsaw. Which I do not have. Real men drop a circular saw straight onto the table. I assumed I would do it with the router. That may take a while, with an inch of MDF to cut.

I need to build a few things, in order to develop some competence. I’m wondering if I have what it takes to make a humidor. I don’t really need one, but I have never been happy with the one I bought for my dad. Maybe I could make a better one.

Shut up. It could happen.

Come on, UPS. I’m bored.

Sometimes the Evidence Matters

Finally, the information is on the web. A friend of O.J. Simpson’s says the deal he rejected was for three years in jail.

I’m not a criminal lawyer, but I would guess that when you accept a sentence in a plea bargain, you remain entitled to things like time off for good behavior, as well as parole. Correct me if I’m wrong. So O.J. could probably have been out in maybe a year. In Florida, he could have gone home in six months. We purge our jails twice a year, because if we didn’t, most of us would be living there right now.

The article says Simpson “and his lawyers” rejected the deal. Surely that doesn’t mean what it seems to mean. Surely the lawyers didn’t back Simpson on this horrendous decision. My father and I discussed this case the other day, and it seemed to him that it might be unethical to go along with a client in Simpson’s position who rejected a nice plea. O.J. was recorded conspiring to commit robbery. O.J. was recorded DURING the robbery. Hello? There was video of him entering and leaving the hotel. He was filmed bragging about the robbery later. If Yale Galanter thought a non-ghetto Las Vegas jury was going to let his client go free, I would truly like to know how he came to that conclusion.

Old news stories say O.J. was planning an acquittal party before the jury dropped the bomb on him. What goes on in this man’s head? Discussing the negotiations, the prosecutor said Simpson wanted something “just short of a public apology.”

Most people do something really stupid once in a while, but generally, when we realize we’ve stepped in it, we wise up. A smart person will search himself and repent sincerely; even a fool will try to avoid making things worse. What are you if you can’t even manage that?

O.J. Simpson, I guess.

I Would Kill for an Attention Span

I am all bummed out today. I completely forgot about the Pacquiao-de la Hoya fight. Boxing is the only sport I have the attention span to watch, and Pacquiao is someone I wanted to keep track of. Last night he pounded de la Hoya to bits, and I found out about it by reading an Internet headline.

De la Hoya is an interesting figure, because last year, a stripper released doctored photos of him, in which he appeared to be a transvestite. Ever since then, he has had to deal with the nickname “Oscar de la Homo.”

According to TMZ, when de la Hoya pointed out that the photos were fake, the stripper sued him. Knowing they were fake. They should have a Nobel Prize for gall.

Incidentally, can someone tell me why stripping is called “exotic dance”? What’s exotic about disrobing? Another thing: if you have to disrobe to make money dancing, aren’t you admitting you don’t really dance well? I assume women put the “dance” in this business, because women generally like to fantasize about being dancers. When women go to the gym, what do they put on? Exercise clothes? No, they put on dance costumes. Weird. You don’t see men at the gym, dressed like ballet dancers or the cast of Breakin’. Not heterosexual men, anyway.

The truth is, men would still pay strippers, even if they just stood there.

It’s a pretty sad way to make a living, especially after your kids (or grandkids) get old enough to realize what you do.

Yesterday, I had lunch with my father and my sister. That’s pretty remarkable. Things continue to improve. Eventually, my sister and I went to a Christian bookstore.

I guess I am not as good a Christian as I thought, because I could not help chuckling at the “Happy Birthday Jesus” lollipops, which were shaped like little birthday cakes. I still have some work to do. I thought of Ned Flanders.

The store had a little aisle labeled “Charismatic Interest.” I told my sister you weren’t allowed in that section unless you brought your own snake. I guess charismatics still don’t get much respect. The movement has had too many kooks and crooks.

I just checked, and it turns out Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker are charismatics. Great. I didn’t know that. If you don’t actually see a minister pray in tongues, it can be hard to figure out whether he’s charismatic.

It can be tough figuring out where in the church you belong. The charismatics seem to have a lot going on; they seem to experience God’s power daily, in a very direct way. On the other hand…Jimmy Swaggart. I don’t want to make a list of charismatics who are really embarrassing, but it’s not a hard thing to do. There are too many of them focusing people’s attention on how God can satisfy our earthly desires, and ministers like that don’t give nearly enough time to our obligations to God. On the other hand, the non-charismatic Bible-believing churches appear to understand duty very well, but compared to the charismatics, they seem sort of comatose.

Then there are the assimilated churches, where they ordain gays and tell us Jesus was just a positive thinker. If I only wanted positive thinking, I’d buy self-help books instead of Bibles. You can think positively and still enjoy all the sin you want. That’s not for me. Those churches aren’t churches. I want a living God who helps me when I’m in trouble and improves me and helps me help others and gives me eternal life. I don’t want Tony Robbins.

Finally, there are the old churches with saints and lots of structure. I cannot pray to another human being. I just can’t. Saul did that, and look what happened to him.

My hope is that the denominations will grow closer. Surely the charismatics can let go of the private jets and ridiculous prosperity preaching and hold onto the power of the Holy Spirit. I know many people from more traditional churches are opening up to the notion that God is among us, and that through the Holy Spirit, he is active in the lives of individuals. Maybe their numbers will increase.

I saw an interesting book about breaking curses. I didn’t read it, but the cover listed things that will ruin your life. I remember a few. Gossip, racism, failing to honor your parents, profiting from the mistreatment of the innocent, withholding tithes and offerings, and witchcraft. I can’t recall the others. The ones I remember seem pretty sound. I think my own family is screwed up largely because our cigarette tobacco killed so many people. That is profiting from the mistreatment of the innocent. You may claim it’s not, because smokers know what they’re getting into, but that wasn’t true before 1963, and even afterward, cigarette companies made sure their products were available to minors. They deliberately addicted kids, before they became mature enough to make wise decisions. And anyway, a pusher is many times more culpable than a drug addict, just as a prostitute is more culpable than a john. One party to the transaction acts out of weakness, in response to powerful temptation; the other acts in cold blood, purely for profit. Cold-blooded misdeeds are worse than misdeeds committed as a result of compulsion or external influences. That’s why contract killers get the death penalty and people who stab other customers in bar fights get two years.

I get so tired of people claiming johns are as bad as prostitutes. They’re not. The levels of guilt go like this, in increasing order: john, prostitute, pimp. That ought to be obvious. The same people who equate buying sex with selling it would never agree that we should punish casual drug users as badly as we punish dealers. There’s some fine logic for you.

In the cigarette guilt hierarchy, my family was somewhere between prostitute and pimp.

I bought a book. Josephus. He wrote about history, from a Jewish perspective. The book contains his complete works. I look forward to digging into it, although I will probably limit myself to bits that seem relevant to my religion. The book is huge. It would take a month to read it.

Maybe I’ll go crack it open. Seems like good reading for a Sunday.

Hope So

I took my new sliding miter saw out of the box and stuck it on the woodworking table today. It’s HUGE. I’m going to have to have the table a few inches out from the wall in order to use the saw. That’s not a problem, though, since I have to move the table out to get clearance for any wood I care to saw. I haven’t tried putting it on the Workmate yet. I may do that.

The other day I complained that I was going to need outfeed support for my tools. People suggested some roller doodads. I know I will irritate toolheads when I describe the solution I found. Kelly Mehler’s table saw video confronts the issue, and Mehler uses a sawhorse with a top surface half an inch lower than the saw table. You may wonder why he doesn’t use fancy rollers. He said rollers steer the work. The wood will naturally move perpendicularly to a roller’s axis. That means you have to have the roller aligned at a perfect right angle to the direction of the wood’s movement on the saw table. With a sawhorse and two-by-four, you don’t get this problem. And the total cost is about five bucks, plus scrap wood. Rollers are considerably more expensive.

The big miter saw should be a great convenience. The vast majority of cuts I make are short, and this thing goes up to 13.5″. You aren’t supposed to rip with it, though. Bummer. I wonder if I can get away with it for short rips, with the wood clamped in there real good. I’ve gotten away with it with my smaller miter saw.

A radial arm saw might have been a better answer, but try to find a nice used one in this area. And they say it’s easy to julienne yourself with a radial arm saw.

I think once I have a band saw and a drill press, I will feel like I can cope with almost every tool problem I am willing to face.

Of course, I am not known for my realistic expectations.

My Phone is Good Enough and Smart Enough

My experience as a smartphone owner is going well. I figured out how to schedule repeating obligations in Outlook, and I managed to fix my computer so it will sync with my Blackjack II. And I am learning to enjoy scheduling tasks on the fly. Look at this picture, which shows you how I am managing my hectic schedule, which is packed with momentous events.

I’ll tell you how that happened. I grabbed Maynard from his cage yesterday, and as I felt his claws penetrating my fingers, I realized it was time to get out the clippers. So I made an appointment. As we sat down on the couch to read Bill Hylton’s Ultimate Guide to the Router Table, I noticed that a bulb in the ceiling fan fixture was out. So I entered that, too.

At some point later today, the phone will begin nagging me. It’s like being married, only without the disappointing infrequent sex. The phone will tell me to get off my fat behind and fix the bulb. And I’ll hit the snooze button, giving myself another hour. Then it will start yapping at me again. More snooze. More yapping. More snooze. Finally I’ll tell the phone, “I’m only doing this to make you shut your hole,” and I’ll go get the ladder.

Then the phone and I will avoid communicating for a while, which I will interpret as peace, and the phone will interpret as proof that I never loved it to begin with. I don’t care. Listen, if the phone really cared about me, it would have come with a touch screen. You don’t have to hit me with a ton of bricks. I get the message.

George Moneo sent me a horrified email, reading “What? You didn’t buy an iPhone?!” I am pretty sure he was kidding. Let’s check AT&T’s site and find out why I didn’t buy an iPhone, apart from the idiotic, pretentious, ungrammatical tiny “i” in front of the capital “P.”

Okay. That was fast. The cheapest…CHEAPEST…Iphone (ha) plan is seventy dollars per month, before the added crap that rounds it up to a hundred dollars. My God, George. What are you smoking? And the real Iphone (the one that has more memory) is $300, with a two-year contract. Good Lord. I assume George’s wife has seen the bills. If not, sorry, George. You can sleep in my garage for a while.

Let’s do the math. Right now I pay $29 (really ~$40) per month. The Iphone is at least $30 more. Multiply by 24 months. It’s over 700 dollars. In real life, I’ll bet it’s more like a thousand. That’s not a thousand, total. That’s a thousand on top of the thousand I’ll be paying on my current plan.

In return, I get…

Okay, that part is not clear.

You can put music on the Iphone. But I can do that, too. Except I don’t want to. MP3 players are only for desperate times, like when you’re flying across the country, and you need something to drown out the screaming babies. The rest of the time, they’re a pain. And I have a great MP3 player that holds 40 gigs. Twice the capacity of the Iphone. It already has dozens of albums in it.

You can watch TV on the Iphone. I can do that on the Blackjack. Except I don’t want to. I don’t watch regular TV on a big screen. Why would I watch it on a tiny one I have to hold up in front of me?

I’m trying to watch the Iphone tour video. It’s some wuss in a black shirt. Why do post-2000 hippies insist on wearing black all the time? Maybe this is an old unwashed shirt that belonged to Steve Jobs. Maybe this guy wears it, hoping it has residue from The Force on it.

It’s so boring…it’s actually painful…help me…Ibuprofen…Vicodin…heroin…

I had to turn it off. It’s half an hour long! Who could sit through that?

Truthfully, I already feel like I bought too much phone. I wish I could have gotten a regular non-smart phone, plus a $75 PDA, but I couldn’t do that, because I refuse to add any more weight to my pockets. I keep my hair short, I have never owned a ring or necklace, and I resent it when I have to wear socks. I don’t need more junk hanging off me. The weight of my pistol is very annoying. I’m not adding any more heavy items.

When this PC craps out, I fully intend to go Apple, more out of anger at Microsoft than love for Steve Jobs. Windows has gotten so bad and so stupid, there is no possibility that Apple could be anything but better. But I wouldn’t buy an Iphone if I were a billionaire.

I’ll Just Get my Protractor and Line up These Wrenches

I am amazing.

I was reading my router table book–I bought Bill Hylton’s router table book–when I realized the garage was still a mess from all the stuff I did yesterday. So I went out and took all the screws and anchors out of their little packages and stuck them in drawers in the wall organizer thing, and I put a P-Touch label on each drawer! I should put a gold star on my forehead.

The book is very good. In the front, it says Bill Hylton was an editor before he wrote the book, and he only did it because he couldn’t find anyone else to do it. Maybe that explains why it’s a good book. He knew what bad tool books were like, because he used to fix them.

The woodworking table I am trying to build magically flattened itself overnight. I guess the pressure of the two-by-six I screwed onto it wore it out. I checked the flatness from front to back–the other direction–and damned if I don’t have another two-by-six to install. Oh, well. That should be easy. I think I’ll put one short board on either side of the router, to compensate for the weakness caused by cutting the hole for the lift.

It turned out I had some parts for my Grr-ripper I had failed to install, so I put those in, and I took the leftover stuff and put it in a little drawer in my electronics cabinet, marked “GRR-RIPPER.” I am too cool.

So far I mainly use tools to make things to help me use my tools. But eventually, I will work on something not tool-related. And then you will all go down on your knees and give me my props. Oh, yes. You WILL give me my props. Or at least one. Prop, I mean.

Teflon Wears Thin

Wow, an Internet source says O.J. Simpson just got 18 years for armed robbery!

Some people just don’t know when to leave well enough alone.

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I don’t know how this story can be right. I don’t have a TV in front of me, so I’m not watching video, but no other website says O.J. has been sentenced.

I do not understand this man. What he did to his wife and Ron Goldman was an atrocity. And murdering the mother of your children is an especially evil deed. Somehow, he skated. His attorneys got him a prejudiced jury who would have found him innocent had they been standing three feet away during the murders. And instead of realizing he was one of the luckiest men alive, he continued behaving exactly as he pleased. Now look where he is.

I think of all the people out there who would have taken his kind of success and turned it into something beautiful. And I think of his children, who know exactly what he did.

My sister does criminal law, and she thinks he’ll do two-thirds of the time they give him. In Florida, a major felony buys you six months (overcrowding), but Nevada is probably different.

You have to wonder if this will make him realize he has to change.

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See what I get for trusting websites in the former USSR. Or wherever it was. He hadn’t been sentenced when that story came out. It was wrong, but just barely. If the TV pundits are right, O.J. got 16 years. My sister claims it’s 21.

Anyway, he’s going to be away for a good long time.

New Phones Worse Than the Flu

I’m not sure what the worst part of getting a new cell phone is. It may be the expense, but maybe it’s really the chore of learning how to use it.

I broke down and got a Samsung Blackjack II, and it has driven me crazy all morning.

This thing has GPS. AT&T wants to charge you for using their GPS service. It’s hideously expensive, at 10 bucks per month. I don’t really want GPS, but if I can get it free, I’ll take it. And since I already paid for the phone, I should be allowed to use the GPS capability built into it, even if I don’t use AT&T’s service. AT&T disagrees, so they keep the GPS feature locked until you agree to pay them off.

I found a site that offers unlocking software today, and after a great deal of aggravation, I got it working. Now I can use Google Maps, which is FREE FREE FREE. Take that, AT&T.

I also had fun installing the software that syncs the phone with the computer. This is the main reason I got a smartphone. I want to be able to schedule reminders and so on. It turns out you can’t really do this if you install the Notesync software they include on the CD. It crashes Windows Mobile Sync. I am too lazy to check to see if I got the names of the programs right.

Outlook can also make it crash. I found I had two versions of Outlook installed, and I thought that might be a problem, so I removed Outlook Express. Don’t get me started on the total inadequacy and utter badness of the Windows “Remove Windows Components” tool. It installs stuff you don’t want. It uninstalls stuff you DO want. It’s ridiculous.

I went through all that, and it turned out the other thing was the problem.

I’m supposed to use Outlook to enter my stuff so it can be transferred to the phone. I hate Outlook. It’s primitive, especially since I can’t stand Office 2007 and therefore rely on Office 2000. I never use Outlook. I have opened it up this week to see if it would be of any use, and of course, it’s garbage. I used to have a wonderful piece of scheduling software that let me program all sorts of regular obligations into it, and I got reminders and so on. With Outlook 2000, if you want to get a haircut every Wednesday during the year 2009, you have to make 52 individual entries. As far as I can tell. Idiotic. Another fine Microsoft product.

I’m looking to see if I can download something better.

I hate the tiny QWERTY keyboard on this thing, but it’s miles ahead of my old LG, which required several presses just to type a single letter.

Here’s to sticking it to AT&T. I will never use Google Maps, but I have the satisfaction of knowing I can.