yaleman.org

Here’s a great article on Links to Free Music that area completely legal. MichaelCrawford is a great poster on one of my favourite "thinking" News/Article/Information sites Kuro5hin.org. His two sites have terribly ugly layouts, but they are very well written from what I’ve seen, and I think you should read the article that I linked to in my first sentence, if not only for the information, but the way that he writes. I admire him as someone that actually puts some effort into his writing, and then gives it away – then there’s the fact that he has some serious mental issues (can’t remember the name, but it’s an amazing story of living through some strange things that happen to people’s brains.)

As you may have noticed, I’m going rather crazy with my new toy. Rather than sitting at work reading my current novel or something like that, I was rather busily investigating the Nokia Developer’s Forum for information on what I can do with the Series 40 platform and its associated Java goodness. I’m going to try and get Eclipse working later, hopefully it’ll be my IDE of choice, since I’d prefer to code in Linux rather than having to rely on Windows.

Oh, and if I haven’t mentioned it yet, then Internet Explorer really really stinks. The amount of times it crashed while I was trying to get around the Nokia site was amazing! Use Firefox, I love it!

Well, I finally got the data cable working properly – since it’s a non-genuine part, it works in non-normal ways. Rather than being a USB cable, it detects as a “Nokia 5140 connected through Serial Cable.” Which is why it wasn’t working, because the software that is included with the normal PC Suite doesn’t include serial drivers and so forth.

I’ve been reading things on Nokia’s Discussion Boards with regards to what I can and can’t do with the phone, software updates and things that are to be played with, and it looks like the Series 40 OS is pretty simple, which means I can’t do much with it. I guess I’ll just have to get into programming for the phone in Java and see what I can do

Well, I bought a new mobile phone today, since I was out of contract with Telstra for the old one… my two years was up, the call rates sucked, and so did the other available services. So their luck ran out when it came to me. Virgin and Vodafone don’t have the coverage that I’m looking for (lots of out-of-city is what I need) so they were off the list to start with.

Optus have good coverage, and a plan where the call rates to mobiles are 18 cents per thirty seconds, and 18 cents SMS all day every day. I scored myself a Nokia 5140 over 24 months, paying $35/month minimum spend. I could have gone for a $25/month minimum spend, but then I would have only gotten myself $15/month included calls, which is stupid since I tend to spend that much money anyway.

I’m still waiting for the number to port across, since I signed up at 3pm on a Saturday. Australia’s porting hours are 8am-8pm Monday to Friday and 10-6 on weekends, so I’m still stuck on Telstra until monday morning, due to the inevitable porting delays that happen when you’re trying to take your business from one company to one of its competitors. *sigh*

The phone seems to have some really nice features, the body of the handset is basically waterproof, and rather tough. The screen isn’t a full colour one (only 4096 colours) but I’m not looking to watch movies or anything on it. If I want to see full colour pictures, I’ll download them to my PC or take them with my proper digital camera in the first place.

I borrowed a data cable off Lauren, but I seem to be having problems trying to get it working, I think the main problem is because it’s a non-genuine one. I’ll post more as I get connected (to the service and through the cable) and I explore the features available to me through both!

Wow, these things are freakin’ scary – I’ve drunk about ten smirnoff blacks (these are two standard drinks each) and two redbulls – normally I would be a bit down and chilling out right now, but I’ve stripped from the waist up and run about 3km back to the house that I’m staying at tonight. It’s rather worrying, this is weird. I’ll post more later, when I’m not so pumped and not so drunk. Yay for the abililty to type properly while I’m drunk and a sexy girl is kissing me.