Buy Nothing Day is upon us again, the day after Thanksgiving. With the media constantly throwing it at people as “the busiest shopping day of the year” it only serves to whip people up into a violent, consuming frenzy. People are led to believe that if they don’t get out and buy something, anything, right now, there’s no hope that their loved ones will get the useless gadget or doo-dad they so cravenly desire. I almost refuse to go out the day after Thanksgiving. There’s insane traffic, every parking spot in town is taken and no store has less than 452 people in it at any given moment (though I do have to admit it always provides for many a hysterical story of fights breaking out at Wal-Mart).
So I say fuck em all. Let the mindless consumers have thier busyiest shopping day. Let them get up at 5am to be the first one into the store and let them get arrested for hip checking some old lady off the last tickle-me-elmo. They can have it. Though I will admit, this is a great day to go bowling or catch a new Friday release movie without the crowds since everyone else is, well, consuming.
Interesting device shipping today from Nokia, the 770 ($359.99). A device rather dubiously called an “internet tablet” that’s actually more of an uber-web-enabled PDA. Most notable about it is the custom Debian-based distribution that’s completely open source as it runs GTK rather than Trolltech’s ebmedded QT. I tend to prefer my apps look clean and professional than something playskool designed.
Some impressive stats as well. Featuring the afore-mentioned Debian-based distribution called Maemo, which includes kernel 2.6 and X.org/Scratchbox WM. Hardware specs are: 800×480 screen, 220 MHz TI OMAP ARM processor (with DSP), 64M of RAM, 128M of flash, USB slave port, 802.11b/g wireless, Bluetooth, and an RS-MMC slot. It sports a battery life of 3 hours with continous Wi-Fi usage. Not a fantastic amount of time I’ll admit, but how many people are going to have the need to sit and browse the internet or keep a Wi-Fi connection going on a PDA for 3 hours straight? Not many. Withtout the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth in use the battery would last considerably longer. Either way it’s not much of a problem considering it accepts common Nokia phone batteries so it would only cost another $30 to keep a fully-charged spare handy. 6 hours of continuous PDA usage ought to be enough to get anyone through the day. If you need more you’re not the target audience and should probably be looking into picking up a laptop.
Another incredibly smart move on Nokia’s part was sending the units to developers before the media so the 770 would have a wealth of new apps and ports by launch today. Check out the impressive lineup of launch apps here.
Frank Murkowski’s jet finally showed up last week along with the $2.6million price tag. He’s still claiming it to be an aircraft the state needs siting the fact that we’re one of the most aviation-dependent states in the country. Odd, his press secretary left out the part where the plane can’t land at over 99% of airstrips in the state seeing as how all but a handful are made of dirt, gravel or completely non-existant in some areas.
The story even made Reuters Oddly Enough.
I went back over my bandwidth usage logs to determine how much I’ve used on average. I realized early off that the overage fee, while being assigned per gigabyte over the 5GB/month limit, wasn’t actually charge to my bill until I had used a full gigabyte. This essentially made my limit 5.99GB per month. Despite my best attempt to hit as close to that as possible, I only managed to average 5.09GB/month. Over the first full week I’ve had clearwire (and no bandwidth limit) I’ve transferred more than I was able to in the past seven months. 35.63GB from March to September while I’ve transferred 39.19GB from October 27th to November 4th. And GCI wonders why they’re hemorrhaging customers, and now employees, at an alarming rate. The ISP landscape in my state is in for a serious shake-up or else there might be a couple fewer ISPs around this time next year.
… I’m also thoroughly enjoying season 1 of Robot Chicken.
