Catchy ring tone

So I've had a few calls come in on my cell phone while at work in the past few days, since downloading the Friday Nights at The Wedge ring tone. Now one of my workmates whistles the tune everytime my phone "rings" and another has said "Thanks a lot - now that song is stuck in my head".

He-he-he. It's working!

Podcatching

I recently wrote that I wanted to be able to listen to podcasts in my car while driving to work. This desire was behind my requirement that my new cell phone had to be able to play mp3 files. I had envisioned listening to podcasts that I copied to my phone on its speakerphone, or even better - over some kind of Bluetooth-enabled car speaker.

Now that I know a bit more about my new cell phone, I think that it won't be a practical device for playing back podcasts because of its limited memory. That leaves me with two playback options. One, to use my LifeDrive as an mp3 player. This works fine when I am at home and listening through headphones. Listening through the LifeDrive's built in speaker sucks though; the audio sounds like it's coming from a cheap transistor radio.

The other option is to burn the audio files to a CD and play them over my car's audio system. This seems like an old fashioned way to do it, plus what do I do with the CD's after I've listened to them?

I've read somewhere that there is an adapter that plugs into a PDA or mp3 player and transmits the audio on a frequency that can be picked up on a car's audio system. I wonder how much such a device costs and how many CD's I would have to burn before it would be worth my while getting one?

The price of knowledge

I thought that putting a custom ring tone on my new cell phone would be just a simple matter of copying an mp3 file to the appropriate folder on the memory card that came with the phone. In fact, I recall the salesman telling me, when I bought my phone, that I could do this by using a card reader device. Well, I figured I could use my LifeDrive for this purpose. I was able to place a copy of a 47-second extract of Friday Nights at The Wedge onto the memory card, but when I put the card back into the phone, do you think the phone could see it? No!!!

So I reasoned that the file has to be in a specific folder on the card to be recognized by the phone, but do you think I knew what that folder should be? Do you think the phone manual documented this? No, and no. So it became time for a little reverse engineering. Maybe if I installed a downloadable ring tone I could inspect the card to see what folder it got placed in and I would place my own file in the same place. I would have to pay for the downloadable ring tone, but that's the price of knowledge, no?

The crappy MIDI rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody cost me $2.00 to purchase, plus whatever the cost is for the data connection. I installed the file as my new ring tone, verified it works. I popped the memory card out of the phone and into my LifeDrive and searched for the Bohemian Rhapsody file - and did I find it? You guessed it - no. It must have gone to the phone's internal memory, to which I have no access. Doh!

Finally I did what I should have done in the first place and saved myself the $2.00. Did an internet search, found a discussion forum full of people who wanted to do the same thing I did, and finally found a step by step description of what I need to do.

Crappy downloadable version of Bohemian Rhapsody - $2.00. Knowing how to set Friday Nights at The Wedge as my custom ring tone - priceless.

Pack rat unpacking

I am a bit of a pack rat. That is as far as I will fess up to. To J, I am a complete and total die-hard pack rat. Periodically we go through a cleanup binge, where I go through piles of stuff and throw a bunch of it away. This activity usually stirs up a lot of emotion for me.

I don't know why I am like this, and I don't really know that I need to know why. Perhaps it works best if I just accept that I am like this; accept it, work within it, and respect it.

The march of technology

I obtained two new pieces of technology this week.

The first was a 30-day evaluation copy of a software application called DayNotez, for my LifeDrive. DayNotez is a mobile digital journal.

I've been using another tool for journaling on my LifeDrive, a tool called Documents To Go. DTG is a mobile version of Microsoft Word. I've been using it for personal journaling for maybe two years now, first on my Palm m500, and then on my LifeDrive. The thing about using a word processor for journaling is that all my entries are stored in a linear fashion. This means that if I want to look up something I wrote several months ago, I have to scroll back through all the entries I've written since.

In DayNotez I can assign categories and keywords to my entries, so I can filter my entries if I want to, say, find all entries I wrote about a particular subject. DayNotez also gives me a list view of my entries. That means I can see a list showing the first line of each entry; instead of scrolling through all the text of everything I've written I can scroll through the list if I want to look up a particular entry. I like these features.

The second was a new cell phone, a Samsung SPH-A920. My previous phone was getting flaky on me. My requirements for a new cell phone were that it has Bluetooth (for communicating with my LifeDrive) and a video camera (because of my interest in media creation). Later I added a new requirement - that it has the ability to play mp3 files so that I could listen to podcasts in my car while driving to work. As an added bonus, I want to be able to customize the ring tone so I can set it to be Friday Nights at The Wedge. How cool could that be, to hear Friday Nights at The Wedge play every time someone calls me! Not to mention the self-promotional value.

So far I have discovered that my LifeDrive does not have a phone driver for communicating with my Samsung phone using Bluetooth. Doh! I thought Bluetooth was Bluetooth and as long as my PDA and phone both have it I'd be able to pair them up. I'll have to find out if I can download a driver.

Application form in

One of my leftover goals from 2005 is getting one of my properties registered with the city as an accessory dwelling unit. It's taken me a while but I've finally reached that all important first milestone, sending in my application form and application fee.

The next milestone is to obtain a letter from an architect or engineer indicating Building Code compliance. Guess I'd better start shopping around for an architect or engineer.

Soul of a poet

My friend Jan continues to recuperate from the aneurysm she suffered in February. She has been released from the hospital where she had her surgery and transfered to a rehab center where she is undergoing therapy to regain the functions she lost as a result of her trauma. Her husband Fede continues to tell the story of her recovery in her blog.

The other day he wrote some amazing and incredibly poetic words in her blog. It made me want to write music to it. A melody started running through my head for most of the morning on that day, but I didn't capture it and by the afternoon the melody was gone.

This morning it came again while I was making breakfast. I don't know if it was exactly the same melody as from the previous day, but it was close. I hummed and captured it on the voice memo recorder on my LifeDrive.

Fede commented that he was just writing what he felt. Fede - you have the soul of a poet. Keep on writing, keep on sharing.

Closer to the heart

In the video projects I've done in the past I've always strived to select a song to use for soundtrack that was suitable for the presentation and felt right for the project.

At the volunteer event this past weekend (see Trail Blazing), I shot several pictures and video segments of volunteers at work and of the scenery. I felt an inspiration on this weekend to put them all together into a new video, and I kept listening to my instincts to come up with a song to use as a soundtrack. If I may say so myself, I have a knack for picking soundtracks for the video projects I've done.

After considering and rejecting a few titles, one came to me - Closer to the Heart, by Rush. It seemed like a good fit. Then I looked up the lyrics on the internet, and I was floored. The words just seemed to be so bang on. It was one of those moments where you just know that's the one.

And the men who hold high places
Must be the ones who start
To mould a new reality
Closer to the heart.