Crossposted from LiveJournal.Hey, everyone.
Item 1:
On Sunday 12/28, I'll be flying back to Wichita for a week to do the Christmas thing with family (slightly belatedly). I'll be in town through Monday 01/05 and staying with my sister. Saturday 01/03 is booked (Christmas dinner on my mom's side) and Tuesday 12/30 is booked (hanging out with a friend), but other Wichita friends are encouraged to hit me up and write themselves into my schedule.
I was originally going to take a few vacation days, but my group is momentarily understaffed so I'll actually be on-call that week. Shouldn't be too big of a deal, though.
Item 2:
As of this week, I now have a second phone: the
Android Dev Phone 1, sister of the better known
T-Mobile G1. The HTC Dream hardware is the first cellphone out the door that runs Google's new
Android OS. Android is notable for being the first
open source cellphone OS that anyone actually cares about (sorry, OpenMoko).
The developer version is
now available for sale for $400 (plus a slightly obnoxious $25 developer registration fee). Not only is the
developer version carrier unlocked, it also lets you flash the phone with your own custom builds of Android, including any modifications you like. Not that that's actually useful if you're writing an application, since end users can't install your tweaked OS, but it helps if you're trying to patch a bug in the OS or proposing a new feature and you want to debug your code on a real phone. (The cellphone/radio bits are all quite thoroughly separated from the OS, so unlike a lot of other phones there are no FCC legal implications to letting you flash the OS. Yay Google!)
For now, I still have my old Sprint phone with the 316 area code, and that number will probably continue to work for at least another month or two before I kill it. The new number is a 415 area code. Despite the fact that my phone is carrier unlocked out-of-box, I ended up going with T-Mobile for service because the only other GSM carrier in the US is AT&T and their 3G network is incompatible with the G1. (Doesn't help that the AT&T brand name gives me the heebie-jeebies.)
I went with T-Mobile's "MyFaves 300" plan ($40/mo for unlimited night, weekends, and 5 numbers of my choosing) plus the upper-tier G1 data add-on (unlimited data plus unlimited SMS/MMS text messages) for $35/mo. They also offered to insure my phone, despite the fact that I didn't buy it from them, and at $5/mo it sounded like a reasonable deal. Grand total: $80/mo. And I get to ditch Sprint!