Tag Archives: cell phone

Device Mania Week: Day 1

Geek, ,

In which I get the first of many packages.

When I got to work this morning my new phone, an LG Lotus LX600, was on my desk.

LG Lotus

I unpacked it, which required opening about six plastic bags and removing five plastic clingies from various of the phone’s shiny surfaces, and plugged it in. Then I checked the quick start manual, and unplugged it from AC power and plugged it straight into one of my PC’s USB 2.0 ports.

I went to sprint.com to activate the phone, but I couldn’t log in…

…so I had to give it to my brother (who is the primary name on our shared cell phone account) to activate it. It was gone FOREVER. I nearly DIED. But then he brought it back and it was finally a properly activated phone!

I love the form factor. It’s square and somehow manages to be chunky and sleek at the same time. It weighs less than my old pink Katana.

It tells me – verbally, not in the form of a dialog notification – when I get text messages. “Message received,” it says. How cute is that?

I love the qwerty keyboard. (It’s a text freak’s dream device.) It’s also an MP3 player (not that I need yet another one of those) and its on board speakers are the best I’ve ever heard from any phone or iPod.

It can be mounted as an external hard drive by clicking the Home icon > Tools > USB Mode (4) > Select Transfer Music or Mass Storage or Phone as Modem or PictBridge. You can move images to and from the device, and put MP3s on it as well.

It has a built-in Google app, Sprint Navigation (a GPS map app), a browser (Opera Mini can be installed instead), and a nicely configurable interface. There’s a built-in doc viewer but I haven’t tested it yet. It takes video.

I will spend my evening transferring my contacts manually, because I’m both too cheap to buy the backup feature and too lazy to take both phones over to Sprint to have them moved.

Long story short: I love the new phone! Can’t wait ’til Notebook Wednesday. This week is totally gonna rock.

Vegas Was Great, Thanks For Asking!

Travel, ,

In which I recap a very, very killer vacation.

Most of it’s already a blur. But here is the Flickr set, and below are the most important highlights:

Moar SlotzI played a lot of slots and drank a lot of booze.

The food was uniformly great.

Vegas looks pretty nasty during the day but is like a giant, endless Times Square at night. It’s fun, and gaudy, and weird, and I enjoyed the hell out of myself.

The shrine between Bally’s and Caesar’s Palace was beautiful and unexpected.

Teh BF is a completely easy-going travel companion, which bodes well in general.

On my birthday, my friend Adam – who booked me as part of the opening act of one of his very first shows ever, when he brought Richie Havens to Iowa about a decade ago – took me and his sister Mona, and our friend Jason, and KJ out for birthday dinner at Nove, a chichi restaurant at the top of the Palms. The food was incredible, the view was stunning, and the company was superb. I had so much fun I could have popped, but I didn’t get any pictures because it was so dark in there.

After the meal, we went downstairs to The Lounge and listened to my new favorite band, Santa Fe and the Fat City Horns. (You can hear ’em here.) Holy fuck, this band smokes. They’re like the new Tower Of Power. They’re all monster players – studio cats and seasoned players all – and they groove like you simply would not believe. This is the band I want to be in. I bought a CD and ripped it to my iPod when I got home last night. It’s been on the top of my playlist since and will probably stay there for months.

Although we never managed to make it over to Fremont street nor go bowling (we’d had the idea that bowling in Vegas would be hella fun), we did accomplish some sushi-eating on our last night in town. We stopped at Ah Sin and gorged on all-you-can-eat sushi. (Well, I gorged – I had six rolls. Teh BF had, like, four.)

I bought myself a new wallet. It was ten bucks. (I’m a big spender, I know, I know.)

When we got back to W2 yesterday evening it was thirty degrees colder than we’d been used to, so we stopped at the new Thai City restaurant and ordered yummy spicy food. I had the green curry and it was brilliant; Teh BF had pad thai and when I saw him on my lunch break was still raving about it. Thai City absolutely rocks.

In other, totally unrelated news: yummy cell phone pr0n! I totally want this, omgwtfbbq. Srsly.