i have been a sidekick user since the first version. chad and bryan had actually bought them on initial release and after playing with theirs i knew i had to have it. after i got mine i did my best to encourage others to buy it. the phone had so much promise. it was a great geek toy and the potential for development by its users was limitless, or so we thought.

we quickly realized that there just wasn’t going to be any real development for this phone without either signing away your warranty rights or just sitting and waiting forever for any kind of over the air update. however tmobile was really good about replacing the b&w and color versions of the original sidekick as they were prone to hardware malfunction quite frequently.

i have owned a b&w sidekick and upgraded to a color. i gave my b&w to joel who got a free upgrade to color after the b&w broke a few times. that jerk. i had to pay for both! i eventually upgraded to a sidekick 2 and yes, i upgraded to a sidekick 3.

i have investigated a lot of phones through the years. i’ve always wanted something better, something new, something cooler but nothing ever really rose to the occasion. i accepted the fate of the sidekick; it would become a trendy celebrity hip hop toy, and while im sure it was a good move for danger and tmobile it still fucking sucks.

im not a heavy phone user in itself, but i rely heavily on email, aim, and sms (from my phone). I also play the shit out of it (tetris and bust a move). i have one of the original plans that has been grandfathered every time i renew contract. its a 39.99 a month plan for unlimited data, 200 anytime minutes and 1000 weekend minutes. a lot of ppl say “oh those minutes are trash” but as i said before i don’t rely heavily on the phone. however i started to use the phone more and more and occasionally would suffer a .35 penalty on extra minutes which sucked ass. i eventually upgraded and added on unlimited mobile to mobile minutes for 7 bux. one of the major reasons i’ve never left behind the sidekick and/or tmobile was simply because, my plan rules.

here are the specs on the phone. some of the upgrades are a 1.3 mexapixel camera, expandable memory (miniSD), lighter, slightly slimmer frame. mp3 player. improved battery life, bluetooth, usb, added email protocols imap4 (they had pop3), they now offer msn along with aim and yahoo. you can also read the manual online on dangers site.

Specifications:

Battery Life Talk time (hours): 5 hours

Standby time (days): 60 hours

Talk and standby times and other specifications are provided by the manufacturer and are approximate. Actual performance varies based upon features or services used, network configuration, signal strength, operating temperature, customer use, and other factors.

Battery Type is listed here

Changeable Faceplates No

Codecs AMR

EFR

FR

HR

Dimensions Height 1.26 width 1.90 thickness in inches

Display Type: SXVGA

Colors: (16-bit) 65K

Size: (pixels) 240 x 160

Mini Display N/A

Memory Memory listed in KB, MB, GB

Expandable Memory: Yes

Type: miniSD

Frequency Bands GSM 850

GSM 1800

GSM 1900

Phone Style Flip screen

Phone book Capacity 2000 in device memory, 650 on SIM Card

Operating System Proprietary

Weight Weight (in ounces): 6.7

Call Management

Picture Caller ID Yes

Ringer Caller ID Yes

Speed Dial / One-Touch Dial Yes

Maximum Amount of Speed Dial Entries: 9

Speakerphone Yes

Type: Full-Duplex

Vibrate Yes

Voice Dialing No

Camera

Modes Yes – Airplane mode, maximum. Loud, normal, soft, buzz, and silent

Megapixel(s) Yes

Megapixels: 1.3

Resolution In pixels: 38,400

Video Capture No

Zoom No

Connectivity

Bluetooth Yes

Bluetooth Profile: 1.2

Browser Type:

Type Version:

Supports: WAP (1.0, 1.2.1, 2.0), HTML, XHTML, XML

EDGE Yes

Class: E2

GPRS Yes

Class: Rel 0.4

Infrared (IR) Port No

Synchronization Yes, No

SyncML Yes, No

UMA No

USB Support Yes

USB Mass Storage Yes

Wi-Fi No

Messaging

E-mail Client Yes

Protocols Supported: IMAP4, POP3

Instant Messaging Client Yes – AIM®, Yahoo!®, and MSN® Messenger

MMS / Picture Messaging No

SMS / Text Messaging Yes

Concatenation Support: Yes

Digital TTY/TDD Support: Yes – two apps available for download through the PDM catalog that support TTY: “IP Relay” and “Sprint Wireless Relay”

Predictive Text: Yes

Predictive Text Technology: User configurable Auto Text

Organization

Alarm No

Calculator No

Calendar Yes

Currency converter No

Dictionary No

Memo / Notepad Yes, No

To-do List Yes, No

Phone book Multiple numbers per name: Yes

Address Field: Yes

E-mail Field: Yes

Caller Groups: Yes

Voice Memo No

Personalization & Fun

FM Radio No

Games Embedded: Yes

Games installed: listing of games: Rock and Rocket

Downloadable: Yes

Music Player Yes

Type of Player: SonicBOOM

Supported file formats: MP3

Ringtones Yes

Types Supported: Polyphonic (# of chords), HiFi – t-zones not supported, but there is a Danger download catalog

Themes Yes

Themes Provided: Liquid, Madison, Rodeo, and Surface

Wallpaper Yes

Types Supported: Static

WHATS IN THE BOX:

PV200 Main Unit / With Screen Cling

PV-BL11 1500MAh Battery

PV-AC11 Battery Charger / AC Adaptor

PV-HS11 Stereo Headset

PV-CA11 Carrying Case

PV-LN11 Lanyard / Wrist Strap

PV-SD64M 64 MB Mini-SD Card

PV-UC11 USB Cable

TM0607 Gift Box

TRAY200UP Upper Gift Box Tray

TRAY200BOT Lower Gift Box Tray

TM1352 Start Guide

TM1353 Reference Guide

TM1350 Terms & Conditions Guide

ZZZ260R010 SIM Card

TM1024 Legal Sticker

TM1351 Accessory Guide (will not be in initial BOM)

if you’re wondering what it looks like, it hasn’t changed that much. like i said before they made it a bit slimmer, they also added in a trackball instead of a wheel.

yah so.. i kept wanting to update a post but i wanted to update the pictures along with the posts.. so i finally have all the pictures now so ill actually.. make a few extra posts with pictures!

guess i should fix my gallery too.

its been a pretty damn busy time since my last post so ill make it easy!

• overcame stomach flu
• saw coldplay live at verizon amphitheater
• celebrated my birthday with great friends
• will missed my birthday because he was carjacked due to his other crappy friends
• reactivated my wow account
• realized that wow still isn’t fun
• I’m still not any nicer. i still hate everyone
• started my japanese class
• learned and memorized all my hiragana characters
• capable of writing japanese words and sentences phonetically
• bought a new easel that doesn’t suck
• finished sam’s painting
• bought dungeon siege 2 to play with ppl i like
• capable of utilizing student discounts
• bought a new tumi bag for schoolbooks
• cut down drastically on caffeine
• eating a lot more healthy
• hung out with my sister while she visited for labor day weekend
• have 2 new friends i really like that are female
• still waiting for my wheels to come in from japan
• cleaned out my tivo and added a ton of new shows for fall lineup
• completely caught up on old tivo shows
• still hate driving in monday morning traffic from irvine
• joel now owns 3 pairs of jeans he wears regularly
• bryans moving out
• i like my life
• mom wong went in for surgery to get her gall bladder removed
• tiff gave me gir for my birthday
• hoping for new action/adventure or rpg multiplayer games to be released and not suck

so. thats kinda it. in no particular order. now i need to make a list of things i need to accomplish. pictures will be up soon.

the exterior transformation of my car is still yet to take place. i ordered Volk Racing TE37 16″ White from Upgrade Motoring. Thanks to Glenn of Upgrade Motoring for all his help and time, these guys are pretty cool and I recommend them if you’re looking for Rays wheels at a great price.

Because of the size/color/lug count, the wheel is not held in stock locally and had to be special ordered from the motherland. It should be about 30 more days before they get here! I haven’t picked a final tire to go with it just yet but Glenn gave me a list of what he recommends. I still haven’t decided between a brembo big brake kit 16″ (they’re the only ppl who offer 16″ big brake kit upgrades), or just painting my calipers red and upgrading my pads and lines and rotors independently.

Thankfully, my JDM ITR optional side skirts and rear valances have arrived and are in good shape.

** this is not my car, im merely showing a shot of what the side skirts look like on my car

** this is not my car, im merely showing a shot of what the rear valances look like on my car

I am still waiting to hear back from Password JDM regarding my JDM ITR front end conversion w/HID. The last time I spoke to them they informed me the cargo was being held at the ports by custom and they have no definite ETA but to keep checking back.

I still need to get a new wing and side mirrors as my driver side mirror was molested and horrifically tackled to the floor by a homeless bicyclist. In the meantime I need to start finding out which shops I want to get estimates from. I’m probably going to be without my car from about 3 weeks to a month . I will be having the front end conversion body work done, shaved doors, swapping of my stock to itr wing, adding side and rear skirts, installing new functional side mirrors, then a beautiful paint job in championship white! yes thats right, honda’s very own racing white! weeeee!

This will pretty much be the last of my exterior changes to the cars. the interior changes i am going to be implemented are changing to a short shifter with JDM ITR shift boot and shift knob (still debating if i wanna spend 200 on an authentic titanium oem knob, or 30 for an aluminum replica or go with a different brand). i am still debating between JDM ITR Recaro red seats or just purchasing new aftermarket sparco seats. I am also still deciding which pedals I want to go with. Possibly two-tone coloring the interior with red suede as well…

This year is pretty much going to end with just cosmetic and suspension changes. Next year i’ll start with engine drive power mods. I’m sure my “plans” will change as they keep doing from month to month. See you on the streets and tracks!

so two time a charm right? if you remember, about a year and a half ago i did a reinstall on my laptop. i had backed everything off the main partition to my second “storage” partition. and through years of evolution and progress of human intellectual development, i promptly

• Reformatted the ENTIRE HARD DRIVE
• RESIZED both partitions
• did a full and complete install

And of course, its only after i log back in and go “okay lets copy my backup over….” i realize exactly what I did.

Lucky me, Joel had asked me a few weeks prior if i had any NTFS recovery tools because his other friend needed it. I fished up
Bitmart Restorer200 Professional.

It saved my ass. It completely recovered the entire hard drive. It recovered the main partition and the backup partition with all of my files intact. It had everything.

Yesterday, in the morning, i was copying over a massive amount of files over to my Micro Vault Pro usb drive. I walked away not really thinking about it. When i was in the kitchen i thought to myself, “you know thats probably a bad idea.. theres no heat sink.. it probably doesn’t handle having over a gig of files transfered to it.”

As i’m clicking “cancel” to end the transfer because i can FEEL the heat being generated on the drive, explorer stops responding.. then i get this wonderful error “File path too deep” and the drive just crashes.

The hardware itself was fine. However the file system completely corrupted and nuked itself. After attempts to even mount the drive in linux i came to the ultimate and sad conclusion that i had lost all my work… A HA! But I remembered restorer2k!!

I loaded this sucker up again and tada! it restored all the content of my micro drive.

If you *EVER* need to recover files you have lost.. this tool really does work. Aah how precarious my life seems as so much of the things i need are comprised of 1’s and 0’s. Its a good thing i can recover it.. I cant say the same about a lot of the other bullshit!

today, technology is cool

When I first bought my car, I had every intention of working on it. Not so much hands on, but making it the fun project car it was meant to be. Unfortunately I had just never gotten around to it. It was always “ill do it next month”. Joel was doing the same thing. We both needed to fix some things about our car but neither of us got around to it. We were both in this love-hate relationship with our cars.

Every time I looked at my car, I was always filled with as much inspiration as I was disappointment. I could see all the things I loved about it, all the things I wanted to spoil her with, then I remembered all the things about her that made me want to kick her. I was a bad owner. I wasn’t treating her right, and in the end all the things about her that made me dislike her were things I needed to fix.

Get the ball rolling right? So I have. With the help of Bryan, Ive been able to start the upgrades and investments into my car. Investments? Yes. Not because it increases its dollar value, but because it makes me like it all over again. Its an investment of my own self interest and self gratification. Ive slowly begun to re-ignite the love affair with my car.

Its amazing what 2 small “upgrades” do to the car. New Suspension and New Exhaust.

RS*R ExMag Exhaust
I have replaced my Greddy Evo with the RS*R ExMag Exhaust. While the Greddy is a popular choice, it was always just an interim choice for me. I needed to get rid of the mexican rice exhaust that plagued my car when i first bought it and the Greddy was a cheap and quick solution. While it was significantly quieter and a better performer, it still left a lot to be desired.

My new exhaust is not only extremely and amazingly quiet, the sound she does emit is very appealing. I can actually hear my engine and my vtec. It also just has a very pleasant hum to it. It looks great on the car as well. It fits perfectly with my GS-R rear bumper. It also has noticeable performance gains. Well worth every penny.

TEIN Super Street Damper
My existing suspension was shot. My shocks and struts were dead and the skunk2 coilovers that were in place just weren’t cutting it. Swapping out my suspension had always been an initial change I had intended on doing but like all else, it just never happened. I have upgraded to the TEIN ss coilovers and they are fucking amazing.

My car handles amazingly well. Even with stock front strut bar. The TEIN SS Coilovers offer me 16 levels of damping force, and ride height adjustable springs. I had intended on getting the EDFC, but I think i will hold off for now.

Bryan has recommended a few strut bar and sway/tie bar kits. That along with new wheels is next. I will be converting to a 5 lug wheel so we’ll see what I get next!

okay so not really, but it does make my life so much easier when i move from place to place. previously in my blog i introduced all of you to a small utility i recently purchased, mobile net switch. it has proved to be quiet useful and im extremely happy with the product this far.

while in the office i can easily log into the domain, auto map the necessary drives i want access to while here, auto change my smtp server, make any necessary host file changes, run any scripts i really want to, change almost every single internet setting..

i never realized just how useful this utility was until i actually started using it. it has definitely made my mobile computing life so much easier than i had ever expected.

now when i go to joels, work, or home; with a single click all the appropriate network settings are modified and everything works smoothly.

so i was using nightly builds before 1.5 was released. unfortunately the upgrade has been far from seamless. ive had to completely rework my template into the new system and none of the “update your templates” guidelines were helpful because my setup was a hybrid of the old and new. so ive had to pretty much manually go in and move things around.

my sidebar got jacked up so i had to rework it. hopefully it looks okay across the board. i was completely redoing the css for it, but im getting lazy and tired and about to revert back to the old one and just “quick” fix it till i completely redo it when im not tired.

yah that sounds like a good idea.. hehe

i love my crt. i have a sony 21″ atm and its a wonderful monitor. however, after we had moved from marina del rey, i think the movers “dropped” my monitor or something. i never had problems till our new place. the colors aren’t as vibrant, and the clarity has dulled. the monitor itself is still a great monitor but it wasn’t what it once was.

admittedly, anytime i look at colors or movies or even video games, i realize how many colors and depths i lose on an LCD. but alas. sony no longer produces 21″ aside form their very high end one that costs $1500.00. Ive looked at other CRT’s but none have matched the image quality that I had with my Sony. Ive looked on ebay for used monitors and they only seem to be selling the lower end models and or refurbs.

Yesterday, Bryan showed me a really great deal. Dell was running a special and i had a coupon code for an additional $75.00 off. After talking to a few friends and doing my own reading, i decided to take the plunge and get the Dell UltraSharp 2001FP 20.1-inch FPLCD.

This monitor has been available since 2003. And to this day it is still considered one of the best lcd monitors in its class. Though with time, it suffers only in the contrast ratio and brightness area vs new models. Though none of those models match in native resolution or price. It’s listed price is $749.00. They usually have daily sales, but yesterday i got it for $534.91

I’m pretty excited. It has been a long time since i bought myself a new “toy”. Ive been looking at the ones in the office and at Bryan’s and I think I’m going to be pretty happy with the purchase.

most of you laptop owners have probably experienced having to reset your laptops network settings anytime you change networks. whether it involves setting it to DHCP, or static IP, regardless you spend time doing so. Ultimately for me, i have to change between dhcp and static ip from work and home. I had to do this a lot at my old job, but this was easily solved by only using wireless at work then plugging in at home.

I have wanted a utility for some time now that will manage this for me. I didn’t want a batch file, and i didn’t want some bastardized fix. I wanted something modern and something effective. I like cool software that works. I’m over the console based home brew shit, unless of course its chad or joels home brew.. then its usually something really nice and well done.

I went looking around for a solution and enlisted chad’s expertise. Thanks chad! I actually purchased a product and it is working really well. It is called mobile net switch. It has a very clean and friendly user interface. And I’m a sucker for packaging, but it had the best website and production information and display compared to its competitors.

It has a lot of really useful features and can be quite powerful when utilized. I will probably spend more time messing with it later to see if i got my moneys worth. $32.44 USD.

so yah.. i cant fall asleep so i’m doing random crap until im tired.

wc = weird quotient

its working.. i think im finally getting tired!