PhoneBoy Says

I had an incident recently at work that involved someone emailing the general manager of my group over something I did without approaching me about the issue first. I did something really dumb that I should know better. It's one of those things that, if handled improperly, could have easily turned into an HR moment. However, I immediately claimed and took full responsibility for what I did. My management was very supportive and chose to allow me to resolve the issue on my own without involving HR. And, of course, it did resolve the issue and everything is back to normal.

I explained the issue to my wife, and she, being the mama hen that she is, was very concerned that I was doing something that was threatening my job. She was also concerned that I had every intention of continuing to do what I was doing--something that is specifically not part of my job description, but something I feel fairly passionate about. I would, of course, be careful to avoid the specific behavior which caused a near HR-moment, but of course that made her nervous. Call it stubbornness, and of course if I am not careful, I could be having an HR moment and put my job at risk.

However, it could be much worse. I could be my dad, whom has smoked longer than I've been alive, and now seems to have developed COPD (note to Dad: this might have been something to blog about). Despite this diagnosis, he's still smoking. Yes, he's taking cessation drugs to try and quit, etc, but to me, getting COPD is a gigantic blinking to neon sign to redouble the efforts to stop.

Every year our neighborhood does an annual Garage Sale. It's not like people around here don't do Garage Sales any other time of the year, it just happens to be when it's an organized, orchestrated affair. We are participating this year, mostly because we have stuff in a storage unit we are paying to keep there for no good reason. There's also a plethora of items the kids have outgrown that we'd like to get rid of and possibly get some cash for.

Over the long holiday weekend, my wife went through Jaden's room. She throughly went through his room, throwing out a couple of garbage bags worth of junk in the process and removing a bunch of toys to sell at the garage sale as well as giving a few of his toys and books to Gracie. Jaden't room is neat and orderly for the first time in what seems like forever! It remains to be seen how much trash will be uncovered throughout the rest of the house, but I suspect there will be more.

We are also using the opportunity to get rid of our dining room table and chairs, which have lasted nearly 10 years, but have definitely seen better days. My wife found a table at the local Amish furniture store, but it will be several weeks before it's made and delivered. The Amish furniture store wanted way too much for the chairs, so she found some cheaper chairs at Pier 1 that will fit the bill. Assuming our set gets sold, we may have to use one of my folding tables from my office as a makeshift dining room table until the new table arrives.

I have a few things up in my office I'd like to sell. However, I suspect I will have a hard time selling them as the kind of stuff I have isn't your usual garage sale fodder--and believe me, I've been to more than my share of garage sales over the years. Whatever doesn't get sold will probably get donated to charity. The neighborhood has arranged to have a charity come through the neighborhood on Monday to pick up everyone's unwanted items. I suspect they will be hauling stuff away by the truckload.

Thru Engadget Mobile, I found out that there is a trojan horse programout there that sends messages to a premium SMS number in thebackground, thus costing you a ton of money. According to the UnwiredView article, this is the first time that a particular trojan horse waswritten specifically for Series 60 devices. Series 60 is the operatingsystem used in the higher-end Nokia smartphones, such as the Nseriesand Eseries devices.

I do a detailed analysis of how this happens and what you can do about it over at the See into S60 blog.

Blue sky does happen here!

01 Mobile Chatter - Episode 1_ Spurious Cellular Transmissions

First podcast I have been involved with in a while. After getting the cats herded and the technical difficulties sorted, Ricky Cadden from Symbian Guru and Jonathan Greene from Atmaspheric Endeavors and I sat down and talked about mobile computing.

This article is a "no duh" for me. Who would have thought something grown from the earth was better than something man-made?

Sound clip 03

The Original Nokia Tune, aka Grande Valse as it was on the Nokia 6160/6190. I used my Nokia N95 to record this as it played from my Nokia 6260, so it's not the cleanest version of the sound, but it's what I got.

The wife has found nearly a perfect house in exactly the neighborhood she wants to move to. We looked at houses in this neighborhood before, and I have to agree on the neighborhood. The houses we looked at previously were not perfect and were a little out of our price range. This one she found is also out of our price range, but it would not require much in the way of work to get the house usable.

My wife gave a verbal offer to the real estate agent that was well below the asking price, but there's a method for that: we think the house is overpriced, even for that area, and we are kind of giving the person a "safety net" of sorts. Basically telling her "if you can't get your asking price in a comfortable time, we're willing to buy it for less." Have no idea if this strategy will work, but it's worth a try.

If we get this house, and it's still a big if at this point, we will probably be able to get the loans and afford it--it's amazing the kind of loan we qualify for, but it will mean tightening the belts a little. Of course, I have yet to actually see this house, so I am jumping into this site unseen. Not the first time I've done this as the house we bought in Spokane I agreed to buy site unseen. Yes, I obviously trust my wife's judgement on these things.