Morton Fox's journal

I went to the Wilmington Pre-SXSW Mashable Meetup yesterday evening. It was actually a bit of a joke on my part. I didn't see anyone else RSVP, so I took over this meetup and picked the venue myself. Thus I went to Cici's Pizza in Newark and had pizza buffet. This time, I focused only on the thin-crust varieties, which I liked, and finished the meal with some dessert pizza. (Bavarian dessert pizza and apple cinnamon pizza)

I upgraded to a smartphone, sort of. I'm not giving out the number to this new line because I haven't committed to switching yet (at least not until the balance on my existing Sprint account runs out), although you can reach it through my Google Voice number. I had a couple of criteria for upgrading that were only recently met. First one, which was admittedly a tough one, was the calling plan with data included should not be more than $40/month or so, which is my existing calling plan. (Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, and even Sprint itself all charge $60+ per month for smartphone plans, especially if data is added on.) Then I came across Virgin Mobile and their $25/month no-contract plan, which does include data and SMS. Perfect.

The next issue was Virgin Mobile had to offer an Android phone that didn't get strings of 1-star reviews on Amazon, etc. That was the problem with the Samsung Intercept. Last week or so, they added the LG Optimus V to their lineup. I heard some opinions that this phone too is mediocre but online reviews are a lot more favorable, so I went to the nearby Radio Shack last week and got one. Used it over the weekend and this week (mostly on Twitter and Foursquare, and to take and post photos), and so far, it's good enough. Cell signal is no better than what I get with Sprint because that's what Virgin Mobile is actually using, but it's generally okay in this region.

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... )