Black Friday

Yesterday my wife convinced me to go shopping with her and her sister. Normally I dismiss the idea of shopping on Black Friday, smugly stating that people should just buy everything online. Long lines, supply shortfalls (artificial or not,) and the like are all just signs of inefficient markets that will be replaced by the ruthless efficiency of e-commerce. Somehow Crystal talked me in to hitting the mall at 7 AM...

One amusing thing to me is the bait-n-switch items. These are the "limited" quantity items that are offered at a huge discount (do stores actually take a loss on these things?) in order to get lots of people in the store. The store then runs out quickly, so customers wind up buying other, more expensive items. This year's bait-n-switch special was definitely GPS units. Not only did every big-box store out there have sub $200 GPS units in limited quantities, but places that don't normally sell GPS had them as well. Get your GPS at Long's Drugs or Sportsmart, woo hoo!

Black Friday was actually a lot of fun. My niece has managed various American Eagle stores for the last ten years or so, thus I have a lot of empathy for the folks who work on Black Friday. They all seemed to be in a good mood yesterday, and I had a good time joking around with people.

Black Friday had a dark moment for me though. I managed to drop my Blackberry in a (thankfully clean) toilet. I fished it out quickly, and took the battery out of it. I waited a few hours, and it booted it up. The keyboard was crazy though. Sometimes it would not type at all, but other times keys would be entered without me touching anything. So I took the battery back out and left it out over night. This morning everything is working good as new! What a relief!

Yesterday ended on a very bright note. We are going to Florida for Christmas this year, so my wife decided to give me an early present: a Nintendo Wii. She didn't want to try and hide it from me in the luggage, and this way we got to play it with our family in Bakersfield. I am happy to say that I have a sore shoulder this morning from playing Wii Tennis late last night... She asked me if I wanted other games for it, but I really did not expect a Wii and had no idea what games are supposed to be good on it. I will probably get Madden for it, just because I used to love Madden on the PS2 and Gamecube. Guitar Hero looks like a lot of fun, too. I have basically taken the last 3.5 years off from playing video games, as I stopped having time for stuff like that when we started having babies. I'm not sure how much time I will have to play it now either, maybe once I finish my book :-)

Hacking my 8830

Ok, so not really. I've had my Blackberry for a little over a week, and I continue to be more impressed with it. Here are some useful things.

1. Enable mass storage. You get a cryptic message for this, but totally want to do to this. It let's you access your Blackberry's file system. On my Macbook it makes the Blackberry look like a mounted drive, a la a DMG file or something, only its read/write not read-only. This is the easiest way to put pics or MP3s on there.
2. MP3 Ringtones. Forget buying ringtones. Just load some MP3s on there. Go to your song by going to Media -> Music. Pick your favorite song and the pick Menu -> Set as Phone Tone. Now that MP3 is your default ring tone. Want a special ring tone for different people? Go to the person in your address book. Click Menu -> Edit. Then click Menu -> Add Custom Phone Tune. Click enter. This will bring up a list of pre-set ringtones. You don't want any of this garbage. But scroll to the top of the list and click Browse. Then click Menu -> Explore. I went to Media Card/MY_MP3S. That gave me all of my MP3s. I just picked whatever I wanted from there.
3. Google Apps. Google obviously loves Blackberry users. GMail and Google Maps both rock for the Blackberry. Google Talk from RIM also rocks. If you open up Google Maps and pick a location, you can get directions. You'll notice that the "from here" is disabled. That's because GPS is not enabled for Google Maps by default, which brings me to my next tip.
4. Enable GPS. A former co-worker of got an 8850 and thought that Verizon had disabled the GPS. That would be a very Verizon thing to do, but it turns it's not the case. Go to Options -> Advanced -> GPS -> GPS Services and switch it to Location On. It's set to "911 Only" by default. Open Google Maps and you'll have to grant Google Maps permission to use the GPS. Now you've got the full GPS enabled Google Maps functionality. I found that I needed to be outside to get a good signal on it.

These tips are for Mac users only.

1. PocketMac. The Blackberry version is free and is very good.
2. Google Calendar. I sync iCal to my Google Calendars, and then sync iCal to my Blackberry via PocketMac.
3. Plaxo. I use Plaxo as a central repository for my contacts. I then installed the Plaxo plugin for Address Book. It becomes a cool read/write system. I update contacts in Address Book. That syncs things to Plaxo where they are persisted and available to me at work, etc. They are also copied to my Blackberry via PocketMac.

Other stuff...

1. I downloaded Opera Mini. It works ok. There are some web pages I can view in it that I cannot view in the Blackberry browser, such as ESPN Fantasy Baseball. Entering text into Opera is a pain though. It has its own interface for this that seems awkward. I still think it will come in handy in the long run.
2. I haven't tried syncing my Safari bookmarks to the Blackberry. That's a cool feature offered by PocketMac. I would need to clean up my Safari bookmarks first though.
3. Facebook Mobile is really well done. You can do most things that you'd want to do on a mobile device there. A lot of folks prescribe to the iPod/iTunes model when it comes to mobile apps, i.e. read-only on the device, do all your writes from your computer. Facebook does a good job of giving the right "writes" on their mobile version.

Update: An old co-worker of mine and an anonymous commenter both pointed out that even though you can supposedly enable GPS, Google Maps and other similar programs are not able to use it. My friend claims that Verizon has disabled the GPS in some way. My experience has been the same, so maybe this is true. I don't know why Verizon would do this...

Update #2: Ah ha, now I know why Verizon has disabled the GPS on the 8830. There's got to be a hack though...