Cats

Cassie was just sitting on the back of the couch and she started heaving. I said to Kira, I said “Get her!”

Kira must have mistook what I’d said. I’m sure she did because just at that moment, she ran over to the cat and CAUGHT THE VOMIT IN HER HANDS.

Strange.

Breaking it off

I broke up with my broker today. Lee. Been with me for six years. Seen my total portfolio with him go up 80% and down 90% in that short time. He’s given me some good advice (HRPT Properties) and some bad advice (BGEN, SNDK — the latter of which was particularly smarty when he advised me to sell at 30 before the thing hit 60-something). Still, he was a good broker and I’d like to think a good friend too. Alas, these things can’t last forever. And at $60 a trade this was a big dog that just couldn’t hunt.

So, I’m at Ameritrade. At least, I’m in the mail to Ameritrade right now and in three weeks I’ll be joining the world of those blissfully trading online.

Another New Phone

I’m about a once-a-quarter cellphone upgrader. I used a little Nokia for a long time, nearly a year I think, then went for the Sony-Ericsson T68i (crap), Motorola T720i (flip-phone crap), and finally the Nokia 6200 (fantastic, but limited for what I was looking for).
A few days ago, I picked up the new Sony-Ericsson T616 and I finally thing I’ve found the phone I’ve been looking for all my life. I gush about technology, I know that. I’m a complete sucker for the latest thing-with-buttons, but this thing is incredible. Big screen, excellent connectivity, built-in camera and Bluetooth to sync with iSync.

I’d read some pretty scathing reviews on the thing before I picked it up — that connectivity was poor, the screen was impossible to read in bright light, and the interface was confusing. Well, the RF reception is astounding, like the folks at SE finally woke up and realized users did not, in fact, use there phones with taught strings and tin cans attached. This thing connects in places around Portland where my Nokia couldn’t dream of connecting. The screen is as crisp as I’ve seen on a cell, though the passive matrix display does suffer from slight ghosting — it’s certainly nothing that gets in the way of standard use in bright daylight.

Finally, the interface is confusing only inasmuch as I’m so accustomed to the Nokia GUI. Still, in just a few hours of exploring every aspect of the thing I had it down pat. That I didn’t have to manually enter contacts certainly helped. I don’t care how great T9 texting may be, I just don’t have the thumbs of a 15-year-old Japanese schoolgirl.

The one thing I wish they could do is figure out how to associate the number type with the number in the Copy-To-SIM function so that you wouldn’t have to manually reassign them within contacts when you copy them all from the SIM to a new phone. That’s just one of those things that some enterprising young know-it-all should be able to get right.