Yes. This is a test post.

Me, my buddy and a bunch of friends skipped first class to go out to breakfast in high school. We went to a Denny’s-type of greasy-spoon diner, in total there were about twenty of us. My buddy, at the end of the meal bets me the price of his breakfast that he cant chug all the little shot glasses of maple syrup on the table. I agree and he starts blasting through heaps of the syrup, just throwin em back. Around 15 he starts slowing down and looking pale. He gets to 18 and gives up. We then go back to school for our second class: Geometry with Miss Cankles herself…Queen Manatee who was really mean, ill tempered and a bad teacher…the kind that likes to hear her own voice and undermine the students by picking on them. Half way through the class my buddy…now GREEN is waving his arms to be called on but Miss Manatee is ignoring him intentionally. He then stands up and bolts for the door; with surprising speed the instructor quickly oozes her bulk into the doorway blocking his path. “WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING?!” she moos at him poking him hard in the chest with her sausage finger. Weakly my friend says “the nurse” she turns BRIGHT RED and screams in his face about being disrespectful to his elders and betters and that he will be serving a thousand painful detentions cleaning her toenails or something. He turns meekly to walk back to his seat and she grabs him “I’m not done with you yet!” As she whips him around to face her and as she OPENS her MOUTH to yell again my friend loses it. He pukes up his MASSIVE lumberjack, grand slam omelet pancaketastic maple syrup soaked breakfast into her horseface and (gloriously) into her gaping mouth..

The aftermath was fairly ridiculous; it was one of those three solid beats of silence that lasts forever as everyone was just open-mouthed (including and especially the teacher) and staring. The only sound was my friend’s whimpering and, post-explosion, blurping. Then one of the quiet kids in the back whispered “HO..lee shit” under her breath but since everyone was still in shock it was CLEARLY audible, echoing around the room. That broke the spell; we all BURST into fits of unabashed laughter both at the timing and source of the side comment and the craziness of the event itself. The teacher (I WISH I could tell everyone how evil this instructor was, she was one of those professors that does math a great disservice because of the way she teaches and behaves) blinks ever so carefully and slowly, wipes the goo out of her eyes, and turns about-face to go across the hall to get another teacher to watch us while she goes to clean up. Not realizing her sodden appearance she causes a HILARIOUS reaction from THAT teacher’s class causing my class to start howling in laughter. Then she leaves in a smelly and indignant huff. She will get her revenge later with homework and detentions galore. Unfortunately my friend was doubled over and crying at this point because the realization that he just projectile vomited 18 shot glasses worth of maple syrup and two pounds of breakfast matter into the face of the meanest, nastiest geometry teacher on the planet is starting to sink in. I and another friend walk over and rub his back and bring him to the nurse explaining what happened (skipping the part about skipping class) and he gets picked up by his older brother and taken home for plenty of rest and a healthy dose of videogames. I do not have many fond memories of high school. I was a late bloomer, angsty and rebellious as they come, but THIS remains one of my most favorite memories…ever..I’m glad I could share it with reddit :)

The hard part(s) came when I booted XP 64bit after doing the swap. It was only 1 generation up for the northbridge, and the processor should just be detected as a quad core 3.2 GHz chip. Well Windows decided to not boot up. Weird, I thought, and put in my BartPE disc to image the install before I just installed fresh. Once in BartPE, I tried to make an Acronis image of the LUN to my network storage, but the partition table was corrupted. I tried fixing it, but decided my backup was recent enough, and I store all important data off to the storage server. Wrote zeroes to the beginning of the drive to wipe out the MBR and partition tables, and just installed XP Pro 64bit fresh. Speed. Raw speed that I have only seen on servers that I set up at work. But for some reason, my Asus Xonar D2 wasn’t installing properly, and the onboard firewire wasn’t accepting drivers. Ok, so I google like crazy, update the BIOS (note this point) and move the cards around. The card worked in the bottom most PCI slot, but it blocks the heatsink fan for my 2nd video card, which caused crashes before due to overheating. This was 11 PM on Wednesday evening. I needed to go to bed and work the next day.

After work, I came home, and called EVGA. They too found the problem weird, and moved me up to level 2 support. The level 2 support guy asked if the card I was installing was a Xonar. I laughed and said yes. He told me the latest BIOS had a specific fix for this, and that my updating it should have fixed it, so I flashed it again via a boot CD and wrote the CD at 8x. Booted into XP 64, and it saw the sound card in the middle PCI slot, and the firewire controller worked fine. Yay? Not quite. I finished up installing everything, and wanted to play some WoW. So, I’d launch it up, start killing things, and get a crash. What? I disabled all the addons, still crash. Hm. Reinstalled fresh, and still crash. Weird. I had installed Windows 7 on my spare 10k RPM drive so booted into that, finished installing drivers and such, and copied over the WoW directory. In the 15 minutes I was playing, no crash. Looks like I’m now forced to stay in Windows 7 64bit, Vista 64bit or Server 2008 64bit. *sigh*

TL;DR version: I got hardware for free, bought hardware to make it work, and it was a PITA making it work.

• I discovered I have no idea where the hell the suction cup mount for my TomTom is.
• Target has universal replacement mounts for TomToms and other GPS receivers.
• The air vent mount looks damn good in my car and I like it.
• I only discovered that it was 9 PM just as I was going to take a shower.
• I am tired as hell but am positive I’m not going to sleep the whole damn night.

That is all.

Now, I can’t be the only person in the world who gets mildly depressed after a vacation and leaving friends. In fact, I’m positive this happens about hourly at every airport worldwide. My issue other than that is why does visiting there make me feel like moving to Colorado was the worst thing I have ever done? Why did saying goodbye to my friends feel like my soul was being slowly fed feet first into a wood chipper?  I absolutely love Colorado. The weather changes with the seasons and we get snow/rain, the cost of living is super affordable, the population density is much less. All reasons I wanted to move away from California, but 1 week there and I want to go back.

The one thing that holds me back is what is tearing me apart: I love my job. Pretty much every second of it. It has traversed from being classified as “work” to “something to go do for 8 hours that you enjoy doing.” I turn 27 this year, and who can say they’ve reached this point in life that they can say that? Who can say they’ve ever reached this point? Its this one fact that is a giant brick wall falling across a 8 lane highway that all my thoughts crash into. Sure, I’d give up where I live, the climate, the cost of living and adjust to that, but this job is awesome. Unless I’m let go it would be retarded of me to leave unless offered the same position elsewhere, which does not exist.

Normally I’d think this statement sounds massively emo, but it seems to actually apply. I cannot be truly happy. There will always be something blocking me from this goal. There will always be some reason to make everything appear perfect on the outside, but a festering rotten shit heap in the middle. I’d come to terms with not ever being totally content with life, I know I’m not going to have everything I’ve ever wanted or do things I’ve always wanted a long time ago. Despite this epiphany a while ago, I’m horribly allergic to it.

Those of you who know me would not believe this statement, but I would willingly sell off most of my possessions on Craigslist just to move back, but that would only get me there and might allow me to couch surf for maybe a few months, and I’d no longer have the job I’ve wanted forever, ever again. I’m kind of babbling at this point, though. There might be a job like this somewhere else at another company, but it will never be the exact same job.

Monday morning when I finally got back to work after the vacation, I was just totally numb. My delayed emotional response set in finally, and weighed in on the real feeling of depression. It didn’t help that I had a performance review for the year that basically consisted of 4 managers’ worth of feedback. One of them wasn’t with the company anymore. Another was against my constant questioning of the process and trying to streamline it and make it better, and wondered why I was so enraged when I was asked to repeat about 2 weeks of work after my checking with him and the team to ensure I was doing my given task correctly. Thankfully, the 2 managers that could give direct feedback both knew me and understood me enough to help my current manager have a better picture of the situation, and his experience with me being in my dream job has been sunshine and roses anyway. So as a result I got an average review, despite the fact that I was one of the 6 people who picked up and moved my life over to establish the best support center globally in our company. None of that ever means shit apparently.

I think everyone on the road home that evening was going 10 under the limit, but snippets of this entry kept running through my mind, and I just didn’t care. Tuesday was just an overall numb feeling too. Not caring. Just sleepwalking through the day getting stuff done, but not really feeling it.I got really tired at 8 PM though, and went to bed. Woke back up at 3 AM, and felt I should type this up.

Well this is getting long. So I’m going to wrap it up as succinctly as I can. I love living in Colorado, and I love my job here, but I don’t think I can live away from all my friends for much longer. I might look at what I’d need to do to move back.

Sorry, I just love this image.

Despite having forced myself to touch type to a very high level, I still ocassionally look at the keyboard. In a darkened room, this is difficult as the keys are going to appear black, or just hard to see if the game I’m playing is not a brightly lit paradise. So, armed with Best Buy gift certificates, I bought the Logitech Illuminated Keyboard.

If any of you have used a really thin keyboard, such as the new Apple keyboards, or most laptop keyboards, the feel can be described as mostly similar. There isn’t a lot of travel in the keys but they took the effort to lengthen them so they do move more than a standard laptop keyboard. After a bit of adjustment, I was typing on it at my normal pace. The characters on the keys were lit up bright and crisp. I believe each key has an individual LED under it, and the characters are laser-cut.

I’m not using it right now because its going to go to HTPC use once I set that up, and I prefer the Logitech Cordless Wave keyboard I have for my desktop for everyday typing.

Overall, however, its a really nice keyboard, I’m just not the exact target audience I guess.

This device, even before you turn it on, is pretty. HTC went a long way to make it very aesthetically pleasing, and feels solid. Comparing it to my iPhone 3G, it was about 1.5 iPhones thick (its a valid unit of measurement!), and about as heavy. Turning it on, you’re presented with the usual Windows Mobile startup screens and initial setup. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to see that screen.

Once you’re done and on the main screen of the phone, you’re presented with HTC’s TouchFLO UI, which sits on top of Windows Mobile and uses hardware graphic accelerators within the phone to make a flashy UI to hide Windows Mobile’s relative ugliness. Personally, I turned it off. Sprint went through the trouble of rebranding TouchFLO to be a Sprint TouchFLO and really ruined it for me. What I still look for in a phone is a decent data connection with instant messaging (AIM/Gtalk/MSN/Jabber, etc) and Exchange sync, good signal, and a battery life that I’m not searching frantically for a power outlet as soon as I unplug it.

Data Connection/Signal:

I work in the Denver area, specifically, Broomfield, CO. Its quite developed, and on other phones I’ve had no problems maintaining an excellent signal back to the towers. With the Touch Pro, this was no exception. Solid coverage for EVDO around work, with some dropout over the farmlands I basically drive through to get home, and then it picks back up just fine. No problems there. I was able to stream Digitally Imported at a high bitrate WMA with almost no dropout while walking around the office.

Instant Messaging:

Sprint/HTC’s bundled IM clients were rather lacking, and Agile Messenger still is a substandard application. However, Beejive, who makes, IMO, the best mobile IM client ever for the Blackberry and iPhone, had a beta of their app for Windows Mobile. This was where the Pro’s full keyboard both shone and dulled. I do understand its not a blackberry keyboard, but a single-membrane keyboard that has no tactile positioning is a bit hard to type on. I probably could have gotten used to it, but I wasn’t going to keep the phone for that long. I’m not going to go into Beejive in detail as that is not directly related to the phone.

Exchange Sync:

Its a Windows Mobile phone. My company has push sync properly set up. It works. Nuff said.

Battery Life:

Here’s where I get mega anal retentive, but I’m going to explain myself. If I’m going to pay $400 for a phone, I want it to do a crapload of stuff for that money. The HTC Touch Pro has A2DP, which allows for stereo Bluetooth audio to stream to a headset that will recieve it. My intent on buying this phone was to use either a Wifi connection or EVDO to stream music on the run. I love Digitally Imported and they’re single handedly making beatport.com get a good $50-60 in music to be bought monthly. My commute is approximately 40 minutes each way, so I will get tired of the music on my iPod if I’m not careful. That said, I did a test. I hooked up my Jabra headset, clipped the Touch Pro to my belt, and walked around the office for a good 30 minutes listening to some trance. The battery came out to about a quarter charge left. I was not satisfied.

Now before any of you scream that this is some amazing feat and I’m expecting way too much out of the device, this is my gripe: CDMA/EVDO 3G technology is much more battery/energy intensive than a GSM/UMTS 3G connection. If I were on the Touch Pro on AT&T (its the Fuze there) I would have roughly double the battery life left.  Granted, I’m not going to always be streaming music, but if I’m stranded somewhere without outside connectivity and want to keep myself from boredom, I will want that much battery available to me. So, back it went.

Overall, if you’re not me, and not that demanding of a battery in a phone, I think you’ll be very pleased with the HTC Touch Pro.