The main story is hosted by wired and can be found here. I am glad that gizmodo is getting a lot of heat and the guy that “found” the 4g in the first place will be enjoying his dance with the legal system. Balking at Steve Jobs?! Come on gizmodo, that just discredits you even more. I’m not bitter because those no talent ass clowns (office space joke) nit picked my macbook mod when it went semi viral but you don’t mess with a company that is as secretive as the NSA or someone who can finagle themselves onto the top of an organ donor list (unprovable of course).

Hopefully a precedent gets set so other small companies get dissuaded from attempting shenanigans like this in the future. I enjoyed seeing the info, but I think I would rather have waited for the official Apple event. I bet Apple will mention something about this and pun off of it.

Sorry my little Sony Ericcson V600i. You have been an awesome phone for 4 and a half years but I think it is nearly time to decommission you.

The Awkward Button Lite is now ranked 37th in Canada. It happened last Sunday. I opened MyAppSales (its an app by a fellow developer to-you guessed it-chart sales/downloads) and was saw a huge spike. Fearing something ‘funny’ had happened, I logged onto itunes connect and grabbed the daily report, opened it up and bam. There it was. A few hundred people downloaded the free button; I hit a rank of 40. I monitored it for a few days and then started up the chatter with my friends. I found no blog posts or anything toting the Awkward Button Lite as an awkwardness fighting tool, so I have no idea how it all started.

I can only make an educated guess as why it is doing so well. Awkwardness. People need help fighting awkwardness. And what better way than with an app.  They download the free version and are temporarily protected. If only they would buy the paid version and become completely protected from awkwardness. Awkwardness would be eradicated from Canada and the Mounties would have one less thing to worry about.

I had the opportunity to travel with the Saint Mary’s Basketball team as part of the pep band last week. We went to Houston Texas for the third round of March Madness. On the flight down there, they had inflight internet. The only downer was that it was 8 bucks or I should say $7.95. A small price to pay to keep up on my facebook status stalking and my “texts from last night” browsing. I also probed the network to see how many of my fellow passengers (it was a chartered flight) were partaking in the mile high internet club. I also wanted to see the little network that Delta airline had constructed. All the photo’s are from my iPod Touch and from 35,000+ feet.

The photo below is from the web browser after you enter the code. “You’re on the inter-webs”. It was definitely a good sight. A few minutes later they rolled out the ice cream snack and I knew this flight was probably the best flight I have ever taken.

Below are the links to the wifi setup they had. The app “WiFiFoFum” used to be on the appstore, but Apple (in their infinite wisdom) axed it. It is pretty sick to use and describes all the wifi systems around you.

After I connected to the ‘Net, I did a quick scan of the network using iNet Pro by BananaGlue. This app is a beast. I was scanning the network at the hotel and it had no problem pulling down information on the 192 devices on the network. Below is the network scan of the the wifi on the plane. I redacted the IP address and the names of the devices. Most of the computer names were pretty revealing as it turned out; password on a post-it note stuck to the monitor revealing, lol. Three of the Apple lines are Macbooks and the other Apple lines are iPod Touch’s. A total of eight people were perusing the internet.

The speed was also pretty decent as well. In terms of wifi at 35,000+ feet and moving at 605 mph, it was quick and snappy. Download speeds were a bit slower than expected but the upload speed was definitely a surprise. Below is the “holy crap, i’m online in an airplane” shot. It was initially slow, but then the speed leveled out as we hit cruising speed/altitude. It also could be that the speed test app chose the wrong ping server, wasn’t really concerned right off the bat (ice cream was RIGHT in front of me). The app I used was Speed Test which was released by Ookla. I would have posted a link to their site, but I couldn’t find one.

The app chose a closer server this time and these are the results.

After a few hours, it was still about the same.

I was very impressed with how the payment system was setup. I think the price was a bit high for a three hour and fifteen minute flight, but it was worth it for the nerd/geek experience. I should also point out that the price was for a 24 hour block of access. All in all, I didn’t use it as much as I thought I would, but it was still good to have enabled in case I wanted to gloat about getting ice cream on an airplane. I was asking other people on the flight, and they would have got on if the price was a tad lower.

As I was playing in the Saint Mary’s jazz band last week, one of the members asked for brass to accompany the pep band to March madness. I, of course, wanted to do it and am going to Providence, Rhode Island tomorrow for the basketball game. They are playing Richmond and our game is on Thursday at noon or sometime around there. So today I prepped my desk for the inevitable onslaught of paper that will pile up over the next 4 days. I have posted a picture of my desk below, it rarely looks this clean because I hoard work for times when I have little work. I really shouldn’t do that because work seems to find me and I am always doing something while at the dealership.

This is my desk in all its glory. I can only imagine the amount of paper in store for it (and me when I return). I am predicting that everything will be covered in at least 6 inches of paper. I’ll post a photo when I get back this weekend, assuming they win. If you look to the left, you’ll see a pile already forming. I was handed it as I was leaving and to the desk it went.

The age old debate of using a desktop or a laptop is in my psyche once again. I’ve been biased towards desktops for a long while. I remember going to Macworld when I was like 8 (although it was just for a brief instance-run in a grab a forgotten brick cell phone), and gawking at all the computers, most of which happened to be a desktop. They didn’t have laptops back then and the Apple computer we had, was a desktop. That is when my bias for desktops began.

I have been looking at macbook’s recently because I am constantly on the mac and haven’t turned my desktop rig on in several months. As I was talking to my alter ego last night/this morning, he said he was on his couch and typing; I said I was at my desk (wanting to be reading/working in the bed). I wouldn’t say it was envy, but more of a simplicity. I want to use my desktop, but I just don’t have any need to use it. I have all the programs I need on the mac. I guess the only thing I anticipate is when starcraft 2 comes out, probably the only reason I would/will keep the desktop.

I guess this will probably be the farewell post to my desktop. It was fun while it lasted and boy was it fun putting all the pieces together. May your quad core compute for many years to come.

I have been fielding many requests for the story of how I proposed, so I will retell it on here so everyone can feast on the romanticism.

Back story-I asked her dad permission and brought both moms with me to pick out the ring.I already knew what she wanted, so it was mainly for them to hang out aka “mom talk”.

In starting out, I originally anticipated on new years eve or thereabouts, but wasn’t really sure of a date/time. I had anticipated going with the moms before x-mas and them telling me they wouldn’t be able to get the ring ready until after x-mas – “oh, it can be ready by tomorrow if you’d like”. Kel’s mom let me use her dad’s moms engagement ring (several generations old and pretty-I looked at it under the scope). That is when the pandemic of excitement started in my brain. This could happen soon…

I started running idea’s out in my head and pretty much had it nailed down on the car ride home, although for reasons of security, and not wanting it to accidentally escape, I decided not to let anyone in on the plan. As part of being allowed to leave work and go participate in ring hunting, I had to bring back some form of sparkles for them to see; they got to see the ring right after I got it. The GM of the dealership walks in on show and tell and goes “whats this? For me?”, I get on my knee and do the first/only practice run. I almost shed a tear because the excitement at this point was epic. I got like 4 hours of sleep the night before.

The big day: Christmas Eve. I barely get two hours of sleep due to the level of excitement. By stroke of luck, she gets to leave work at like 1, so I go to pick her up and we decided to have lunch in Heather Farms Park; when we first started dating, we used to have lunch there quite a bit. They also have a large rose garden and nice area’s to sit. After we had lunch we decided to walk around a bit and gab about the next day.

We end up in the rose garden (i’m an excellent navigator) and on a bench near a little stream. We continued to talk a bit and I decided to give her, what she thought, was her early x-mas gift. It was a bag of coal… The bag was a felt bag, labeled coal. It looked quite nice. She takes it and there is nothing inside “whats this”? So she opens it up and there are little fortunes inside, terms of endearment. So she begins to take them out and read them. I only put like ten or fifteen inside and of course the most important one. As she is taking them out, she keeps getting all the others (excitement is overwhelming). I think to myself, “did it get left out?”.

The very last one she pulls is the one; “Will you merry me?!”-”whats this??!!” I get on my knee and bring out the box, formally ask, display ring. At that point it was outta my hand and on her finger faster than I could blink. Add some tears from her and the uncorked bottle of excitement from me and that is how I proposed. As we are driving back to her house, had dinner and went to mass with her parents, her mom calls…

Hi honey, how’s it going… (kel could have used the awkward button right here as the pause was long enough) Anything new?!?!?!

lol, “Official, like a referee with a whistle” – little bro

I am working on adding a suggestions page (where people can suggest changes/modifications) and am also putting the finishing touches on the feedburner modification. People will be able to follow the feed through email, which was going to be the next logical step, but I will give Johnny some credit for mentioning, his site is www.jonathanvolk.com