My Next Cellphone

UPDATE: I found out that the enV is crippled too, to the degree that it does not allow file transfer. Screw that. It has a nice camera but eh. I first grabbed myself one of those LG Chocolates, a kind of mutant phone/ipod, slick and mysterious, but one day of use left me hating it with a passion. It was constantly doing things I didn’t want to do because of slips of the touch-sensitive interface. I took it back and settled for the LG 6300, a simple, unprepossessing phone, which I didn’t have to pay anything for after my outrageous discounts. I’m very happy with it so far.

END UPDATE

I just talked to my Verizon Wireless folks and found out that assuming I’m up to commit to two more years of service with them (I am), and I’m willing to order online rather than go to a store (I am), I can get some outrageous discounts. Apparently I’ve had my phone for 2 years and am up for a New Every 2 Program discount. (This sort of thing works better for us people getting on in years, because the years seem to fly by to us.)

I probably won’t drop the $ on it till after Christmas is over and done with, but this is what I want: the enV. Muchos thanks to Jason for pointing me in its direction.

What completely wins me over is the extremely functional Bluetooth stuff. Macs these days have bluetooth, but historically Verizon’s bluetooth offerings have been deliberately crippled. This one doesn’t seem to be.

There are a lot of cool things about the phone I could totally do fine without. But for a small investment after the discount, it seems to be a phone which will stay looking very good for a couple years.

Right now I have the Motorola V710, which is awfully nice, but I’ve always had terrible problems getting it charged. You have to balance the charger cord at some crazy angle to the phone to get it to connect, and possibly because of that, possibly for other reasons, charging is a very iffy business — it thinks it’s charged but dies quickly, stuff like that. This has persisted through two phones and four charger cords, so I’m pretty sure it’s not just that I got a bad phone or charger.

Anyway, looking forward to that crazy enV. Anyone with strong opinions for or against it as a phone drop a comment eh? I haven’t placed the order yet…

Ben Stein: Warren Buffet, Taxes, The Economy

In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning – New York Times:

Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”

Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Some really interesting writing from Ben Stein. Now that Republicans are allowed to break ranks and say what they think, it turns out a lot of them think things you didn’t think Republicans thought anymore.

The Comment Spam Takedown: Bad Behavior and Akismet

Between Bad Behavior blocking most spambots from even reaching the site (look at the bottom of the page to see how many it’s blocked as of now) and Akismet screening out the trickle that get through, I seem to have the comment spam issue covered. But what about legitimate comments? Is Akismet going to mistake them for spam, so I have to comb through them to find gems of real humanity? If you’ve got nothing better to do, help me out here with an experiment. Drop a comment from you, a human being (or equivalent sapient entity) reading this, and I’ll see which ones if any get misclassified as spammage. I’ll report what happened in an update on the post.