School Begins

Family

This fall is going to be busy busy in the Flessner house. Hannah has started her second year of preschool and is going four days a week in the afternoons. And the one day that she doesn’t go to school she will have a dance class. This is her very first dance class and she is so excited for it to start. Hannah is definitely our little ballerina!! This week we got her ballet slippers and she wears them every chance that she gets.

I don’t know if this busy schedule is harder on the two youngest who try to nap in the afternoons or on mom who has already had to wake them up a few times in order to pick up big sister from school. Late afternoons are always the hard part of the day for all of us for some reason anyway and now it is even longer. Gone are the naps until 4pm, since Hannah needs to be picked up by 3pm. It’s so tempting to just let them sit in front of the television all afternoon. I guess this is just another change that we all have to adapt to.

One Week With Android

Computer Stuff

Now that my wife is posting regularly, perhaps I should resume my technobabble-related ramblings. I’ve been the happy owner of a US Cellular HTC Desire for a week now and am loving every minute of it. Being back at US Cellular with all the related perks has been awesome as well.

Let’s get the gripes out of the way early… I really have only two, and they’re common to many Android users: battery life and storage space. I sometimes have trouble making it through the day, but I still have some tweaks to try and really, the iOS4 already prepped me by killing my iPod Touch’s battery life. Plus with USC, I can get a new battery for free anytime I want! Storage space for apps is atrocious, though only compared to what I’m coming from (having all 32gigs available to me). I patiently await Froyo 2.2 to alleviate this concern.

The great stuff? Being off Apple will be a nice relief. Most of my gripes with the iPod are taken care of by default. And despite earlier posts, having data available everywhere has already proved very useful (and not just for Pandora, which has become my default music-listening option). Plus I now have a decent camera always available as well as GPS for the occasional trip to unknown locations (and perhaps a new family geocaching hobby that may or may not take off). What really makes it amazing, though, is everything it can do that iPhone can’t:

Tasker – ~$6 ($5 direct from developer)

As one of my coworkers this thing makes your phone a true “smart” phone. With so many options a programmer would love, I haven’t even begun to figure out everything this can do for me, but here’s a start:

  • Automatic silent mode during meetings (driven off calendar) and during church (fixed time)
  • Insert headphones = popup instant menu of media apps (actually this popup menu thing can also be used as a much nicer implementation of folders)
  • Auto-enable GPS when loading maps (or any) app; disable it when done
  • Auto-lower volume when a certain high-volume family member calls
  • Custom Alarms (I actually did this just to get the permanent alarm icon off my notification bar, but you can play any song, support advanced snooze/shutoff/etc.)
  • Auto-updating battery status widget
  • Read aloud messages received while driving
  • Tons more!

LauncherPro – FREE ($2.99 upgrade option)

Sense is pretty and all, but do I really need a clock taking up half my home screen? And that’s really all it is. LauncherPro lets you customize the way you launch apps and organize your home screens, but it’s so much more than that.

  • Hide apps in the drawer – why list them there when they’re on your home screen or bloatware pre-installed on your phone? If you really want one back, search is your friend.
  • Custom dock: 5 shortcut keys to do whatever you want. Basically like the iOS  dock except you can put any Launcher shortcut in there. Oh, and have two actions for each icon. (I click on phone, it takes me to the dialer. I slide across the icon and it loads my contacts.)
  • Activity shortcuts and Profiles – more programming wizardry, but you can create a dock or homescreen icon to take you to a particular settings page in any app. And with profiles (I haven’t even checked this out yet), you can create automated scripted tasks, too.
  • Resizable Widgets (upgrade) – Minimal use but cool when applicable. I have a 4×1 power strip with 6 toggles on it. But I can shrink it to 3×1 or even 2×1, and it still works fine!
  • LauncherPro Widgets (upgrade) – The best things about sense (except the ugly clock.. yet), but being actively developed and with multiple size options. I like the agenda view mainly, and am looking forward to the friendstreamesque (facebook+twitter) widget next week.

Google Voice

US Cellular has free incoming texts, but I don’t want to pay for a texting plan. But in Android, I can text from any app that hooks into text messaging by using Google Voice instead of the standard messaging app. The drawback is my Voice # shows up, but realistically, the only person I ever text is Amanda, who already knows it. Also, with an app like

Google Voice Callback, I can essentially call for free (because, oh yeah, US Cellular has free incoming minutes, too). I probably won’t use that too much unless we get close to our minutes, since we have a pretty low plan for now. (They text us when we get close, too).

Aldiko

While this app is not quite as full-featured as Stanza on iOS, it still lets me download free books automatically. And change the hardware brightness (oh wait, iOS doesn’t let you do that). And add book-shortcuts to your homescreen. And turn pages with the volume keys (apps get banned for that by Apple).

This just after one week! Give me a couple months and we’ll really see what this thing can do!

Alternative Input Methods

I haven’t played around too much with this, but you can replace the keyboard with different systems including Swype (which I hear is awesome…if it ever comes out of closed beta). Plus just tap a key on the keyboard and speak what you want to say. I guess there’s some speech recognition for iOS but it’s no good if the iPod Touch doesn’t have a microphone.

Like I said, I’ve just scratched the surface, but already I can do so much more than just browse the Internet on my phone. Exciting times are ahead!

Nursing Home Visits

Life Musings

I have made an effort to visit one of the nursing homes in our town several times in the last month. I was a little apprehensive at first because going to talk to people you don’t know, no matter how sweet they are, is a little disconcerting for me. It requires me to step out of my comfort zone, but I know that the experience is helping me to grow. And I love that my girls get to join me on these adventures. My oldest two girls love talking to the elderly. Although sometimes I think they come just to see the residents’ pet cat and the big cage of birds. Already we are getting to know just a few of the residents and although they don’t necessarily remember us from one visit to the next I feel like we are making a difference.
I thank God that He led me to share just a little bit of my time with the elderly. Now if I could just figure out the best way to spend the rest of my time…

Food Pantry

Life Musings

I discovered something that I thought was pretty cool this summer. I can donate our fresh garden produce to the local food pantry. This is so great for all of those extra zucchini that I have been getting but can’t use up fast enough. And I’ve found that I just don’t use enough zucchini to justify freezing it.
Last year our church planted a garden and they donated everything they grew to the food pantry. I don’t know why it took me a whole year to make that connection.
So if you have a bunch of zucchinis that you are considering leaving on someone’s front porch during the night or putting in their car when they aren’t looking – you can stop sneaking around and take your abundance of beautiful squash to the local food pantry too!
Or any other extra produce you might have…

Swimming

Family

I have spent a lot of time at our city pool this summer. Which is funny considering that we only went once, maybe twice, last summer and never before that.

At the end of June, Hannah had her first swim class, which consisted of lessons Monday through Thursday for 2 weeks. Hannah was a little uncomfortable in the water at first, but she really started to enjoy it by the end. Didn’t quite get the courage to jump off the diving board yet.

Then Samantha got to take swim lessons too; her and Daddy did the Parent/ Child course that is offered for small children in the evenings – also for 2 weeks. Samantha loved having her first school-type activity. Finally she was the star of the hour and Hannah was watching her. Samantha was really proud that she had her “swimming lessons,” and she loved sharing it with Daddy. Samantha wasn’t afraid of the diving board and would even ask to be dunked!

Then we decided to send Hannah to another round of swim lessons. She had gotten the opportunity a couple of times to try the diving board with Samantha’s class, and she seemed a whole lot braver this time around. I’m so glad that we did the second class. Now Hannah loves the water. She had a little scare in the deep end, but she still jumped off the High Dive all by herself. Amazing!

Finally, one more lesson – well half a lesson. I don’t swim myself, so I decided to try out these swim lessons and see if they can help a 27 year old Mom. I took 4 private lessons and I certainly haven’t mastered swimming, but now I have a much firmer grasp on how to tread water, do the front crawl, back stroke, and breast stroke. And I even jumped off the diving board! Even I didn’t think it was possible, but I did it! I still won’t be able to rescue my kids from drowning, but maybe now I won’t have to worry about them trying to rescue me.

Kansas City

Family

This summer has been very busy. Despite not having a “real” vacation, we have done lots of things to keep busy. This past weekend we dropped the oldest 2 kids off at Grandma and Grandpa’s house and traveled all the way to Kansas City to see the newest member of Ben’s family, Oliver, who is still in the hospital there. Ben’s sister and her husband joined us for the journey. It was nice to get away for a couple days. First we made a stop in Des Moines to visit my niece, Armina. Then we headed south to Kansas City. The drive through Missouri was a little too exciting though; someone compared it to being in the Wizard of Oz movie (they must have meant the very first part with the tornado). But despite all the wind, lightening, questionable looking clouds, and the overturned semi truck, we made it to our hotel safely. Saturday we got to visit Amy, Chip and Oliver, do some shopping, and eat at a great Italian restaurant. Ben got to try out a GPS gadget that he had borrowed for the trip. The GPS was really nice to have on a long trip to a city that we are not familiar with.

Our return to Iowa to pick up Hannah and Samantha (and to regular parenting duties) was made interesting by finding energetic Hannah sleeping on the couch at Sherrie and Kenny’s house. When she woke up after about 3 hours she threw up in the kitchen sink. It was a long drive home with a sick child, but thankfully she slept more and wasn’t really complaining much. We were happy to be sleeping in our own beds, and Mom was only up with the sick girl a couple of times during the night.

How many e-mail addresses are too many?

Computer Stuff

Most people would probably say more than one or two are enough, but I have very specific uses for the almost dozen addresses I use regularly. The problems come when people who know me enough to know more than one, but not enough to know which one…or the fact that most of them will get to me one way or the other. When a certain worship director at our church starts sending me 4 copies of an e-mail, I know I have a problem. So let’s review my addresses and decide which ones I can do away with.

  • Work address. This hasn’t caused too many problems. Nobody outside of work knows it, and the occasional personal e-mail I do receive, I politely redirect to one of my other addresses.
  • Digimuzik.com – This was my original site from college days. I put the addresses on my website for all the world, including spambots, to see. For the most part, I’ve retired all of these addresses, but we still maintain flessner@ for a few people who seem to still have it. But if you do, please switch to one of the next ones (since it’s getting enough SPAM to warrant serious deletion consideration).
  • FlessnerFam.com – After getting married, my wife and I wanted an address for “us” rather than something tied just to me. We ended up with FlessnerFam, but then we made three addresses: one for her, one for me, and one for “us.” This actually works well, since we each have regular subscriptions that the other person doesn’t care about, and it’s nice to not have that cluttering up our individual mailboxes. It does make for difficulty when checking them all and keeping them in sync across multiple computers (we don’t use IMAP because we don’t want to mark something as “read” if the other hasn’t read it). It also confuses people when they don’t know which one to use (answer-just pick one; we’ll get it. Just don’t pick all three; we’ll get three copies!).I also maintain what was originally a spam account for rewards programs, but ironically, it gets very little spam. So it’s exclusively for rewards programs and purchases on not-quite-mainstream websites (where I also use a virtual credit card number). (Update: the digimuzik.com version of this address recently got on a spam list… so I’m going to start creating new alias address for each site I’m unsure about. Not that you care about that… move along now…)
  • HiddenV.com – Here’s where I start getting into trouble. I only have a single address here, and I maintain it for working on the church website. Sometimes I send emails from it when I ask questions related to the website, but then people (like the aforementioned worship director  (-: ) think that’s my main email address and start using it for non-web-related stuff. Or worse… a FMSC auto-generated signup e-mail gets me on someone’s “forward random-but-useless crap” list.  :shudder: Action plan for this one: don’t send ‘normal’ email from it.
  • Gmail – Who doesn’t have a gmail account these days? I have just one, but I haven’t come up with a really good use for it. Since I have a more appropriate (or more targeted?) FlessnerFam address, I don’t need to use this one as much. But it’s still used if I email something from Reader or log into a site with my Google account…
  • Hotmail – My wife has a hotmail account. I think I probably had one or two related to my WWT-Live shenanigans, but I haven’t logged into them in ages. I wonder if they’re still around.
  • BuentingFamily.com – Um… I think I have one here, but it just forward to my regular address. No one knows this one… not even me.
  • Forbin.net – Now I’m just getting crazy. This was my old dial-up address that is way expired at this point… though it might be referenced somewhere on the scrambled mind…

Most of those are old/unused address, but the truth remains that my iPod has 7 different mail tabs that I have to actively swap between (looking forward to OS 4 to fix that!), and that’s not counting the 3-4 active addresses that forward to one of those 7. Is some intervention in order?

10 Displays

Computer Stuff

I have 10 different LED/LCD displays in my office at this point, and it’s not even because I’m that nerdy (i.e. I don’t have a beautiful 4-display layout like a certain coworker of mine).

  • Standard 2-monitor workstation (Widescreen + Standard)
  • Laptop 15″ display
  • Digital Picture Frame (see… who doesn’t have one of those these days)
  • Cisco IP Phone (alas, not the touchscreen variety, but I can have a cutesy message like my hotkey to home: “The Beautiful Amanda Flessner”)
  • Labeler – we got these free when we surrendered our file cabinet to the ways of ‘Getting Things Done’ (though I still have useful hanging files; sorry David Allen!)
  • Cell Phone
  • iPod Touch
  • Pager (this one’s only with me one week out of every couple of months, but it helps bring the total to 10 today)
  • Watch (not just an LCD display; a Casio databank with phonebook, timers, stopwatches, etc. Just no calculator)

Okay, so maybe I am a little nerdy. But if I were a real nerd, I’m sure I’d have many more than 10 computerized displays…

iPod Gripes – Now With Solutions!

Computer Stuff

So in true Gilmore style*, I started keeping a pro/con list of my iPod touch. Well, maybe not that as much as a list of gripes of things this thing can’t do that even my old Dell Axim pocket Pc could do. But then I started finding solutions to them one by one. I haven’t come up with something for everything (the lack of any text formatting options, including in this WordPress app for one), but I’ve found enough to satisfy me… For now!

Continue reading iPod Gripes – Now With Solutions! →

The Story of My iPod Touch

Computer Stuff

So, I have joined the ‘dark side,’ as Bill says. I am writing this on a brand new iPod Touch… My first ever Apple purchase. Well, actually it’s a birthday present, so we can say Amanda bought it, and she doesn’t know any better.

Anyway, I’m still in the debating stages of whether I want to keep it, switch to Verizon and a droid handset next month, or stick with my aging pocket pc a little while longer. I think Verizon’s out of the question for now (Sorry, Verizon family members), since the insane amount of $$$ it would cost to switch and get a data plan seems wasteful for as little as I’d use it. I don’t travel much away from home, work, or church, all of which have just fine Internet, as well as most of my family’s houses. Family gatherings in Webster City might be painful, but maybe I’ll *gasp!* actually spend some time with family!

I think, however, that I’ve used it too much to give it up. I started a list of gripes I had with it… Things that even my old pocket pc could do, but through apps, Google, and my own programmer’s prowess I seem to be knocking those out one by one. I was going to document them here, but I’ve rambled on too long already. If anything, this free WordPress app means I might actually start blogging again… More for my own journalosity (gotta add that to Benwords… ‘journalism’ seems wrong in this context, though probably not) than for anyone to actually read it. I know there are maybe two or three of you, and I appreciate that!

Anyway, I have another three weeks, so let’s get some more apps! (I’ve only tried about 150!)