Someone thinks my workday should be over soon:

She may be right.

For my own organization, I'm writing down my reasons for rejecting every smartphone on the market today.  I know, #FirstWorldProblems:

• Plans are primary, so I'm staying with T-Mobile barring an overriding deal elsewhere.
• I'm almost entirely reducing the field to Android because:
• I need easy tethering. Blackberries don't do it right. I don't want to connect a personal Blackberry to my work BDM and have everything get confused there.
• Symbian is a moving train wreck, particularly in the US. I may have never left my Nokia E73 if they kept releasing bug fixes to the existing features, but that's never been how it works with them. That the Nokia Astound is being dumped for $99 is a shame, but it's not getting a Belle update.
• If I won't touch Symbian again for that reason, you can just not mention whatever this year's name is for the Linux/Qt OS that Nokia and Samsung pretend to care about when they want to keep their real OS partners in line. Too bad after glowing hardware reviews of the N900 and N9.
• Windows Mobile is unmanageable without a Windows desktop that I don't have, even if I did like it otherwise. Booting Windows once is OK, e.g. to flash the Hercules that Heimdall can't manage, but as far as I know WM7 would be too hobbled without being able to regularly touch Windows. Ditto iOS.
• Luckily, Android means lots of device options. But I know I need a couple things physically:
• The weight must be as low as possible. If my G2 could magically lose two ounces I wouldn't be writing any of this. I want to stay under 6 oz. includnig a case. A TPU case generally works for me, so that lets the phone creep up over 5 oz., but not to 5.5.
• The screen must be 4.3" or larger unless it has a physical keyboard. Bigger is better. The ease of typing jumps with every increment I've tried.
• Almost every Samsung is out for not having a notification LED. I tried to use a Hercules and sent it back. The LED is a showstopper. I know about BLN hacks, but the backlights involved are too bright. It couldn't work.
• After sending back the white Hercules I got, I considered that the black model might be better, but I checked in a store and it's still too much.
• The one modern Samsung that has an LED is the Galaxy Nexus, but its voice clarity is said to be a step down from its S2 cousins. It's also annoying that they used an inferior camera, maybe because it showed off Android 4.0's new software better?
• If the RAZR either had Band IV HSPA or took a standard SIM, so I could use a different 3G phone when I needed it, I'd overlook the (nominally?) non-replaceable battery. Would love to have a phone from a company that can build a phone. Every HTC and Samsung starts out down a point with me. Could move up as more other micro-SIM phones come out as options. Or will the industry largely skip right to one or more nano-SIM standards? (Because standard SIMs are just so unthinkably huge ....)
• The HTC Sensation was a strong candidate. Maybe if I hadn't been comparing its screen to the Hercules when I got them both in ...? My official rejection reason will be the power button being too stiff combined with a lack of other physical buttons to wake it up. We'll see if the one @dragonjaze kept develops any of the hardware problems endemic to the model. It was manufactured this January so maybe HTC fixed some of the issues. I'll have to check hers in a couple months, because if her power button loosens up after a couple months of use, who knows?
• (Yes, I bought a Sensation three months after the Amaze came out — see the point about weight, above! And I think people undervalue the hardware jump the Amaze represents. None of it is worth that last ounce.)
• Now pondering the Atrix 2 as a melding of the above two. Practically the same dimensions as the Sensation, with a full GB of RAM and a camera button, and Moto's reception and call quality, while still being of the replaceable battery and standard SIM variety ... and the whole Webtop thing as a bonus! Need to check out the development community and see if it's thoroughly broken. Update 3/28: darn, no one has cracked the bootloader?

I'm pondering a Blackberry/Playbook/Tetherer combo, but not too seriously. ("Tetherer" being one of the old Android phones that can sit in my backpack until needed.) Also pondering other phone-tablet combinations.  Hm, does the BB 7.1 OS bring mobile hotspot to the platform? With Blackberries everything depends on which service books your carrier pushes too. TMOUS started rolling out 7.1 for the 9900 in February then pulled it. May have to recheck this.  (Looks like they just re-released it and tethering is a listed feature.)

Now the latest news from TMOUS is that they will start moving 3G to band II this year so they can do LTE on band IV within two years. When that hits my area, many more of the world's 3G phones become options — and more future-proof options at that. So that's even more reason to simply do nothing.

Update 3/28: the upcoming Huawei lineup, including both the Ascend D series and the myTouch QWERTY, looks promising. Looks like summer for any of those. I'm trying to think of any Huawei phones I've seen reviewed.

Update 4/11: Upcoming Pebble watch to make phone LED less relevant? Or today's inPulse watch?

I never remember the exact days ... Elton is the 25th and @extrapremium is somewhere right around here.  Happy birthday to both. I have no idea what to get either.

Good news is while looking up the more public of the two, I discovered he has an album ready to go this fall, to be called The Diving Board.

Mildred's is Sunday, and luckily she's easy to buy for. The whole family wins when she gets birthday goodies. At least the feline contingent.

I spent more of Saturday than planned getting DD-WRT on my main gateway. I've been curious just how much bandwidth we actually use, what with the Roku being so popular, so now I can track it. It's nowhere near as nice as Tomato, which I still run on the old WAP (as a reverse access point for @dragonjaze's desk upstairs), but I haven't looked into it much.

Spent a little time recently getting myself a Dropbox account, concluding Sunday with trying to get it set up on FreeBSD. That's a no-go: the official daemon isn't ported, the only available port requires registration as a developer, and the terms of service for doing that don't actually allow much of anything. Apparently the Linux client works if you have Linux ABI support, including all the libraries, which I don't want to do. So I now have 2.25 GB I can magically share between my phone and laptop, and no particular purpose for doing so.

I'm actually having a good day at work — finally got past whatever was blocking me on getting a particular report working — so it's time I got back to it.

I grew up spending very little time in video arcades, but playing all the hot games of the day at home on a parade of Atari computers. One of the different things about that experience was being able to restart at will. Tried something risky on your first life and failed? Hit START and start over. It's an advantage in playing for high scores. It's a disadvantage in learning how to take an effort seriously up front. Life doesn't let you get away with hitting the START button too many times. But maybe once is OK.

When I started writing down my progress, I promised that I'd log my setbacks. I knew they'd come. I haven't made a lot of entries recently, so here we go.

Had a pretty significant setback recently, culminating in a frenzy of numerous bad things eaten yesterday. I eventually decided to make an attempt to get it over with at once, and ate ... well, rather a lot of sweets. Some of them probably shouldn't have been in the house at all, but some I had bought recently specifically to have semi-acceptable options as an alternative to going completely in the wrong direction. Nothing semi-acceptable about the quantity I went through — enough that it would have been a standout day in past years, although not a record setter. I ended up at 198.0 this morning.

This was after a month-long plateau, subsequent to a promising start to the OWL phase of Atkins. I had been hanging around the 193 mark in general, but not getting anywhere. It looked like I could not eat anything more than I did in Induction and be able to maintain, or at least continue losing, weight. I can handle a restrictive diet if I have numerical progress. I think I can handle a lack of progress if I have an interesting diet. But I stopped so early, I couldn't take it.

So, that's all in the past and I'm hitting the START button on 16 March at 198.0.

• Primary goal: live by induction rules through 31 March.
• Primary goal: be at/below the 8 March measurements in waist and thigh on 5 April.
• Secondary goal: be at/below 193.0 on 31 March.

There might not be an update on this before April. We'll see. In more positive news, I'm consistently doing rung 19 of the Hacker's Diet exercise ladder. Pushups are the holdup from going further.

I got measurements last Thursday. Bottom line, not far off the January numbers. I didn't do any in February. [Updated Monday 3/19 to add the actual data:]

• Neck: 17"
• Chest: 39½"
• Bicep: 12½"
• Stomach: 36¾"
• Waist: 36¼"
• Hips: 38½"
• Thigh: 17-23"

(Image cropped from Digibarn Atari 400 page under CC BY-NC 3.0 terms.)

I don't have TV or a newspaper subscription. I check national news daily, but the pre-season hasn't come up there. Yet thoughts of baseball have been popping into my head right on schedule. Powerfully, today, with the windows open on a 79° (forecast) day. I don't quite understand, but it's part of me.

I bought OOTP 12 just after the season last year and barely touched it, so I have my outlet if I need it.

Finally getting around to bookmarking my own site admin on my phone and letting it remember my password. The browser doesn't work with the TinyMCE editor, so unless I'm completely happy with my first draft (Zinnia has a plain text box for that) I can't post until I get back to my laptop. Good enough for now.

Getting around to making time to spend with the cats on the couch. As with humans, the idea of having three girls competing to rub up against me is better than the reality. Also as with humans, just one is pretty annoying when trying to hold a phone and type on it.