Philibuster

I used to have a G’Zone phone with Verizon. I liked it, it was simple and I could scare the crap out of everyone by dunking it in a cup of water or washing it off in the sink. Sadly it died. Don’t know what went wrong but it suddenly started cycling the power on and off. I couldn’t even get into the phone to get my numbers out of it. All it did was power down then power up power down and then up again. I have wanted something a little more than the simple phone I had before so I decided to make the jump into a smart phone. I went with sprint because they are cheaper than Verizon.

I didn’t do a lot of research into the phone because I lot of what I value are in aesthetics instead of pure horse power tech specs. If I don’t like the way a phone fits in my hands then I don’t care how awesome it is supposed to be I won’t want it. This is with computers as well. It is one of the biggest reasons why I don’t like macs. The OS and hardware looks like butt. I simple don’t like the way any of it is laid out, colored, or designed.

Well there are a whole bunch of ugly ass phones. The interface is slightly less important because well, mostly you can change that with skins. I looked at a few phones and in the end decided on the Samsung Moment. It has a nice simple look to it and it doesn’t have any awkward bumps or bulbs on it like a couple other phones I looked at.

The slide out keyboard on it works well enough to get by but the raised portion of the buttons are just a little too small and a little too close together. I hit the wrong key all the time. But not enough to make me hate it just enough to know that this could be better. The most common typo comes when I am typing around or on the space bar. I probably dislike that key the most.

There aren’t any complaints about the interface on the phone or using it. I like android quite well. I do have a couple complaints about a certain weirdness of the phone.

Number one, while I am starting to get the hang of it I still mess it up quite a bit. There is a call start button and a call end button. You use the call end button to flip the screen on and off. When you get a call you are supposed to take the phone out of your pocket and wait for the little light sensor to detect that it’s out of your pocket and turn the screen on itself. Then you push the call start button. What really happens is that you take the phone out of your pocket and by habit since you get text messages more is you push the call end button to turn the screen on to see who has texted you. Then the screen flashes for a split second showing you that oh actually it’s a call but then the auto light detector has seen the light and doesn’t turn the screen on but FLIPS the state of the screen. In other words it turns the screen off on you at this point. Now the phone is still ringing but the screen is off. If you push the call end button again in order to turn the screen on again you will hang up on the person calling. So how about we push the call accept button to just right to the call. Well it doesn’t seem to work that way and so the only option is to hang up and give them a call back. I’ve done this enough times that it’s really getting old now.

Sometimes if I’m somewhere a little dark the phone will sit there and not turn the screen on for me right away and it take all of my will power not to push the button to manually turn the screen on because I know it’s going to screw everything up. The phone will on occasion get confused about wheter the screen is on or not. If I push the end button to turn it off I’ll see it turn itself back on after a second and the only way to fix this is to unlock the screen and then turn it off.

Another thing that bugs me is that certain apps seem to never close and after playing around on the phone for a little bit suddenly it’s super hot because the processor is going at full steam, even though it’s been in my pocket for half an hour. I’ve installed a kill everything app to help prevent this. I hate this more than anything else because this phone seriously has crappy battery life.

The GPS isn’t all that great on the phone either. A clear view of the sky is a must, because if you have clear glass or a tree branch or anything at all over you, you are done. The one time I wanted to use it, it sat on the dash of my friend’s car with a perfectly good overhead view and it hardly ever worked. Eh, it’s not a GPS device so I don’t care too much about this.

Overall I have to say I like the phone. The few minor faults are made up for in everything else. Another phone may do all of that and not have the faults that I have seen but after looking at all of the phones in the sprint store I’m fairly certain that it’s the only one I wouldn’t have wanted to toss out the window after a few days just based off of how the phone looks and feels.

Read this at World of weird things.  It sums up how I feel about it perfectly. I could not have said it better myself. Really.

The years of neglect for teaching critical thinking and curiosity in favor of cramming for standardized tests and blatant anti-intellectualism from partisan pundits and post-modernists alike has come back to bite us and bite us hard. We seem to have jettisoned the idea of experts and authority and replaced it with manufactroversies for ratings and blowhards who generally have no qualifications other than a strong opinion on the matter. We started taking medical advice from Oprah and Jenny McCarthy instead of actual doctors. We see conspiracies everywhere we turn. And we have to be so nice and considerate towards everyone and everything that unless we want to be flooded with complaints about being mean and bitter, we have to give everyone a pass, from a creationist who wants to dismantle science education after having a chat with God, to homeopaths and faith healers who want to force insurance companies to pay for things that don’t work. And perhaps worst of all, the cranks are highly paid professionals in their con artistry while the skeptics and scientists who try to keep them in line can’t even hold a candle to their income.

Click here to read it all.

I am sometimes asked why I dislike religion. I am asked why I feel the world would be a better place without it and I’m given all sorts of stupid arguments that say why it is a force for good and that the world would be hell if there wasn’t religion. All of that is easily dismissed. It’s not a good or strong argument. I don’t believe that religion makes a person who they are. I don’t believe for a second that it is the reason why they do good or evil. I think it’s nothing more than an excuse in both cases. Those people out there that were raised to care about others and help others out would do so without the teachings of dogma and old superstitions. They use religion to help justify their actions and give them more meaning. I personally think that gives it less meaning, that it takes away from a selfless action/good deed done by someone and reduces it to a “I’m only doing this because someone (God) told me to and I don’t want to go to hell” instead of the remarkable kindness that is really is.

Also I don’t think that it causes people to evil things. Those that use religion to justify killing is nothing new. Everyone has been doing it since the beginning of religion. Hell, I am willing to bet that it was one of the founding principals. “There’s a tribe over there, we worship this, they worship that, they deserve to die.” I do believe that people will happily use it to justify the things they do so they might have a clear conscious, making whatever repugnant thing they did even worse.

This vile article speaks massive volumes of the person that wrote it. To quickly sum it up it says that you shouldn’t lie, EVER, even if the Nazis were asking you were some jews were it would be best to just tell them the truth because a lie is a lie and god hates that.

It shows that they have compassion and no love. That their strict adherence to their old bull shit dogma has sucked out the life from their bodies. That they have driven their archaic rules into their heads for so long that there is no free thought or reason or even any emotion anymore. Nothing but their unwavering rules. What disgusts me the most is the fact that they will sit back and smugly claim that without god you have no morals and that I am a horrible person who should be avoided because (picks random atheist hating evil out of the hat) I’ll probably eat your babies. Yet with jaw dropping statements like

“But consider for a moment that we are all already sentenced to die because we are sinners (Romans 5:12). It is going to happen regardless. If a lie helps keep someone alive for a matter of moments compared to eternity, was the lie, which is high treason against the Creator, worth it?”

Yes, they are basically saying so what those Jews are going to die anyways so what if I tell the Nazis were they are. god will judge me favorably because I didn’t lie. I’m surprised the article didn’t just state well they’re only Jews you know who cares what happens to them. So what that by my actions human beings will be round up and tortured and beaten and most likely have a miserable, horrific, slow death. But you know maybe it will just be the gas chambers those aren’t that bad.

I really have no words to describe how this makes me feel. My jaw just dropped when I read that. Religious nuts will never cease to surprise me and that honestly scares the shit out of me. Here they are happily removing all personal responsibility from themselves. A common trait and function of religion I’ve found. Probably why it caught on so well and has stayed around as long as it has. You don’t have be a good person or do anything good in order to be sure of your eternal soul just have to follow these rules and we’ll use magic away guilt to remove all the pesky moral problems and paint them the way we want them to be painted.

Bah. Sickening.

Ok the UK is a nice place, I’ve been to London and I liked it, but WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU BRITAIN!!!!!!! SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK? I want to know what the fuck you are smoking and putting in the water to make things like this article sound like a good idea. Here’s a quote if you don’t want read the whole thing.

“The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes.

They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.”

I will say it again. WHAT THE FUCK! cameras in people’s homes to monitor them 24 hours a day. You are going to seriously watch kids sleep and whatever else. ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE? How the hell anyone thought this was a good idea is totally beyond me. I’m sorry but as much as I liked London the critical mass of stupid has reached a level I am not permitted to experience so I will not even visit your country anymore. It’s much like Texas to me now.

HELLo I would like to take a moment to drop a bombsHELL on you. There happens to be a town in Texas that is HELLbent to do away with the HELLacious term of HELLo that is bringing on the HELLfire and unleasing the HELLhounds who chase down and drive everyone into the deepest HELLholes. And you might ask what on earth is  wrong with HELLo? Well it’s because it has embedded within its’ cheerful greeting and innocent outlook is a HELLuva horrible evil word, HELL. That’s right for years we have been innocently greeting each other but little did we know that we are actually doing the DEVIL’s work. Sowing the seeds of evil in our brothers, sisters, coworkers, and even total strangers. In a nutsHELL, this has to stop. We must fight against the evil, force back the demons, send holy sHELLs of divine light and goodness to drive the HELLhounds back to unsHELL the evil that has been right in front of our very faces for so long. We must be HELLbent on destroying and removing this problem before it spreads even further. To replace tainted term we must use a word that is just as just as HELLo is evil, to this end the term HEAVEN-o has been coined. This new and good term is already being used the Courthouse, which we know is just an extension of the church. Where the divine word of God is processed into the Justice of Man. This my friends is just a small victory, we must proceed posthaste in order to get this to catch on in the rest of the country, and then THE WORLD!

Found Via Pharyngula. The main article can be found here.

So I just bought another car off ebay. I’m tired of the kia I’m driving right now. It’s decided that it’s new goal is to annoy me as much as it can without completely breaking. Ever since I got the car the front right headlight has been burning out. I’ve replaced it about 4 times in two years. The radio has been a major pain in the butt. It never really worked all that well. The lights would go out on it and sometimes you couldn’t control the volume. Then it decided to really mess up and just not turn on and when I pushed the power button a little harder than normal the thing fell out. Showing me that it was never really mounted correctly. I decided to try and fix it by putting in a computer in place of the radio. Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I even have all the parts I just have to install everything. I got cold feet about it when I started seeing how bad the electrical problems with this car are. Without the radio the dashboard light don’t work. Behind the radio are two different wiring harnesses one that wasn’t being used (The stock harness I guess) and the one that was attached to the radio. I figured Ok well so this was attached to the radio and my dash lights worked so two or more wires from this are used for them. I can rule out the speaker wire lines and I know which is power ground etc so I’ll just connect the right wires together to complete the circuit that is broken without the radio. Nope no go. No combination of wires not including the speaker wires would get the dash lights back on. Except for a couple combinations with the old wire harness which again wasn’t connected to anything before the radio fell out.

I rigged up a method that brought the dash lights back. But only on one side. and only if you don’t have high beams on. I couldn’t get them to work. Oh well. So I’ve been riding around without a radio just a gapping hole in the dash because I don’t want to deal with the wiring problems that I’ll have when installing the computer and of course the dash lights will probably stop working once I have the computer working.

There is a CV joint going bad by the sound of it. Every time I go over a speed bump the thing bangs like I’ve run over something. Nearly made me drop a deuce the first time it happened.

Don’t get me started on changing the oil. I have never been successful in removing the oil drain plug in this car. I stripped the bolt the first time I tried and had to get a stronger friend with a super long vice grip to get it off. Alright so now I put on a different new plug. Come next oil change nope not coming off. So again it has a stripped bolt. It’s also leaking oil but in this case it makes it easier for me I just keep topping it off. Oh and before you even begin yes I’m turning the bolt the right way. But hell I even tried the other way as well. It’s not moving under 1 Phil power, and I’m not a weak guy. Not super strong either but still it’s a FREAKING OIL PLUG! It shouldn’t require that much force.

After all of this the car decided it wasn’t annoying me enough so it decided to revoke my ablitly to change from defrost to floor to straight at you. It just randomly switches from defrost to floor or whatever whenever it feels like it. The next thing to go will probably be the temperature control.

Well too bad it won’t get that far. I’m going to get rid of it now that I have a new car lined up. I decided a day or two after the air con control problem sprung up that I was going to buy a new car. Well, not a new car, just another car new to me. I don’t have the money for a new car. I thought about going to the auctions now that I have more money in hand, or going to test drive cars on my day off but I first hit up the internet to see what was selling. I got around to ebay and there was this super good condition BMW convertible and I’ve missed the T-tops of the Z so convertible equals better. I put a bid in on it not really thinking I would get it. I figure well it would be nice but there isn’t a hope for me to get it it’s going to go higher. Well it did but not that high and I won it. Sweet. It was 4300 for a few days and then at the last min someone tried to snipe me and brought it up to 4965. I imagine that it was a douche bag that just wanted to bid the thing up to cause me to pay more seeing as he stopped just before my highest bid. But whatever it’s still a pretty good price. I’m going to go pick it up and pay for it on thursday so I’ll post pictures then. There are a ton of photos on the ebay page but I want to post ones I take myself.