Monthly Archives: February 2009

Another nice winter beach weekend…

Another weekend escape…yeah, the weather forecast was for rain and the weatherman delivered! However, we were able to get out for a walk when we got to Emerald Isle on Friday night, and while is was pouring rain first thing today (Saturday) the rain stopped for several hours and we got two good walks on the beach. Temperature was about 60 and virtually no wind, though the surf was rolling and the fog was thick. The dogs enjoy the beach in winter, as they can run and have a great time. Steamed oysters at Jordan’s on Friday and Saturday. The Tarheels clobbered Georgia Tech today; the cable guy put a temporary fix on the line (until they bury a new cable) so Pandora can happily stream tunes…a good day! Snow back at home Sunday? Have to watch the weather and maybe head back early…

Blackberry update…

It’s been about 3 weeks since I got my Blackberry. Overall, I’m quite happy (see my earlier post), but there is one thing that really annoys me — the GPS! A little bit of googling and a trip to the forums at crackberry.com will convince you of the weirdness that’s out there. There are OS issues. There are application issues. There are carrier issues…gee, how hard can it be to make it work? The carriers seem intent on figuring out how to incrementally monetize use of GPS. Here is one place where the monoline strategy that Apple used with the iPhone & AT&T does make sense; it means that they can offer a more consistent user experience on functions like this.

I think that I’ve more or less figured out how to make my GPS work with the BlackBerry maps app — if the GPS lock is taking too long, pop the battery, but wait long enough to drain the capacitors before reinserting the battery. This hard reset seems to improve things dramatically, but you should not have to do that! Must be some really buggy code in there. There does not, from what I’ve seen, seem to be any consistency about which “point release” of the 4.5 OS that you are running and the impact on this. Oh well, the other apps work well, and it makes a great phone…