Archives for February 2006

AOL’s new pricing is good, not bad … pay attention!

February 27, 2006 by Leave a Comment

AOL recently announced that they’d be changing their pricing plans with a $2 increase from $23.90 to $25.90 a month for dial-up, which of course isn’t going to be a popular change. However, the interesting part of this change is that AOL has worked out agreements with companies to bundle an AOL subscription with a broadband connection, for guess how much? Right, $25.90 a month — the same price as dial-up. This is incredible, but people aren’t as excited about this as I would have expected. Why not?

I’m guessing that lots of folks read the BetaNews article on this, and like Gray Rentz over at MobilitySite, didn’t fully understand the new deal. I left a few comments over there, including a link to the more elaborate AP article, trying to clear things up a bit. I think Gray’s understanding is that you’ll be paying for a broadband connection (whatever that already costs) and then $25.90 a month on top of that for your AOL subscription. If Gray’s interpretation is any indication of the general understanding people got from this change, no wonder people aren’t excited by this news. From the AP article, it definitely sounds like the $25.90 a month pricing includes the broadband connection and an AOL subscription. In other words, what people were already paying for just a broadband connection before, they can now get an AOL subscription for no additional cost! If you ask me, this is huge!

I hope this makes the new pricing change make more sense to people. It’s a great deal for AOL subscribers who have been thinking about leaving AOL for a plain broadband connection, or reluctant to upgrade from dial-up to broadband … now, there’s no reason to leave AOL, and pricing is no longer a deciding factor between dial-up and broadband.

This could very well be the start of another September that Never Ended.

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Filed Under: AOL Leave a Comment

del.icio.us/dossy links since February 13, 2006 at 09:05 AM

February 27, 2006 by Leave a Comment

del.icio.us/dossy (RSS) links since February 13, 2006 at 09:05 AM:

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Treo 650 Updater 1.17 for Cingular released November 2005

February 25, 2006 by Leave a Comment

In August of last year, I replaced my aging Samsung i330 with a brand new Cingular Treo 650. It shipped with the latest software, which was Treo650-1.15-CNG at the time. I wrote about some really annoying problems, but the one that’s really bothered me the entire time is how the device keeps turning the screen off after seconds, not 3 minutes as I’ve got configured in the preferences. Well, somehow I missed Palm’s Treo 650 Updater 1.17 for Cingular that was released a month after, in November. There’s a bunch of fixes that are part of the update, but the one I’m most interested in:

Correctly saves Auto-off power setting. This addresses an issue experienced by some users after installing updater version 1.15

Glory be and halleluja! As I write this, I’m in the process of installing the update. A HotSync, a hard reset, the update installs, another HotSync … and it’s done! But, what has it done to my poor phone? It’s totally messed up! The phone won’t power on. Going to Phone Info, it’s blanked out Number, IMEI Number, SA Number and Firmware fields. Going into Prefs, selecting Network under Communication throws me an error: “Network Error … The network library is not available.” Crap! Okay, if being a long-time owner of crappy PalmOS devices has taught me anything, it’s this: when stuff stops working, hard-reset and restore from HotSync. So, that’s what I do … no luck. The phone works fine after the hard-reset, but after I restore my stuff with a HotSync, it stops working again. You know what this means … I’m going to be spending hours playing “Where’s Waldo” with my user profile folder, adding PRC files back in one at a time until I figure out which one is causing the Treo to hang. Oh, I’m so not looking forward to this.

I might post an update after I get this thing working again. Or, I might try and find a way to revert it to the 1.15 version of the software. Or, throw it out the window and finally get a non-PalmOS PDA phone. Argh!

UPDATE: After playing the twiddle-with-my-backup-folder game and HotSync’ing over and over, finally removing DocumentsToGo got the Treo working again. Yay! And, yes, the “keeps turning the screen off prematurely” problem is fixed.

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Filed Under: Palm/Treo Leave a Comment

I ought to test in MSIE more often

February 24, 2006 by 5 Comments

To anyone who might have tried to leave a comment on this blog using the MSIE or AOL Explorer browser (which uses MSIE under the hood) and couldn’t, I’m sorry about that. Someone just told me today that it wasn’t working … turns out I had an extra close tag (specifically, </form>) which MSIE was interpreting correctly (which ended up neutering the “Post” button) but Firefox was being lenient about. In other words, it wasn’t working under MSIE which was the technically right behavior, but I didn’t know it because I mostly use Firefox which ignored my mistake and “did what I meant, not what I said.”

Commenting should now work for MSIE users again. Sorry about that. Fire away! And if you ever have a problem with this site, don’t hesitate to email me and let me know about it.

Filed Under: Geeking out 5 Comments

Stanley Burrell, yes, Hammer, is now blogging, too

February 24, 2006 by Leave a Comment

Just a quick note before I really start my day … Niall Kennedy points out that Stanley Burrell, the legendary Hammer (or “MC Hammer” as he was previously known), is now blogging on the MC Hammer Blog. He’s also doing some podcasting and moblogging too, but start by reading his first entry.

Spike Lee really gets it when he tries to spread the message that we should be celebrating the good stuff in life. Of course we all have bad stuff happen all the time, but why should rap and hip-hop degenerate into a massive pity-party for black people? I think Hammer gets this when he writes:

[…] Through the blog I will eliminate sensationalism. You will have access to my many thoughts and truly get to know me without an intermediate.

Video on demand will allow you to see my art, my life and work on demand and without the infection of those who have hidden agendas. This is the revolution and it is on demand. There is no stopping this movement and you can’t contain it. The music was built from the vibrations and the call of the people.

We will dance.

There will be many steps in this dance. Learn the movements. Respect my get down. Notice the strength of the women in these videos. See the joy of the kids. The young man at the end of the first “Look” video is my ten year old son Stanley Burrell Jr. I turn them loose and lift them up. They are strong and beautiful. I applaud their strengths and I create an environment that focuses on their gifts. When I launch The Look Tour you will witness what the power of music, dance, technology, God and community truly is on another level. Witness the maturation of Hip Hop.

I won’t be just performing but we together will be celebrating the Art Of The Dance.

Yeah, he gets it. “Through the blog I will eliminate sensationalism.” “Witness the maturation of Hip Hop.” Nailed it. Almost makes me wonder if Hammer’s read Naked Conversations.

Anyway, MC Hammer’s music was a big part of the soundtrack of my childhood, and I’ve always been surprised that he steered clear of the whole gangsta mess. Now, he’s once again entering my life in a big way, this time through his blogging and transparency, and his positive outlook and message. Maybe he’ll be a big influence on my own childrens’ childhoods as well. I think I’d quite like that.

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Filed Under: Blogging Leave a Comment

Twin Tangle by ThinkFun, if you like brainteaser puzzles

February 23, 2006 by 4 Comments

I’m a big fan of brainteasers and puzzles, especially the metal manipulation ones, where you have to unlink two or more objects that are somehow entangled together. This past weekend, while on vacation up in Cooperstown, NY, we stopped into a store called Riverwood Gifts right on Main Street where I found a fantastic puzzle. Normally, I can solve these things within a few minutes without much effort, but this one had me stumped. I probably spent a good ten minutes studying it, and just couldn’t figure it out. We left the store to continue shopping, but we went back the next day. Having a night to sleep on it, I managed to “solve” the puzzle … by which I mean, unlink the two pieces, but I hadn’t truly “solved” it in the sense of understanding the solution. In other words, when I put the two pieces back together again, I couldn’t immediately re-solve it! This puzzle was great! I rarely find a puzzle that can do this to me.


(The packaging.)

(Unsolved.)

(Solved.)


The puzzle is called Twin Tangle by a company called ThinkFun. It’s two seemingly identical pieces of steel (they may actually be identical) which can be linked together by sliding them together. The design of the puzzle is so incredibly simple and elegant, but the solution is actually quite unintuitive which makes it a challenge to solve.

Do you like puzzles? Have you found any that you found especially challenging? One that you had to really study in order to understand the solution so that you could repeat it reliably? Tell me about it in the comments below.

Filed Under: Geeking out 4 Comments

Willie Nelson is Frequently, Secretly (A Subversive Iconoclast)

February 22, 2006 by Leave a Comment

Something special happened this Valentine’s Day. Willie Nelson released the single “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond of Each Other).” It’s only available through Apple’s iTunes Music Store, so here’s a download link for the song. Matter of fact, this is the first song I’ve actually bought and paid for at iTunes. Yes, I just had to hear the song for myself and $0.99 was well within impulse buy range.

Apparently the song is 20 years old, originally written by Ned Sublette, according to Boing Boing. I’m guessing it was much better received today than it would have been 20 years ago.

Go and buy the song off iTunes and share your thoughts about the song here in the comments. What do you think? Is Willie just capitalizing on the success of Brokeback Mountain (IMDb), or is he really being subversive and iconoclastic?

Filed Under: Believe it, or not Leave a Comment

Ask Dossy

February 22, 2006 by 18 Comments

If you could ask me anything, what would it be? Something you’re curious about? Or, would like to know more about? Or just something that’s been on your mind and you need to ask someone about? If you want to ask it publically, go ahead and leave a comment below. Or, if you want to ask me privately, just send me an email. Note: My spam filter can be a bit overzealous, so if your mail bounces as “spam detected” just leave a comment here letting me know you sent me an email and that it was detected as spam. I’ll go look through my spam folder and try to find it.

Filed Under: Dossy, Dossy and more Dossy! 18 Comments

A recent “web log” entry

February 21, 2006 by Leave a Comment

I’ve been reading Jason Kottke’s blog on and off for a while now, but I never had a real reason to link to what he writes mostly because most of it didn’t interest me much. However, he just pointed out William Safire’s “web logs” blooper, reminding us of his own blog entry from August 2003 that web logs are not weblogs. To help illustrate the point, I’m posting a recent web log entry for my blog in this weblog entry:

x.x.x.x - - [21/Feb/2006:21:23:10 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 53648 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1" 1.990597 "[cookies removed]" "dossy.org"

I sanitized it a bit to mask the IP address and the cookies that are logged, but otherwise, it’s a real live example of a web log entry.

I don’t know if I’d call a “web log” a chronologically-ordered and frequently updated website … it is chronologically-ordered for the most part (sometimes slightly out of order if your web server is multi-threaded and does asynchronous writes to the web log, like I know Netscape Enterprise Server did back in version 3.x) and as long as you get reasonable traffic, it’s updated frequently … but I don’t think posting them to a website would be very interesting, unless you’ve got a data mining fetish.

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Filed Under: Blogging Leave a Comment

Scott Adams for President in 2008

February 20, 2006 by Leave a Comment

You might think I’m kidding, but no, I really would like to see Scott Adams elected President of the United States in 2008. Why? Just read his blog and you’ll see that he really “gets it” when it comes to so many of the world’s problems. For example, in his latest entry titled Defeating Terrorism with Good Mileage, he writes:

If someone is fanatical enough to fund terrorism, do you think THAT’S the part of his budget he cuts first? What part of “living in caves in the mountains of Pakistan” is compatible with “we’ll only do this as long as the money comes easily”?

And how expensive is terrorism anyway? Their last attack could have been accomplished with Bonus Miles and a few box cutters. Is there somewhere a would-be terrorist on a tight budget who is thinking “As soon as I save enough money for a box of nails, I will complete my exploding belt”?

The corresponding full-color illustration of this point ran yesterday, on February 19, 2006.

Don’t be a fool. Learn what “fungible” means, and make sure you help elect Scott Adams for President in 2008. It’s your civic duty. Don’t let the terrorists win and all that jingoistic yadda-yadda bullshit.

Filed Under: Blogging Leave a Comment
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