Jason Crowther’s Blog

Was flipping through the latest PC Magazine, and spotted a full page ad for the new Black Diamond high end cell phone.  Its got a pretty sexy form factor, Windows Mobile, Quad Band, Mini SD slot, 4 Megapixel camera, WiFi, Bluetooth, and two diamonds….

Hey wait, two diamonds?  Yep.  This is one of the those super bling phones.  The ultimate in exclusivity, you’ll be able to pick up one of the limited edition series of 5, for a cool $300,000.00.  Yar, that’s a chunk of change.

Was pleasantly surprised at my recent birthday (yeah, I’m feeling old again) to receive a new MP3 player and some other useful electronic gadgets from my Amazon.com wishlist. Props to the wife and in-laws for the hook up.

The new player is a Samsung YP-F1XB. Features include:

• Tiny. Its about 3/4th the size of a nano. Pretty light too. After clipping it on the waistband of my running shorts, its pretty easy to forget its there.
• Built in clip. Its a sturdy metal clip that’s actually part of the player itself.
• Display. Its kinda tiny, but a backlit monochrome, 3 line screen works fine.
• 512Mb. Not huge, but enough to keep me entertained for a week at a time.
• FM Tuner. If I get bored with my tunes, its always a good option.
• FM Recording. Sounds cool, but I doubt I’d use it much. It would be nice to tape NPR Morning Edition or All Things Considered to listen to when running. It also has mic for voice recording, but I’d probably only ever use that for bootleg taping.
• Decent user interface. Its not as nice as an iPod clickwheel, but its fairly logical.
• Priced right. I was looking for something a little less expensive than an iPod because I know I will eventually kill it (drop it or sweat it out) or lose it. At $59, I’ll be a depressed instead of crushed when the inevitable happens.

I’ve used it for a few runs at the Y and I’m pretty happy with it. I’d forgetten how much it helps to have some musical distraction, especially when you’re doing 102 laps for a 6 mile run.

Making my bi-weekly scan through CssMania, I spotted DabbleDB. At first, I thought they were just another webified ASP version of Microsoft Access (there are a bunch of them these days, along with some simpler open source projects that attempt to do the same.) They are kind of like Access, but with a lot smarter and easier for joe public to use.

Be sure to check out their 7 minute demo video, you’ll be impressed. They upload a CSV file and automagically create a database structure from it. Then they do a bunch of database schema changes like changing field types and normalization never having to get into any gory details. Doing this kind of stuff for a living, I’m very impressed how well they’ve put things together. Good job!

Dell is now selling a 30″ widescreen lcd, ala Apple. I’ve seen Apple’s in person, and its pretty impressive; guessing that Dell’s is just as nice.

Until the bucks start rolling in by the truckload, I’ll stick with my recently acquired Dell 20″ widescreen. Sure, it ain’t no 30 incher, but at less than a quarter of the price, its damn good.

A while back, I was on Gizmodo and found a company that was offering to trade used CDs for an iPod. Too good to be true? Millennium Music has their exchange rates posted for CDs to a number of iPod models (or you can just cash out if you want.) Basically, you package up your discs, mail ‘em off to these guys. They evaluate them on quality of title and the physical quality of the disc.

Sounded like a pretty good deal to me. I’ve got a whole rack of CDs just gathering dust. Even if they only end up giving me $1 a disc, I’d pretty happy to unload them. (Selling them onesy twosy on eBay or Half.com is drag.) So, I spent a few hours matching up CDs to jewel boxes, swapping cracked jewel cases, and windexing off dust and smudges. I was interested in a new 30Gb iPod, so I picked out 130 CDs to ship out. I didn’t happen to have decent boxes and packing materials lying around, so I went to my local UPS Store. I was pleasantly surprised how reasonable it was to pack ($10) and ship ($25, insured for $500) 36 pounds of CDs.

A few days later, I got a call from Millennium Music. They got the CDs fine, but didn’t have a name to go along with the shipment. Geez, I meant to put a packing list in there; nutz! They tracked me down by the number on the UPS label. They’re supposed to line up the tracking number for the shipment with an email that you send them right after you ship. But, as I expected, the guy on the line told me they’ve been getting tons of email about the program and have been having trouble keeping up.

No biggie, I confirmed the tracking number and that was good enough for them. Even though the package had arrived late that morning, they told me that they had already evaluated my CDs by midafternoon. They offered me $280 for 118 of my CDs. They then confirmed that I was still interested in 30Gb iPod and told me the difference out of pocket would be $29 (including shipping for the iPod and return of the 12 CDs they didn’t want.) So, I said deal and gave them my credit card number for the difference.

A few days later a box shows up with my new iPod and returned CDs. I was a little disappointed to see that they used newspaper for padding the shipment; but, everything made it unscathed, so I’m pleased. I’m looking forward to whiling away some free time getting caught up on some videos I’ve been meaning to watch. Gonna have to put some time into getting that home made DVR together so I’ll have a good source for video content.