I am good at coming up with ideas. I am not so good at executing them. Sometimes, I am simply unrealistic. Other times, I lack the know-how to go anywhere with an idea. Other times, I come up with a plan to acquire the know-how, which might, for instance, involve purchasing some books, and then I don’t follow through on acquiring the know-how (which would involve reading the books).

For example, four years, I aspired to make Toastie Radio totally interactive, allowing users to create accounts, rate songs, create lists of songs…oh, I don’t remember what the grand plan is. But I had bought a nice big book on PHP and MySQL web development, and it was going to help me create something very cool. I got stuck somewhere in the user authentication part. And then the project stalled, probably around the time I decided I hated living in Knoxville, Tennessee enough to plan a move back to Durham. (Ok, so I had an idea that I’d move back to Durham, and I executed that. I’m talking about grand ideas…)

I’m talking mostly about computer-related ideas, like ideas for websites or applications. When I was 9, I was writing programs like a Mad Libs game with my Apple ][ Plus in Basic. I had a certain gift. The gift was squandered somewhere. (This is turning into a semi-autobiographical post; that wasn’t my intention, but the free-flowing writing about whatever is the kind of writing I used to do much more of before I had this “blog” with “readers”, and kinda miss the days where I’d journal without regard to sentence construction and coherence…) I didn’t commit to studying computer science in college; I picked up a minor. I didn’t get a programming job out of college. I got a job with a consulting company, where I learned something called R—–.

I’m not sure if I have that awful six-letter word anywhere within this blog, but I don’t feel like spelling it out right now. If you know me, you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, with the exception of a couple of brief stints trying to be an Access database administrator, I’ve been working with R—– for almost a decade. You’d think I must be some sort of expert. Hardly. There are some very cool things that an organization can do with R—–. I did some of those things years ago. But I don’t do those cool things in my current position, and it’s quite unlikely I will have the opportunity to so where I’m at. But it’s also quite unlikely I will be doing those cool things anywhere else. No one uses R—- to do these cool things anymore. Instead, they buy unwieldy, bloated, expensive applications based on R—-, and….well, I don’t want to start getting into details of my current job.

What I was planning to get at before that impromptu interlude was that I’ve wanted to come up with some grand idea for years that would employ the one significant skill I have. While I’ve had a few ideas come and go, mainly the idea has been to simply come up with an idea. Earlier tonight, I came up with an idea and started working on it. It’s not a brilliant idea. It’s probably something that has been done before. There’s no intelligent reason why one would use R—– to implement this, but, like I said, that’s my tool.

Rather then spend time on developing this idea much tonight, however, I spent way too much time trying to find a clever domain to buy. While it may seem silly to most, I actually am quite pleased with the name of this domain. I owned toastie.com between 1998 and 2004. I regret having sold it. I got a great price for it, but now it languishes as a parked ad page. captaintoastie.com (predecessor of this site) was stupid. I like toastie.st. So I wanted something else I’d like. The name that came to mind was toastr.com. Unfortuantely, toastr.com, in all of its (I think) cleverness, is being wasted by, well, it’s not a parked ad site, but it isn’t worthy of the toastr name. So I’ve spent several hours looking through all the international domain suffixes looking for something clever. I’ve had a couple of ideas, but nothing I went with.

I’m not going to divulge what the big idea is, since it may all evaporate tomorrow, or I may work on it for six months before it’s anything worth sharing. The last time I tried to chronicle a big project from its inception (my home purchase) it was a big bust.

As 2007 comes to a close, I have thought about whether or not to write any kind of year-end retrospectives. I may post some more silly lists. But the posts about why I bother with this site, what the relevance of any of this is, seem to come a couple times a month so there’s no need for a special one now.

…

Having just read through the above, I know this is the type of post I’ll contemplate scrubbing when I awaken later today. If it’s still here, it means I’m sticking with my blogging philosophy of the moment, which is that…<stares blankly at screen for a few minutes>I don’t know…If I start to share more personal stuff in 2008, if I become more of an open-book, it will not be my intention to come across egotistically, as if I think my thoughts are of any importance…People vent in all sorts of ways…I was about to list them, but ultimately I don’t think I need to explain…this blog/journal/website is what it is…

I was telling the sales rep at Costco that while it would be good to have the same functionality in my new phone that I had with my old one, I didn’t care too much about the music player or getting TV on my phone or having a full keyboard. I wanted a decent phone with a decent battery life.

I bought the LG VX8350. Plain clamshell design, nothing special.

I neglected to consider one feature of my old Sprint phone which I took for granted–the ability to run the mobile Gmail application. That’s my cell phone candy, being able to check my Google mail quickly and with a good interface. It turns out my Verizon phone can’t run this. I can surf the mobile Gmail web page, but it takes a few steps to get there, and the interface isn’t nearly as friendly as the app’s. I can get my Gmail through Verizon’s web-mail program, configuring it as a POP account, but then I see all my mail in the inbox, whereas with all the list-servs I’m on and all the filters I have, only about 5% of my mail is truly Inbox worthy.

After doing some research, I’ve learned what anyone who knows anything about cell phones apparently knows, which is that most Verizon phones only run BREW applications and nothing Java-based. This means you can’t get the mobile Gmail app or the Opera Mini browser or any one of thousands of cell phone applications. Verizon restricts your application downloads to things on its approved GetItNow list, most of which you have to pay for. So they may have the best customer support and the best network, but their internet capabilities suck.

So now I’ll research the AT&T phones, AT&T being the other carrier that Costco sells phones and service for, having gotten rid of Sprint a couple of months ago. The other alternative is getting a Blackberry or Treo for Verizon, but I wasn’t planning to spend anything on a new phone.

Like with so many of my gripes, this one probably isn’t shared by too many people. I’m not finding much evidence that anyone buys a cell phone based on its ability to run the Gmail application.

Fortunately, I’m well within the period to cancel my service and get a new phone.

UPDATE. Better explanation of my Gmail dilemma, from a 5/07 NY Times article

Google says that about 300 phones — from AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile — are Java-compatible. Unfortunately, no Verizon phones run Java, and therefore no Verizon phones can run mobile Gmail. (You can always open m.gmail.com directly in a Verizon phone’s Web browser — that’s an optimized cellphone version of the Gmail Web site — but the Gmail for Mobile software is five times as fast.)

I’m not one to give to charities specifically at the end of the year to get tax breaks, but if you’re looking to give some money away before the end of 2007, you might find charitynavigator.org useful.

My personal plugs:
- PKD Foundation
- Doctors Without Borders

Honorable mention:
- Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
- Human Rights Campaign

Local giving:
- Traction
- Coalition to Unchain Dogs

Giving from you car:
- The guy in the wheelchair on the I-85 off-ramp to Guess Road (Normally, I wouldn’t, but it was raining hard, and whether he needed a sandwich, a shot of insulin, a pack of Marlboros, or a bottle of whiskey, I had no particular need for the money in my change compartment and respect his free will to do whatever with it).

One of the mistakes I made in 2007 was re-upping with Sprint for yet another 2-year-contract with the upgrade to a new phone back in January. I’d been a Sprint customer since 1998, having gone through at least 5 different phones. As of today, I’m free of Sprint! It might be difficult to imagine how one could be so happy to be rid of a cell phone service provider. I think I captured some of my frustration earlier this year, but their customer service throughout the years has been horrible.

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So I signed up with Verizon, whom Consumer Reports ranks as the top service provider. For the type of phone I need, there’s not much difference between one provider and another. I need reliable customer service. The January 2008 issue of Consumer Reports cites their reader survey showing that only about 40% of wireless customers received good customer service from their provider. However, with last-place Sprint, that percentage was just 20%. Some people may be happy with Sprint and may have even been fortunate enough to either never have needed customer service or have had a satisfactory experience with them. I was not so fortunate, I can’t warn people against starting new service with Sprint enough, although after this post, I probably won’t need to so public ever again.

I’m paying the $200 early-termination fee, but I’m fine with that, because I just got over $200 back from Costco for returning my old phone. (My purchase was grandfathered into Costco’s old cell phone return policy; they’ve since changed their policy to just 90 days).

I was designating someone’s photo on Flickr as a “favorite” recently, and I thought that perhaps I could come up with a quick list of my Top 10 Flickr Photos of 2007. I figured it would simple enough, that I’d just need to go through whatever photos I had marked a favorite in the past year.

I encountered a few obstacles to this being a quick task. First, my Flickr activity dropped off considerably in 2007 after a few months of Flickr addition in 2006. I didn’t mark that many photos as favorites in 2007. Second, such a list ought to only include photos taken in 2007. Many photos I have favorited even recently are not recent photos. Flickr, for all its inventiveness, does not have a function to search photo sets by date range. Finally, a review of what I had favorited only produced about five photos. So then I went to my contact list and picked out a few more photos. But then I couldn’t even come up with ten, particularly because I didn’t want to select more than one per contact, and I don’t have so many contacts.

Low and behold, every photo on my list is pet photo. How very original of me. I have a great appreciation for photography, but I don’t spend much time browsing Flickr for photos of artistic merit. This is not to say that my selections are lacking, artistically. It’s just not a particularly diverse set, when one considers the nearly infinite pool I could’ve chosen from. Maybe I’ll start subscribing to some photo feeds so I can appreciate more photos in 2008.

These are in no particular order.

Amusing captions requested…

Big Cat (December 2007)

Originally uploaded by toastiest

People don’t realize just how big Aremid is until they see him sprawled out. Here’s one from recently.

Here are a few from the archives:

(1998)

(2001)

(2002)

Huckabee calls for border crackdown in response to Bhutto’s assassination

It’s laughable reading about Huckabee decrying Islamic fundamentalism, and how we need to seal our borders to keep out those Pakastani fanatics.

Why is this laughable? Google up an old Huckabee sermon. (Maybe preaching that wives should submit themselves as gracious servants to their husbands isn’t as bad as telling the flock to blow themselves up and kill lots of Christians, but there’s plenty of fun to be found in Huckabee’s brand of fundamentalism).

Americans needs to do everything possible to prevent religious fanatics from destroying our country. The problem is, the fanatics are already here, and some of them are even running for President.

…

Of course, the leap from Bhutto’s assassination to building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border to keep out Pakistanis is also an astounding admission of ignorance about world affairs. Huckabee had not one intelligible thought about Bhutto and Pakistan. His attention switched immediately to the border, since that’s a place both he and his flock can find on a map.

…

A quick Huckabee aside, a quote from a 1998 book he penned:

Abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug abuse, and homosexual activism have fragmented and polarized our communities.

That’s right, environmentalism.

And you thought George W. Bush gutted this country of all its reason and clean air…

“I felt, like, there wasn’t a purpose to live”.
- 14-year-old Molly, after her mom got fed up with Molly’s enormous cell phone bill and had the service shut off

[NPR : Three Generations' View of Cell Phones]

Dependable Erection: Ummm, a little help please?

Barry’s got bigger problems. And I know 95% of those reading this probably read about them in DE already, but it’s the holidays, and this shouldn’t fall through the cracks. Mr. and Mrs. Dependable have had some shitty neighbors for quite awhile. City of Durham, County of Durham, help them out already!

Barry loves Durham and does as much for Durham as anyone I know, and he can’t figure out whom to get to listen to him to help clean up his neighborhood. What hope do the rest of us have?