At least once a year I drone on and on rant about some operating system that I hate, so I’m going to get that out of the way right now. Android is a huge, steaming pile of crap! About 6 months ago I upgraded my iPhone to an Android phone – the Samsung Nexus S. Almost immediately, programs were crashing constantly and performance sucked. I can’t believe that I didn’t return it with those first couple of weeks. I posted on Facebook, asking if this was just the way Android is and several people confirmed that it was.

I can’t believe that so many people are behind this OS when it has so many problems. It’s basically like time traveling back to the late-90′s and dealing with Windows 95/98 constantly crashing. My iPhone never crashed and rarely had to be rebooted. Android lovers can make fun of the iPhone all they want, but at least it WORKS and it’s not frustrating to use.

Besides all the crashing, my phone started overheating really bad and the battery was lasting only a couple of hours, even when I wasn’t using it. When me and the kids were in Seattle for Comicon, I decided to factory wipe the phone in hopes that whatever was causing the problem would stop, so I could keep in touch with the kids at Comicon without having to charge my phone up. I lost all my apps and information, but it fixed the problem. Within a week, though, the overheating and the battery draining was back, and I hadn’t even installed many apps yet so I have no idea what’s causing it. On Friday I mailed my phone to Samsung so they can hopefully fix or replace it. They’ll probably just factory reset it and claim that it’s fixed.

A few days ago I blew $450 on an Android tablet. After installing just a couple of basic, popular apps, CRASH. Various apps crashed throughout the evening and next day. I went to Amazon.com to look up some info on tablets and the entire thing locked up, I assume because of the Flash on the web page. I had to get on my computer to look up the magical button combination to soft-reset it. Within 24 hours I had 2 complete lockups. I used this as my excuse to return the device for a refund, and the AT&T store guy admitted that crashing was a common issue. I use friends Androids and they crash too, doing the most basic things. Why are we all putting up with this?

If anyone reading this is thinking about getting an Android, DON’T! Sure, they do more and look prettier and they’re made by a completely different giant evil corporation, but they suck! Another thing I started to do last week before I mailed my phone in to Samsung was root my phone with CyanogenMod. I’m told that rooting your phone gets rid of a lot of the bloat and makes it more stable, which I’m sure is true, but I was about 12 steps into the billion-step process and I quit, just for the principle of it all. Why should I be putting this much effort into making my cell phone not crash? Even if I didn’t want to deal with learning how to root the phone myself, I have local friends who could easily root my phone and keep it working for me, but screw that. It should just work! Why not just get an iPhone and never have to worry about retarded shit like this again?

Here’s what I did instead. I completely ditched my AT&T wireless plan. At first I attempted to keep the plan turned on by signing up for the $15/month Android tablet data plan, but not only did the Android tablet suck balls, I just couldn’t see the need for even having a tablet. It was neat to play with (all the crashing aside) but I just didn’t NEED it. And I was blowing $450 to keep from being charged the $275 early termination fee, when I’d still end up paying $270 over the next 18 months (plus all kinds of taxes and fees, I’m sure) for the $15/month data plan. When I returned the tablet, I had them just cancel my account. And then I bought a cheap, crappy prepaid phone for $50 and $25 of prepaid credit.

The phone looks like an old Blackberry and it’s capable of email, texting, taking pictures and making phone calls. And a lot more, I’m sure, but it’s all stuff I’ll never use. So now instead of paying $80/month for my Android with texting and unlimited data, I’m paying approximately $8.00 per month. I’m going to have an extra $72/month now to pay bills and have fun with. I never talk on the phone anyway and I was mainly just paying the $80/month so I could check my email or play on Facebook while I was out. Now when I’m standing in a long line at the post office, I’ll have to think of something else to do to avoid talking to people.

I still plan to keep a smartphone of some kind – I’m just not going to pay a subscription for it anymore. I’ll give my Android another try when it returns from Samsung and I really hope the overheating issues stop. It’s a fun little device and it does a lot, but really I don’t even leave the house that often so I can just use my home’s wireless connection to play games and listen to online radio stations.

I’m actually borrowing an iPhone from my friend Jessica this week, just so we can continue playing Drawsomething together while my phone is being repaired. (We’re both really addicted to that game.) She wants me to sell the phone on eBay for her when my phone gets back, but I’m kind of thinking I’ll just buy the iPhone from her. These past few days I’ve filled it up with all of my music and my old iPhone apps and it’s really nice to just have a device that works so flawlessly again.

I’m really loving the idea of not paying $80/month for a phone anymore. Prepaid plans have come a long way since I last looked at them. Prepaid wireless used to be kind of a ripoff, but now the rates actually seem better than a postpaid account. This card that I got with the phone says they have monthly plans for texting – $10/month for 1,000 texts or $20/month for unlimited. AT&T wireless forced me to pay around $40/month BEFORE my texting and data plans, for the 450 minutes that I never came close to using up. They even have a $50/month plan for unlimited talk/text and web. This makes so much more sense. If your cell phone bills are as nuts as mine was, look into some prepaid plans! See if you can save as much money as I am.

April 29th Update: After two weeks, I’m not regretting the decision to ditch my smart phone plan. I’ve been using the iPhone at home just as much as ever and I don’t miss it while I’m away. It’s a little inconvenient sometimes, like today when me and the kids were out and wanted to check movie times, we had to go drive by the theater to see when our movie started. Evie gave me her old GPS unit for her car since she’s got a car with it built in now, so that takes care of that. A lot of times I leave the house now and I don’t even take my cheap prepaid phone with me.

Samsung sent me an email to let me know that the phone was broken and they’re replacing it and it’s been shipped back to me. So maybe I was a bit harsh about my hatred for Android, but I’m still probably going to sell it to help recoup my early termination fee. This prepaid phone of mine lasts about a week without being charged. It’s like magic! I think I might buy a watch soon, so I can be amazed at the batteries that last 7 years.

When I first moved to Oregon in late 2005, I wanted to explore all the woods around here, so I did lots of Geocaching and hiking. There were no hiking groups in the area, so I signed up on meetup.com and set up a hiking group. Within a year, there were over 100 members and I was leading weekly/bi-weekly hikes to a dozen or so people, sometimes dragging my kids along and sometimes by myself. I think in the end there were over 150 members.

I ended up shutting down the group because a friend of mine set up her own hiking meetup and I was getting kind of bored with it since I’d already explored all of the woods and we were just going on the same hikes we’d already been on. I introduced a lot of new people to the game of Geocaching. Soon after I killed my hiking group, my friend killed HER hiking group (damn her) so the whole hiking thing just died.

I miss all the weirdos I met there, though. My favorites were Dan, who had this stereotypical Canadian way of speaking (he sounded just like one of the Moose in Brother Bear) and he spent an insane amount of time biking places. And this really old couple, George and Shirley, were a lot of fun to talk to. I usually don’t click well with old people, but those two were awesome. And a bunch of other ones that I’ve completely forgotten by now. I don’t miss hiking at all, but just the odd assortment of people that I met during the hikes and the few strange things that happened during some of them that I don’t even know how to explain here. And it was kind of cool, causing lots of people to wake up early on Saturdays and Sundays just to hang out in the woods.

Last weekend, Evie and I drove around Mount St. Helens which was the first time I’ve seen real snow in several years now. I don’t miss the midwest, but I really miss the awesome snows and the sledding. I need to visit Illinois one of these Christmases and hope they have snow.

Today I went skating for the first time in awhile. Me and the kids drove to Eugene, where my friend Kate told me about the skating rink there a few days earlier. It was lots of fun. Each of us wiped out a few times. I’m good at roller blading until I need to slow down or stop, then things turn bad. Some little kid cut me off and I crashed. Before that, we went to a flea market and I ended up buying a mid-1990′s Motorola flip phone, hoping to use it for nefarious purposes, but instead making this video:

Speaking of videos, I’ve put a lot of them on PLA’s YouTube channel lately. Just this past week, I’ve uploaded one of our pizza shenanigans, where we demonstrated how easy it is to talk pizza employees out of customer data, and another of mine and Evie’s adventures at Target this past Black Friday, where we tricked Target employees into registering our own telephone on their phone network. Both of these videos also demonstrate that I’m a huge jerk. There’s also this video of a lady who hates PLA. I hired her from fiverr.com, which is a site I’ve been completely addicted to for a few weeks now that lets you blow $5 to get people to do ridiculous things. Like this girl who danced around in a dinosaur costume for me.

I went to an improv comedy show on Friday with Kate and Cameron at the Reed Opera House in Salem. I’m only mentioning this so I’ll remember to go back there one of these days and explore the stores and restaurants inside there. The comedy was standard improv stuff and they were really good.

My car stereo got stolen again a couple weeks ago, so I’ve been driving around with a giant glob of duct tape over my back window that was broken out. So far the cheapest replacement window I’ve found is $65, and that’s without the rubber/adhesive stuff that goes under it. I’ve never replaced that type of window before and I’m having a hard time finding YouTube videos or other information on how to do it, so I might end up paying over $200 to just have a shop do it. If anyone reading this has any advice on that, please share! It’s a 2000 Ford Focus hatchback non-door window – it’s just triangle-shaped part in the back. No idea why they broke THAT window since it seems like it’d be hard to reach through that one and get the door unlocked. At least with the door windows those are easy to replace since I’ve done it several times before. So car thieves, please be nice and do that next time. I’m officially giving up on owning a nice stereo.

In other exciting news, our house almost burned down! When the kids and I got home that afternoon, we smelled something burning. I was super proud of both of them for immediately knowing that it smelled exactly like a soldering gun. (I bought them both electronics kits for Christmas.) I Googled the smell and read about how that’s usually what people smell right before their houses burn down. It was less than an hour before smoke started coming out of our electric wall heater and we could see fire behind it. Luckily, it’s all enclosed in metal, so after the rubber insulation burned off the wires, it stopped.

We were at Goodwill a few weeks ago and I spotted the tape recorder in that video. I bought it for $3.00, just to use for making this video, then returned it for a refund. Before you yell at me for being a bad person, you should know that it was broken when I brought it home, so I had to take it apart and fix it. (The belt had slipped off the motor.) So really, Goodwill should be paying me whenever I buy stuff from them just to play with for a few days before I get a refund.

That’s the exact same model of tape recorder my parents bought me one Christmas in the late 70′s or early 80′s. I would assume that I’d somehow come across the actual same tape recorder that I owned as a kid, but my old tape recorder ended up like most electronic items I owned back then – in pieces because I needed to salvage some random part from it. I remember being stealthy about throwing the casing of the tape recorder away because my parents wouldn’t have been happy to see it in pieces. To bring things full circle, the red tape from the video was used in my original tape recorder in the 80′s and still has some 80′s weirdness of mine on it, including a mid-80′s version of What’s Your Bid? and other live radio pranks, and a 1986 recording of me and a girl I babysat for programming my TRS-80 to make prank calls to Dominos and then dancing to hits of the 80′s.

It’s 1:12am and I have to wake up at 7:30 to take the kids to school. I can’t sleep, which is why this post is so long.

There used to be a magic shop in downtown Albany and the kids and I would stop by there sometimes and look around. The owners were an old couple and the wife would rave about how awesome it was being a magician. She said learning all the tricks completely alters the way you see life. The way she talked about it reminded me of how hackers are pretty much the same way, feeling like they have a completely different grasp on life than “normal” people. I wonder, as someone who has an understanding of the way hackers see the world, would learning all the magician tricks add anything to that feeling or would it be basically all the same stuff. Or maybe magicians are just newbs and don’t really have the awesome enlightenment that hackers do. Stupid magicians.

Earlier this month my friend Jessica found an interesting program called Snail Mail My Email which was a free service that allowed you to have a typed email handwritten and sent to anywhere in the world. The transcribing was done by volunteers, so Jessica immediately signed up to be a volunteer. I’m not sure how many letters she got, but I think it was at least one per day. She even let me do a few of them. And I’m probably breaking federal postal regulations here, but I’m going to post the letters I did.

The first one was in French and didn’t have a name on it, so I addressed it to “Someone” on the envelope. I was too lazy to paste their short letter into a translator, so I have no idea what I wrote.

The next one I did on post-it notes and faked the lipstick kiss that they requested since I don’t own any lipstick.

And finally, I transcribed some guy’s girly letter to a girl he obviously has the hots for. He requested a unicorn near some trees and mountains. He failed to specify the type of unicorn, though, so I decided to draw a homicidal unicorn who’d just killed a bear.

The project at snailmailmyemail.org seems to be over now, but you can visit their site to look at some of the letters that other people did. It’s too bad because I would have enjoyed doing this kind of thing maybe once or twice a week for the rest of the year.

When I was in grade school, my teacher started us on a fun craft project. We made baby rattles! How do you make a baby rattle? It’s easy! Take a normal incandescent light bulb and paper-mache the entire thing. Then you paint it bright, happy colors. After the paint dries, you smash it against your desk so that the glass inside shatters into a hundreds of tiny glass shards. And that makes it rattle!

Yes, in the early 70′s / late 80′s, it was completely acceptable for your teacher to suggest that you give babies GLASS to play with. Of course, it was completely safe, being wrapped up in PAPER. What could possibly go wrong?

After months of having my 23″ flatscreen computer monitor sit on a couple boxes of envelopes, I’ve finally gotten around to making a proper mount for it. And by proper, I mean by using old gas pipes and scratched up plexiglass because I’m too cheap to shell out nearly $100 for a real mount on eBay. About 7 years ago, I made a laptop mount for my car to use for cross-country trips. But these days, we all have little GPS screens in our car or on our phones, so mounting my laptop in the front seat is kind of pointless. This is why I disassembled my laptop mount and turned it into a monitor stand for my desk.

So that I wouldn’t have to spend any extra money on a single piece of pipe of perfect length, I bought a coupling and joined two of my old pieces together. I think those are 10″ and 4″ pieces. I also had to buy the 90 degree coupling. Fourteen inches is pretty high for a monitor, but I wanted it to be high enough so that my laptop could sit in front of it. I drilled 4 holes into my desk and tightly secured the pipes.

The plexiglass is looking pretty beat up and I didn’t even bother taking the piece of metal from the top of it. It’s all behind the monitor, so who cares. I had to drill 4 new holes into the plexiglass to mount the monitor on. Most monitors have mounting holes in the back.

Here are a couple shots of the completed project…

It’s the perfect height to have my laptop in front of now, and I have a ton of extra space on my desk. Using a “T” connector for the pipes, it would be easy to add a second monitor on top of the first or beside it. The pipe is strong enough to hold two monitors and I think my pressboard desk would be strong enough to support them both. I could have saved even more space by buying a 4′ or 5′ pipe and mounting it to a stand on the floor. This way is better for me, though, and now I can’t knock over my monitor in drunken accidents. I lose so many monitors that way.

The monitor easily swivels back and forth and I could even turn it vertical if I wanted to. The only downside is that it doesn’t swivel up and down. This isn’t a problem, though, since it’s nearly eye-level for me. If I do add a second monitor on top of it someday, I will probably use a 45 degree connector so that it’s facing down at me.

UPDATE! A few months after building this monitor stand, I added another one next to it. Instead of attaching a 2nd monitor onto a single stand, I just built a second stand next to it, mounted on the desk. Since I’m stupid, the new stand is about an inch lower than the first. It’ll be easy to fix that, someday when I decide not to be lazy anymore.

Robert Spuds Holloway: hey
Robert Spuds Holloway: are you there?
Brad Carter: howdy
Robert Spuds Holloway: not too good. and you?
Brad Carter: i’m ok
Robert Spuds Holloway: I’m stranded in London
Robert Spuds Holloway: got mugged at gun point last night
Brad Carter: that’s never fun
Robert Spuds Holloway: all cash,credit card and phone was stolen

(It appears that his ability to construct sentences was stolen too!)

Brad Carter: bummer
Robert Spuds Holloway: I was attacked returning from the mall back to the hotel room,i was hurt on my right hand, but would be fine
Robert Spuds Holloway: sucks and scary!
Brad Carter: i bet. what are you doing in london?
Robert Spuds Holloway: on a short vacation
Brad Carter: with brenda?
Robert Spuds Holloway: It was a Brutal Experience but Thank GOD i still have my life and passport
Brad Carter: yep that’s a good thing. is brenda there with you?
Robert Spuds Holloway: yes

(Oh weird, Spuds doesn’t know anyone named Brenda…)

Robert Spuds Holloway: the police are investigating it but nothing came up yet
Brad Carter: good thing they didn’t mug her too
Robert Spuds Holloway: she was hit on her head
Brad Carter: oh, well thank god for that metal plate in her head
Robert Spuds Holloway: my return flight leaves in few hours but having troubles sorting out the hotel bills
Robert Spuds Holloway: I need your help
Brad Carter: just ditch the hotel man. just like we did in orlando that time!
Robert Spuds Holloway: wondering if you could loan me some money to sort out the hotel bills and also take a cab to the airport?
Robert Spuds Holloway: I will definitely refund it back tomorrow
Brad Carter: no way, you already owe me five bucks for lunch from last year
Brad Carter: not until you pay that back
Brad Carter: but i can still help you out
Brad Carter: i know this guy in stonebridge that will loan you a gun. he’s a drug dealer
Brad Carter: get a cab to stonebridge and i’ll give you the address
Brad Carter: you can use the gun to rob a store so you’ll have the money
Brad Carter: you’ll need to return the gun before you come back to the states though

Robert Spuds Holloway disconnected 11:57

Jammie visited last week, after not seeing her for more than 3 years. We went to a Local H concert, had dinner with her cousin, and she bought a Mac at the Apple store. Also went to Ground Kontrol arcade. This is all before we even left Portland. We were supposed to buy Macs together, but I found an awesome deal on Craigslist a couple months ago and couldn’t pass it up, so I already had mine.

We failed a Geocaching repeatedly, even on one Geocache that I’d found before. We swapped a few iPhone apps and I’m now addicted to a game called Angry Birds. As if Desktop Defender doesn’t eat up enough of my time. Thanks, Jammie. We visited Albany’s history museum, which is always good for a laugh. We also visited a furniture store across the street from the museum and this place was like a wax museum of celebrities. They had a Terminator and a Charlie Chaplin and a Hulk Hogan. Jammie asked what was up with them all, and we were told that the building was once used to make life-sized characters and a lot of them got left behind when they took over the building. Weird. But awesome.

We visited the carousel place and a couple antique shops. I ended up finding a good item to place in a Geocache as a PLA themed travel bug. We rode bikes and hiked through the woods, failing at another Geocache. Played minigolf. Jammie surprised me by telling me she hadn’t heard of the “Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work??” internet meme yet, so I showed her all the related material and got to watch her laugh hysterically at a months-old meme.

We had our traditional dinner at Red Robin with kcochran and Chad, then went to Game Time and played darts. Attempted some android red boxing and failed. Attempted some 11pm minigolf and failed. A day or two later, kcochran and Chad came over and we all did The Phone Show together. (Episode here.)

On Wednesday, we had breakfast at Rogers and I drove Jammie back to the airport, with a brief stop at Fry’s Electronics. The end.

I tried to cause mass confusion on a Salem Facebook account today by posting something terrible, waiting for hateful replies, then deleting my post.

It didn’t evolve into a lot of confusion and finger pointing like I hoped, but it still kind of looks like the first few people are offended by the original question. I need to refine this technique.

Few weeks ago I drove to Little Caesars for pizza since I’m too cheap to pay 3x as much for delivery. I threw the two large pepperonis on the front seat and the 2 liter of Pepsi in the back seat. As I rounded the corner onto my street, I turned down the blaring MC Chris and stepped on the brake to bring me to a reasonable level of speed. This caused the Pepsi to shoot off the back seat, hitting the front seat, which was slid all the way to the front. Then it dropped and landed on the corner of the metal track that the seat slides on, puncturing the bottle.

Then the bottle rolled over, spraying Pepsi all over the seats, windows, and ceiling. Pepsi was raining from the ceiling in my car. After a few seconds of this, I held my hand over the spraying Pepsi as I pulled into the driveway until it finally stopped. When it did there was a miniature lake of Pepsi on floor. I went inside and told Payton he wouldn’t believe what just happened. He immediately ran outside to survey the damage and laugh at me. Surprisingly, barely a drop hit me or my phone or car stereo, aside from my hand being covered in it to stop it from spraying everywhere.

After dinner I spent about an hour wiping out the car and managed to get it cleaned up pretty good. In fact, I even Windexed all my windows which I’ve never done before in the 7 years that I’ve owned the car. I still find occasional drops of Pepsi in parts of the car. Too bad they don’t still make glass 2 liters. That probably would have been easier to clean.

REMEMBER GLASS PEPSI BOTTLES??? I remember the very first commercial I saw for one in the 80′s. Some person accidentally knocks a 2 liter bottle off of a counter or table. In slow motion it takes forever to fall to the floor. Just as your expecting the bottle to shatter, it bends like a plastic bottle does and bounces back up in slow motion. At the time it looked like the coolest special effect ever since nobody had ever seen a plastic 2 liter and it was completely unexpected. GOD I’M OLD!

I just searched YouTube, trying to find that commercial and didn’t have any luck. But this lady sure had better luck with 2 liters in her car than I did.