The Time Sink

Yep, a 'short week' this week: the boys and Shelley are off from school, but Shelley has them all pretty well scheduled up. I'll have both Thursday and Friday off, but Thursday will be taken up by the "over the river and through the woods" gig. ...and Friday will be the annual decoration extravaganza around here.

Yes, a screen shot. ...and from an online game of all things. That would be sunset on Lake Lordamere (one of the early settings of a World of Warcraft quest). WoW is noted for some of their 'attention to details', and I was busy on one of the islands in the lake the other day I noticed some of the characters were being silhouetted by a very low setting sun. I really didn't think about it; I just turned around as I would at home to see if there were any highlights to the east. Oh, heck yes! ...and since I don't go anywhere without a camera, voila!

Okay, that's it for the work week. We take "Federal" holidays, but we horse trade Columbus Day for Black Friday. Coolness. ...and I need a cooldown after getting my technology head handed to me by my replacement cell phone, of all things. Every so often I get behind the curve, and I'm used to using a phone to make calls. ...as opposed to taking photos, emailing, texting (occasionally) or beaming myself down to the planet.

...but I do rely on Bluetooth tech to keep me at least marginally safer on the road; part of the job requires me to be out of the office a fair amount of hours, but the phone calls don't stop. So a simple earpiece or a speaker is something I consider necessary. ...and when my old phone's Bluetooth started getting a bit long of tooth, the IT/Cell King/Programmer had a new one sent in. ...and things had changed enough that the old SIM wouldn't cut it in the new phone and darn...

I did manage enough connectivity through Motorola's phone tools to pull most of my numbers off the V551 and pass them on to the new phone, but it's been a bit of an uphill experience getting all the twinks and such working. Good grief, the blasted thing even has an mp3 player built in. ...and it'll take a 4gig card!

...and the rest of the story? I simply could not get the voice dialing figured out. I searched every setting and dug through the abbreviated manual and the best I could do was to switch it 'on' from the settings and learn that 'push the button' activates it. ...nothing, absolutely nothing about how to record the names and assign them to the address book. I mean, once I switched the option to 'on', the address book seemed to allow an entry; but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to get one in there.

Tuesday I was trying to reach someone at the house while I was at a store, and I was finally frustrated enough to 'just push the darned button'. ...and I had my earpiece in. ...and the phone lit up with a new menu and a voice in my ear asked me, "What would you like to do?". Okay, I've been a gamer on and off over the years; I'll play along. ...so I read "name dial" off the menu. ...and the blasted thing came back with, "Okay, say the name." WT? I have no recordings, you silly piece of solid state! ...but I said, "Brad", just to keep things interesting. ...and the thing said, "Okay, call Brad". ...and Brad answered. WT???^n. The darned thing has enough tech in it to 'decode' my voice prompt and perform a lookup of names and match the decoding of what I spoke into the earpiece with what it would think the phonetics of the written name would be.

""Festival of Lights" here...

Well? Yeah, the lights are up. Daniel is still asleep, but I'm not sure if that's 'teen' or 'done'. He acquired the title "Design Speicalist" last year and continued in that role this year. That translates to: Brad puts up the lights in the redwoods (his first year for that duty) and around the eaves, and I run power to everyone's work and do a few specialty things. ...and Daniel has all the central yard work and can pretty much do it any ol' way he'd like to. ...and it turned out darned well! I do need to change one power feed (because we'd really like to use the microwave in the evenings); but other than some cleanup, we're pretty much done.

Coming back online... I've been offline most of this four-day holiday, so I'll spend some time this evening catching up on email and such. Heck, I haven't even had a browser open on this box (except Konqueror to look up a game play tip or two) most of the time.

...but we got a lot done around the house and had a good time at the relatives and are way tweaked of backs and legs, but hey... The tree is up and the interior is started (yes, photos later); and the front main feed is resnaked to pick up most of the load on another breaker...

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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