Morton Fox's journal

There must be a sales drive going on at Sprint now because yesterday morning, I got a phone call from a rather insistent Sprint sales representative. Of course, I wasn't going to upgrade my calling plan since I hardly use any minutes in the first place, and I wasn't going to upgrade my phone either because I just got a replacement Razr V3m in good working condition. However, that sales call did get me to at least take a look at Sprint's current selection of phones.

The LG Rumor is one that I might get for the slide-out keyboard. The dealbreaker is it doesn't support EV-DO! If I have Power Vision, why get a phone that can't use it? The only other Sprint offering that I thought was interesting was the HTC Touch, a touchscreen Windows Mobile smartphone. However, the reviews are lukewarm. The rest of the phones are either less capable than the Razr V3m (so why buy those when I can always get a V3m on eBay?) or too high-end for me to be bringing out into the woods. Bottom line is I ought to wait and see. Maybe they'll have more choices next year when my contract is up for renewal.

Did more work on TwitVim. Yesterday, I added support for highlighting #hashtags and jumping to the Twitter Search for those hashtags. That should make hashtags easier to follow in TwitVim, not that many people on my friends timeline use those.

Then today, I rewrote TwitVim's date/time reformatting code in pure Vim script. It used to be written in Perl, so only those who ran Vim with the if_perl extension compiled in would see those. Everyone else saw raw Twitter API timestamps, which are in GMT instead of local time and aren't very pretty, besides. Now that this piece of code is in Vim script, everyone will get the new timestamps. Why was it in Perl earlier? Because Vim has barely anything by way of date/time handling functions so I was using Perl's library functions for that. Once I had the Julian date formula though, it was easy to write a Vim function to convert date strings to UNIX time values. (i.e. seconds since Jan 1, 1970) Of course, it was even easier to peek into the Perl library to see how they implemented timegm(). Wish I'd thought of that earlier.

( Here's what timegm() looks like in Vim script... )

Local geocachers have been busy with cache placements over the long weekend. So today, I did two of those. The first was Critter Comfort, which was behind the Ramsey Public Library. That was an easy find (and I was FTF) but there was a supplemental question on what kind of creature that structure is meant to house. I don't like geocaches with additional logging requirements but went along with it because I was quite sure of the answer.

In the evening, I visited Dead Man's Chest of the World. This one is in Old Tappan, on a trail next to an upriver stretch of the Hackensack River. I also took a look at a rusty piece of junk near the cache site. Would be nice if, when a car rusts in the woods, the insignia and model name remained readable so that I could identify it.

Phone is getting flaky. It still makes calls and browses the web but I have to hold it a certain way or the keypad doesn't work, which makes it a bit awkward. The kicker is I'm only 4 months away from being able to get a new phone from Sprint with a $150 discount for contract renewal. So I'm looking on eBay for a cheap replacement to bridge the gap.

I went out this afternoon to MacFarran Park (actually, it was the edge of the park) in Ramsey to try looking for Anemic Skippy again. This time, I was successful. Yes, the peanut butter jar was really in the rock pile. What helped this time is the previous visitor positioned the geocache so that it wasn't quite as deep in the crevice. So I was able to see it and reach for it without any trouble.

I should've known this would happen. I canceled my landline phone service on January 26. Today, I checked and saw that they still billed me for February. Ugh. Called them this morning to get that charge taken away. I hope it really is canceled this time or else I'll have to call them again next month. Between this cancellation order screwup and the hotel reservation screwup I mentioned previously, I have to wonder if anyone can get anything right the first time, but we carry on somehow.

Even Google can't get things right the first time. When I tried installing Google Apps on my family domain name last year, it got stuck at verifying domain ownership. I contacted Google's support team but they didn't do squat so I deleted my incomplete Google Apps setup. I tried again a few nights ago and this time, it worked! Of course, I'm the only one from my family with a user account there now so it's not much of a community. :) There's actually not much of a reason to use it yet -- except for the recently-released Google Sites, all those services are available outside of Google Apps -- but it's a good placeholder to keep this domain from being just another "domain parking" page.