Brighter Fusion Blog

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Monk — former captain of the pirate radio station in Boulder (KBFR) — noticed my post about the apparently short-lived pirate renaissance in Boulder. Visit his blog COURAGE, TRUTH & BOOTY for interesting commentary about underground and pirate radio (apparently, not the same thing).

I remember that I had a very short email exchange with him sometime around 2004 or 2005 because I was interested in starting a news or talk program on KBFR. As I recall, he was very encouraging, but I was just too busy and also had no clue how to put together such a show, so I didn’t follow up on it.

At that time I was trying to make a go of volunteering at Radio 1190 under the guidance of a disaffected, pothead news manager who hated radio (and news) and would usually cancel the show after I had already put a dozen hours of work into my segment. Nice enough guy personally, but he really screwed up my opportunity to get some cool experience there.

After I got rejected by the J school twice, I turned my focus to political science and haven’t thought much about doing journalism since then. I do think a pirate news show local to Boulder issues would be awesome, and wouldn’t it be fun to pick up Steve Forbes in a nondescript van and drive him around town for half an hour doing a live interview about the economic crisis?

Hey again!

My family group decided to re-up with Sprint, so we all got new phones this week. I picked the Samsung M520 slider phone. Click the image for the Crunch Gear review:

All-in-all, I’m pretty happy, but after two days of honeymooning, I’ve discovered a couple problems.

1) The headphone jack and the charger jack are one and the same — a proprietary, pain-in-the-ass port which will necessitate buying half a dozen new accessories to replace my old ones. It’s also pushing me to think about investing in a bluetooth hands-free set, when I didn’t particularly want one before. It’s the only way to be hands-free and also have the phone plugged into power, which will be pretty important when working from home.

2) The micro-SD card slot is pretty much useless. You can store music and photos on it, but NOT ringtones, themes, games, or java applications — you know, important stuff. So despite a 2GB card in the slot, I have no room to spare on the phone. Hopefully that limitation will be hacked by someone shortly.

3) The OEM Sprint theme is very attractive and serves as a fast launcher for all kinds of stuff I will not be using. I can’t redirect those icons to launch anything different (like making the envelope go to my installed GMail app instead of the crappy Sprint mail app that I already threw away). There’s a car icon to go to the GPS app that I’m not going to be paying an extra $10 a month for, a TV icon to take me to a streaming video app that’s not supported on my current data plan and a clock icon to take me to the weather and a Sprint news app (”OnDemand”) that I don’t like.

4) Meanwhile, it seems that the NYT app I used to look at ten times a day is no longer available. It was made by Vindigo, and I’ve written them about it with no reply yet. I’m getting by with Opera Mini and a couple decent mobile news sites like the AP Mobile News Network, but boy do I miss reading the real New York Times any time the whim struck me.

5) Ringtones! While it IS possible to put custom or third-party ringtones on the phone, they sure don’t make it easy. You can navigate to the mp3 file on the web from the Sprint web browser or from Opera Mini, and there’s absolutely NO WAY to download it to your phone or set it as a ringtone. To get the file to the right spot, you need to use this web tool to send a text message with the appropriate kind of download link in it.

Zedge.net is a great source of peer-created, free ringtones. They’ve got nearly everything.

Some of my favorites from Zedge: this super mellow SMS alert, Pac Man Mixx, the Hamster Dance (go here, if you missed the original), the Peanuts theme, Knight Rider, Careless Whisper (it’s intended to be ironic, so give me a break), Remington Steele, Zamfir’s Lonely Shepherd.

And from other sources: Dramatic chipmunk, IT Crowd theme, IT Crowd mix with Moss’s dramatic ringtone followed by the theme. I have yet to find Moss’s ringtone by itself, minus the laugh track.

And the coup de grace: Star Trek fight sequence!

Waiting for the next big thing, my new job.