T-Mobile G1 Unboxing

About 6 weeks ago, it was finally time to upgrade Julie’s mobile phone.  She’d been making do with a hand-me-down BlackBerry 8700g, so we looked around and decided to order a T-Mobile G1, also known as the first Googlephone.  After a couple weeks, I couldn’t stand Julie’s shift to the top of our household early adopter rankings and ordered another one to replace my BlackBerry Curve 8320.  I needed a new phone anyway as my Curve had always been a little flaky since I dropped it in the bathtub in Feb’08 (why didn’t I blog about that?  remove cover and battery, rinse in rubbing alcohol, place in a ziplock with some rice, wait for everything to dry out).

Moving away from a BlackBerry was no trivial thing.  I have had four BlackBerry devices since my first one in 2003 (see here for a really good RIM history lesson):

1. The so called BlueBerry 6210, a monochrome device
2. BlackBerry 7100, a color device that debuted the SureType keyboard
3. The aforementioned 8700g
4. The aforementioned Curve (with WiFi and a trackball)

Throughout the years, my dependence on the device has grown.  It’s become a trusted partner in both business and personal affairs.  But, alas, due to the vagaries of exclusive marketing agreements, the new BlackBerry Bold will be exclusive to AT&T Wireless for quite some time and Verizon Wireless will dominate distribution of the BlackBerry Storm. Thus, I decided to take the leap and go for the G1.

So far, I’m really enjoying the device. Powered by Google’s Android open source mobile OS, the device has a touch screen, a real QWERTY keyboard and a trackball for GUI interactions plus it has WiFi, GPS, is 3G-ready and a fantastic screen.  Although Android Marketplace is a far second to Apple’s App Store for the iPhone, I sense momentum is building and I’ve found a few cool apps out there.

The biggest downsides for me so far are the short battery life (daily charges are mandatory) and lack of integration with MS Exchange.  The G1 does come fully integrated to Gmail, Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts and supports generic POP / IMAP access to other mailbox platforms, but there’s nothing really good yet for MS Exchange.  So I’m manually synching contacts using MS Outlook Export and Gmail Import, using Google Calendar Sync for that data and accessing work e-mail via my company’s OWA implementation.  Pretty hack compared to the seamless BlackBerry experience, but I expect the Android Marketplace will come through in the next few months to save me.

So, without further ado, here are the unboxing pics.  Enjoy!

Da Box

Da Packing

Da Gadget

Facebook: 1 Year Later

It’s been a year since I signed up for Facebook so I figured it was time to provide an update.  The Facebook network has a lot of folks I can’t find on LinkedIn, particularly friends from college and high school.  There’s probably an interesting study in there somewhere to see how career paths, areas of the country and other factors influence which network you use or if you use both or none.

Growth of my Facebook network as has also been pretty good: I’ve gone from 0 to 160 friends in 365 days or about one new connection every 2.28 days.  Reasonably rapid given I haven’t really done a lot of trolling around looking for people.  I have also noticed a lot of friends have popped up when I search for my high school or college classes.  A year ago, there was just a handful.  Now there are dozens, so the timing of my joining Facebook seems to have coincided with that of many others.

Other than creating connections, I really don’t do a lot on Facebook.  I have a few applications loaded, but don’t play around with them much.  I’ve found the most basic features (like access to contact info and Groups) the most useful as a huge swath of the applications are really just for killing time.  And when I’m ready to kill time, there’s many other things I’d rather do than issue a SuperPoke or sent virtual cocktails.

Still, if you don’t already have a Facebook profile, give it a whirl.  It’s nice to reconnect with folks to learn where they are and what they are doing.

The Pinnacle of Popularity? Hardly.

It’s been well over 3 years since I joined LinkedIn and I finally reached that magical mark where my profile says “500+ connections”.  From now on, people will just have to just guess about the sheer massivicity of my network since LinkedIn will no longer communicate to the public with any specificity about how many connections I have (currently 507, but who’s counting).  I’m not going to blather on about what a great thing LinkedIn is, etc, etc, since everyone knows what it is / does, but i do find myself on the site at least once a week looking for someone or seeking a connection.

But truth be known, there are many, many contacts on my list that I don’t speak with very often (some never), but it’s surprising how many I bump into at alumni happy hours, soccer games and other accidental encounters around town.  The foundation of my network remains concentrated in Level 3 folks, many of whom are still there or went to work at other companies around Denver, so the odds are good for a chance encounter.

A thanks to one of my Point B colleagues, Jason Hayes, for finally putting me over the mark.

2008 Fall Soccer Season Wrap

After approximately 40 practices and 16 games over 11 weeks, the fall club soccer season is finally over here in Colorado.  It was a pretty grueling run with 5 practices most weeks and a pair of games on Saturdays, but I loved every minute of it.  Hopefully in the spring I can wrangle a schedule with practices on the same nights instead of opposite nights.

How’d we do?  Well, my older daughter’s U9G team was pretty spectacular.  We went 6-1-0 (W-L-D) with an average margin of victory probably in the 5-6 goals range.  The single loss was due to a break down in goal keeping (coaching error, really).   Speed kills, as the saying goes, and this team was blessed with it.  Hopefully, the group will stick together in the spring as the other coach and myself are pretty set on moving up one notch in the competitive spectrum.

Dad coaching in the background

My younger daughter’s U7G team, on the other hand, wasn’t anything close to dominating.  We don’t keep scores or league tables that young, but I’d be surprised if we were even a .500 team.  But we were doing a number of things that teams in this age group don’t normally do, particularly an emphasis on positions in addition to the usual ball control work.  Some of this was influenced by the work I was doing with the older girls and hopefully it will pay dividends in the spring.

Next up? Basketball and indoor soccer!