Yesterday's automatic Android upgrade on my Motorola Droid Bionic didn't exactly go as it should.

As mentioned previously, it downloaded and installed decently. It then 'optimized' the resident applications and attempted to update the app databases. And that's when things didn't go quite as planned.

It seemed the upgrading of the media database took forever. Indeed, after several hours, it effectively drained the battery. I manually forced a restart but it looked as though the 'upgrade' continued in the background, sucking up CPU time and remaining battery life. Many of the built-in functions didn't work at first, each one waking up slowly about one per half-hour. It started up, great! A half-hour later, I was finally able to use wifi connectivity. A half-hour after that, GPS functions came back. A half-hour later, GMail was working. And so it went.

By the evening, however, I had had enough: while I could receiving telephone calls, there was no ringing and it refused to let me access the ring tone settings. When a phone is only partially usable as a phone, there's a problem.

When I got home from my evening's square dance gig, I backed up my personalizations, removed the 32GB SD-RAM card and hit the metaphoric big red button to reset the beast to factory settings. It rebooted fairly quickly into ICS, then proceeded as though it was a brand new phone (as it should). I restored my preferences & apps and voilà all is back to where it should be. I have a working telephone (now ringing!), all of my email is syncing and so on. The alerts operate differently but that's not a big deal.

I'm still testing all of the functions to be sure they work as they should. I need the mobile hotspot functions and IRC for work. I need also confirm it can make emergency work-related txt messages from work squawk in a truly obnoxious attention-getting fashion. Perhaps Winamp's playlist won't suffer from amnesia in this version. Still, so far, so good.

The remade phone seems to operate a little faster than the older Gingerbread version. The interface seems a lot crisper. I love beyond all reason the default system fonts: they strike my amateur eyes as cleaner and better formed. The biggest question in mind is whether the battery life is any better than it was under the old version. That will take about a week of use. More later.

A year ago, I bought my Motorola Droid Bionic mobile phone, upgrading from my old Blackberry Storm. The Bionic was the first dual-core phone which could use Verizon Wireless' 4GLTE network and was, at that time, the phone with the most RAM and CPU power behind it. It ran Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread), as it was the latest & greatest version at that time.

It's been a fairly stable and solid platform. There were a few quirks --occasional data drops, sluggishness connecting/switching networks while moving, performance issues under high loads-- but it's been a decent phone for me.

Earlier this year, Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) was released into the world. And those of us with current & modern Motorola phones had to wait. And wait. And wait. Many got tired of waiting and jail-broke their phones. While I've been tempted, this is also my work phone so I value reliability a lot more than street cred of having the newest, shiniest device on the block. Since Verizon Wireless and Motorola promised it would be coming Very Soon Now, I waited paitiently for ICS.

And then they pushed back the release schedule to summer 2012. Then they missed that schedule and pushed it to fall 2012. I was no longer patient, but I waited anyway.

Last week, we heard ICS was finally being pushed out. This morning, my phone got it.

Time to download the 350MB package: about 15 minutes via my in-house wifi.
Reboot & unpackage the base OS: 15 minutes
Optimize installed apps: 10 minutes
Upgrade installed databases (calendar, contacts, etc.): 10 minutes
Upgrade installed media (mostly MP3s): 1 hour & counting... it's still working on that.

Very soon, I hope to have ICS working on my phone. Yay!

Of course, Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) has already been released... My model of phone is on the upgrade list for early 2013, but I'll believe it when I see it.

I'm next eligible for a discount phone upgrade in May 2013. I think my next phone will be a Nexus model, as that line has a more direct pipeline to the Google Android group. We'll see when the time comes.

I finally found a hat which fit well in the style I wanted with a pattern/colour which was somewhat complementary without being visible from orbit. And which I could afford ($14).

I'm still looking at similar styles but it's going to be a long while before I'm near a proper haberdasher so this one will do in the interim.

I had only two square dance calling gigs this week: Monday's mainstream class with the DC Lambda Squares (only three more to go!) and tonight's mainstream class with the Chesapeake Squares (fourth week out of about 20).

Both are going incredibly well. The Monday class is ramping up for a big finish as we have only another nine calls or so left on the list. Everything they've been shown thus far has been snapped up and internalized very quickly: it's been a long time since I've seen a class 'get it' so fast.

The Thursday class is slower getting off the ground, largely because we keep getting new people joining each Thursday. I and the Chesapeake Squares' board agree that we aren't so swamped with people clambering to square dance that we can afford to turn away anyone. Here we are in week #4 however and we're barely past my usual open house material.

That said, I'm getting really good with open house/party nights. Such events used to frighten the bewjesus out of me: a good party night is hard, and there's the omnipresent pressure that you're the dancers' first entrée into square dancing. If you blow it after the club has done all that marketing, you'll probably not get them back, ever. An open house has to rock from the first moment to the last, and you want everyone to leave excited about the next one.

I had an English teacher in high school who told me, "Any idiot can write a novel. Writing a short story, now that's hard." Open houses are the square dance equivalent of short stories: you have to hook the novice participants with a very small working vocabulary and keep them entertained from the first word to the last with no room for asides, trivia or false leads.

Having done such weekly for nearly a month now, however, I've found my mojo for this. Tonight, I pushed further and more creatively than I have previously with very simple calls, using circles, stars and simple formations to easily build more complicated ones and still resolve them cleanly & with good body flow. Repetition helps newbies, but too much gets boring: I think I've handled the past few dances with a good balance.

I like teaching a great deal. I think I demonstrate good energy & enthusiasm, I like the challenge of describing a move multiple different ways on the fly to suit the needs of the moment, I try to be as clear as possible and, thanks to experience, I have a much better feel for times when I can simply talk people through a new call and when I should use other means such as a demo of the move with an assistant or a prop. Workshops are especially fun since the floor already knows the basic calls & vocabulary: it gives us all the space to explore nuances of the definitions or explore non-standard applications. It all takes more prep work than just a regular club night, but I love that part too: evil plots don't just hatch themselves, ya know.

The Chesapeake Squares class was initially to wrap up around xmas, but we may extend it into January if there is a need. I'm delighted the club's board is being so flexible: I'm sure it will pay dividends in an increased membership. The club's good health is definitely in my best interest as one of their staff callers.

The next two weeks are gonna be a doozy: I'm calling four nights next week and three the following, everything from class-level Mainstream (which itself varies depending on the class in question) up to C2. I hope to get a jump on some choreo writing projects this weekend.

DCLS' Harvest Festival Hoedown comes up in three weeks. I have flyers going up to New York for their 'Peel the Pumpkin' event this weekend, as well as flyers for our ACDC and GCA caller school events. I'm still trying to get the GCA webmaster to update the online registration form to cover the master class; I'll telephone him again before this week is out. I also need to write a more detailed article about the caller school and master class for the next GCA newsletter.

In other news, I'm working on a minor project for CALLERLAB: digitizing cassette tapes of recordings from previous conventions. Currently, I have the 31 cassettes of the 1998 CALLERLAB convention. An old walkman is playing them into the 'audio in' port of the workstation beside me, Audacity digitizing the lot onto the hard drive.

This weekend, I'll do some editing to splice files of the A side and B side of the cassettes into a single MP3 and try to normalize the recording levels. With a little luck, I should be able to ship the lot back to the home office early next week --at which time they'll likely send me a new batch. :-)

And that, more or less, is the state of my square dancing life. Not much dancing, plenty of administrivia and enormous amounts of calling. After the DCLS class wraps up in three weeks, I'll get back to more dancing again.

Doping on the professional bicycle race circuit à la Lance Armstrong is in the media again, as though it's somehow news or a revelation. Don't care: I've written off nearly all sports as being immersed in doping anyway. And I refuse to invest any of my emotions in any event in which I cannot affect the outcome.

We learned today that the panda cub who died at the National Zoo suffered from complications due to immature lungs. Don't care. The cub is still dead. Millions of critters --and humans-- die every day: the only difference is that this one critter was cute and had its own marketing campaign. I should be sad because a PR department tells me I should? Please.

Locally, the Nationals baseball team has made it into the finals. Really don't care, except to the point that the games are screwing up local traffic patterns. It's very nice for the team owners and their employees, but for the rest of us? Whether they win or lose, I'm no better or worse off.

I know this sounds very sad & depressing, perhaps even angry, but really it's just an expression of disappointment. Why, why, why are these stories dominating our news cycle? Seriously, are any of us any better off for this news? What are we as individuals able to do with any of this new information? What exactly can we do differently which would either improve or correct any of these situations?

Maybe if I was a vet at the National Zoo, I could use the panda necropsy information to help the next cub, but I'm not and I can't. Perhaps if I had a friendship or professional relationship with a major sports figure, I could urge him/her to resist or stop doping before events, but I don't. Of what use is a news item when it can only be productively used by a handful of people out of the seven billion on the planet?

I do listen to news, economic and literature news items. Perhaps I can't affect earthquakes in Pakistan where thousands are killed, but I can send money to help. News that interest rates have risen or fallen is key information for the 100 million people in the US alone with mortgages, even more with bank accounts. Literature doesn't reach as many people as it once did, but still most of the planet can get their hands on a book --at least more can read than can nurse a panda cub to health.

This planet is one grand experiment in human policy. For every social ill we experience, multiple areas around the globe are experimenting with different approaches to its resolution. The best news I could ever hope to watch or listen to would be a cross-comparison of how different countries are tackling the same problem. There is no problem we face today which hasn't already been faced by others: why are we so hesitant to look at what has worked or not before diving in with our homemade solutions? This not-invented-here mentality has killed insular countries as often it has insular companies. We ignore the experiences of others at our own peril.

During the depths of the Obamacare debates two years ago, we nearly got there with a comparison between the healthcare systems of the US, Canada, Britain and France, but it wasn't well done and was dropped all too quickly. I want more like that on how to tackle poverty, financial imbalances, the drug trade, prostitution, hunger and more. Instead, we get Honey Boo Boo and Shark Week.

In my ideal world, I'd like every media producer to wake up tomorrow morning with these questions front and center: Is this really the best material I can possibly produce? Is this really what I want to be remembered for? Would I want my child to be watching this?

One can hope.

This has been a long & brutal week on all fronts. I'm incredibly grateful that I've only been running at 100% since Sunday instead of something even more demanding.

We have a hardware refresh going on at the production data center where I work. One of my team has flown in from California to work with me on this project. We've made good progress over the past number of days, trying to make the Oct 6 deadline, but these 10-12 hour days are very draining.

Even while this mega-project is in process, I'm on-call this week so I'm getting badgered with a tonne of minor but really annoying issues which have broken my concentration and flow several times per day. And there are still various other routine tasks which have come up periodically that I need to do as part of my regular duties. Ugh.

In the middle of all of this, we were keeping up with all of our square dance gigs: teaching DC Lambda Squares mainstream class on Monday, calling a Chesapeake Squares club nights on Tuesday, calling a C2 workshop on Wednesday, calling a Chesapeake Squares open house & mainstream class on Thursday. Fortunately, the Wednesday C2 gig was cancelled at the last minute: we needed the rest.

I had a dental cleaning Thursday morning. I figure when you start your day at the dentist, things can only improve from there. My teeth are fine and shiny. I recommend sunglasses.

Last Friday, one of our C2 dancers, Jack Frickey, passed away from complications of malignant melanoma. This morning, I worked a few hours at the data center, skipped over to Herndon for Jack's memorial service, and returned to the data center again for the balance of the day. I'll miss Jack and I'm glad I was able to attend the service, but--

I'm really getting to hate Baptist ministers. Jack wasn't a Baptist but a longtime friend of the family was a Baptist minister and was asked to officiate. He went on at great length about how he was sure Jack was in heaven and how that should be a great comfort for his family, but also that he had great reservations about the rest of us at the service unless we accepted his version of $deity asap. It was less a memorial service than a fear-mongering recruitment drive, IMHO. Tasteless.

Still, it's better than the Baptist funeral service for kent4str's grandmother some years ago: YOU'RE ALL GOING TO HELL! TO HELL, I SAY! REPENT NOW! Oh, and by the way, we'll miss whatsername... HELL, I SAY!

I have been enjoying some audio books via my mobile phone on the drive to/from the data center, kinda. My old car has a cassette deck --remember those?-- and I use an adapter to plug my mobile phone into it so I can listen over the car speakers. The adapter is an ancient one though and the wires are breaking & fraying, yielding a frustratingly intermittent audio performance.

Looking on eBay last Saturday, I found a replacement for only $2.15 and ordered it immediately. (The joys of smartphones: I looking for the adapter, located one, purchased it and submitted payment all in three minutes while on a break at a square dance workshop. Yay, technology!) The replacement unit arrived in yesterday's mail, just in time for me to listen to my current audio book while I drove to Baltimore to call the open house.

I had to unplug my phone to take an emergency call --did I mention I'm on-call for work?-- just as I was pulling into the parking lot and the adapter cable got wound around my steering wheel. As I turned the wheel sharply one way and then another as I jockeyed my car into the last parking space, the cable torn off the cassette adapter. My shiny new toy lasted precisely 45 minutes. Dammit.

I suppose I could try soldering the wires back on but it's a pain in the ass and the adapters are dirt cheap so I've just ordered two replacement adapters. With luck, I'll have a new car at some future time that has wireless functions before I need another replacement adapter.

And our microwave died Thursday evening. Just what I needed right now.

There's been 1001 other things going on this week, but I'm too tired at this point to discuss much more. I need sleep. I also need to work out since I haven't done much since Tuesday but that's going to have to wait as well. We have some shopping to do and some domestic chores on which to catch up, among many other things. Sleep first though.

I've been at our trailer at Roseland Resort since the Friday before Labor Day, enjoying a full week away from work. Both kent4str and cuyahogarvr were here for the long weekend, but kent4str had to return to DC for work this week; he'll be back this coming Friday.

We have a hummingbird feeder hanging on our trailer deck, a gift a friend. I didn't think the birds were all that interested but within hours of it appearing, one hummingbird staked its claim and a second one keeps trying to invade. ( Here are some pics from dusk on Saturday. )

I know hummingbirds are territorial but I have no idea how large the territory for such a tiny bird might be. I'd like to put a second feeder at the other end of our deck (about 35' away) but I have no idea if that would be too close.

Last Sunday, a number of campers joined up at the campground observatory to send chinese lanterns into the sky. It's just a large paper bag with a small paraffin flame below, but if the wind isn't too strong, these things can travel quite a distance. Normally I would be concerned about accidentally starting a forest fire or burning down New Martinsville, but we had a good soaking rain thanks to Hurricane Tropical Storm Thunderstorm Atmospheric Disturbance Isaac just prior so we were probably safe. ( Pics behind the cut... )

Sadly, we've had a dense cloud cover until today so star-gazing and satellite-watching has been sharply curtailed. The rain has made most of the hiking trails a muddy mess but we hope to go for an extended hike Friday morning, provided we have a couple of days to thoroughly dry out. In the interim, our walks around the campground have had their own particular charms...( Read more... )

My Canadian passport arrived this morning, taking about two weeks from the time I submitted it for renewal. Not bad.

Thanks to tdjohnsn, my square dance business card has been updated. I used a different photo --I'm much greyer than I was for the first one-- and I've now added C2 to my square dance offerings. I also decided to lose the cowboy hat: to non-square dancers, there's already too many country overtones of dancing in barns with bales of hay and I don't want to make that misconception any worse.

Before:


After:

Old joke:
"Have you found Jesus?"
"Yup! He was hiding behind the couch the whole time!"

Nearly identical:
"You heard they cancelled Easter? Turned out Jesus was hiding behind the couch the whole time."

While helping allanh clean up his mom's (& her boyfriend's) apartment, we were hanging enough pictures to put the Louvre to shame. The boyfriend had one particular picture which absolutely needed to be hung somewhere: all others were expendible, but not his picture of Jesus.

Naturally, it was the one picture we couldn't find for the longest time. We searched stacks of pictures, looked around various boxes, checked the kitchen and bathroom but found nothing. This is effectively a bachelor apartment: there aren't that many places to hid a picture.

We did eventually find Jesus when we moved furniture to hang a large nautical picture. Sure enough, Jesus was hiding behind the couch the whole time.