mahalo.

For those who don’t know, I’m a fan of Sprint. I get reception in my house (previously rare, but I think Cingular is actually okay now), their phones are good (had a Sanyo 5300 before, a Samsung A900 now), their service representatives are actually nice and well, not retarded. And plus, they have got to have one of the cheapest unlimited data plans out there ($15/mo for EVDO - I think Cingular is catching up, but Sprint was always there first).

They also give you nice little quirks like giving you discounts on your service, text messages, plans, etc, if you’ve been a customer for a year or so. My text message plan was just automatically readjusted from 100 to 300/mo because well, that’s what the plan is now.

This weekend, my A900 actually inexpicably died. I mean, “power-on-lock-up-reboot-and-repeat” died. I called Sprint and they informed me that there’s no hard reset button on the A900 so I would have to take it in for service. Well, that’s not so great, but I knew the phone was still under warranty from the manufacturer, so I called Samsung. They said that they would fix the problem for free, since it was under warranty, but I would have to lose the phone for 15-21 days, which was a little long for my taste.

So I went to the Sprint store by my house yesterday, but the technician had already left for the day. To make this part short, I basically wanted to test out a new battery to rule out the battery as an issue. They didn’t have any spares, but they did have an extended life battery (which you really need anyways. those who own an A900 know) which they sold me at 15% off. I bought it, but that didn’t solve the problem.

Today in the later afternoon, I went to the Sprint store by my work to let their technician flash the software. I was pretty miffed when I learned I was going to be charged $35 for it and left there steaming a bit. I was even more steamed when I looked at the receipt and realized that the charge would be $35 + repair costs. Since I had already transferred my service to my old (but very trusty) Sanyo 5300, I was resolved that if was charged an additional repair cost, I would just refuse to pay and tell them to keep the phone and take it to their collection/service people if they really wanted my money.

Turns out, that when I went back, they had ran some tests which revealed that the phone was defective and truly dead, so they just gave me a new phone. Additionally, the final service bill was $16.02. I can’t complain about $16.02 for a new phone. Especially since it was a newer revision of the hardware. So I was all steamed for nothing.

I’m actually going to go back tomorrow to have the technician transfers my contacts back over. If that doesn’t work - people who read this should call me. You should actually just call and not even bother talking to me. It will be fun to see if I can just recognize and re-associate your phone numbers.

So what’s the net of it?
- New Samsung A900 for $16.02.
- New extended life battery at 15% off.
- 200 additioanl text messages per month at no cost.
- Missed all work issues while I was away for the weekend.
- Some wasted driving time hunting for the elusive Sprint store this afternoon.

Anyways. Sprint is cool. CDMA … well, it gets the job done.

And check out this cool new Samsung that’s going to be coming out: Samsung M610. 12 mm thick.

There’s this neat little open source program called PasswordSafe which is handy for storing passwords. The other neat thing about open standards is that a Linux equivalent exists called “MyPasswordSafe” which uses the same file format.

All I’m glad about here is that I finally have a way to access all those obscure passwords I use at work from home.

Image swap should happen soon. I’m just super busy, but with a lot of Carl’s help, I believe we have a suitable base background image now. It’s just a matter of adding some text this weekend and hoping that the people that are jacking my image are out of town.

I didn’t think this last season was all that great, but I’m still glad that the series was recognized again.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/TV/08/27/emmys/index.html

Just been really busy as of late. Could someone help me out and find a suitable picture? I’ve decided I don’t want something super duper gross, for example, faces of death is not something i want to go for at this point.

i was thinking about something along the lines of the pink ponies theme from slashdot this last april fool’s… or just some other kind of ridiculous thing that would usually be used in site defacing. goatse.cx came to mind, but i’m thinking a bit more funny than that.

Geez. And I’m just trying to make contact.

It has come to my attention that a fair enough number of people like this picture:
http://www.myrandomshih.com/images/backgrounds/blueice.jpg (Remind me to update the link after 8/20)

Some have used it as their myspace background, it has been used as the background of an ebay auction, some examples are here:
Look at the image for section headers
Rubbermaid ice chest
All weather rubber vinyl hose

Here is an auction that is actually still live:
Another all weather vinyl hose

This seller has a 100% feedback rating so far. Too bad if you look at all of his images, they all seem to be stolen from somewhere.

The top hit is actually from MySpace. I see the requests coming from: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm.

This user is a culprit: http://myspace.com/tonytowers. He is using it as his entire background!

Previous hits have also come from:
http://www.myspace.com/stepwithme
http://www.myspace.com/dizzybomber
http://www.myspace.com/badkarma4ever

Though they seemed to have discontinued their usage.

I have no problems with people using my picture, but I do mind:
1. People using my bandwidth, even though I am no where close to the limit, it’s a matter of principle.
2. People not asking permission to use the picture. Again, a matter of principle.

To be clear, yeah, it was kind of a neat picture, but I don’t find it to be that special, so this isn’t an artistic “You’re stealing my work!” issue.

So here’s the deal. I’m posting this message as an open invitation for those using the image from my domain to ask my permission to use it. I most likely will turn none away and even allow you to continue linking it off of my domain. I’ll probably only turn you away if your usage will exceed 1 million hits in a month, but even in that case, I don’t mind if you host the image somewhere else and use it from there.

I’ve posted the image at www.deviantart.com and www.kde-look.org for those who want to pull/link the image from another source. Search for “blue ice” and it will probably turn up. At kde-look.org, it is distributed under the “Artistic 2.0″ license which should grant users fair use of the image as long as redistribution occurs under Artistic 2.0.

I will leave the invitation open for two weeks. On 8/20, I will be swapping the image at the location: http://www.myrandomshih.com/images/backgrounds/blueice.jpg, to something much less savory, although I haven’t decided exactly what yet. Anyone who reads this, I welcome your comments. This one may actually be fun to sound in on.

eBay sellers - you really have to be more careful about linking external image sources.
MySpace users - I hope your friends have a good sense of humor.

Those visiting this site after the image was swapped - When in doubt, err on the side of overcommunication.