Japenglish and Korenglish

The Japanese and Koreans make some pretty good products these days. However, it appears that they don't bother to have native English speeakers review text of alerts and such on their products. For instance, on my new Samsung A900 cell phone, an alert popped up that said "Connection is failed". On the products I work on, we have native speakers of the languages we localize in localize the text so that it makes sense in those languages. You'd expect that a company like Samsung could do this, but I guess not. I've seen Sony does the same thing with their CLIEs and TVs.

San Diego Weather

I just finished walking the dog and was a bit too warm with a sweatshirt on and a light jacket. We've had a little bit of a warming trend lately where the weather has been in the mid 70s during the day. It's hard for me to imagine this being winter and even harder to remember what it's like to live in the cold. Last time I lived in the cold was almost 7 years ago when I lived in Portland, OR. That was a pretty miserable time (I only lived in Portland for a year, but prior to college, I had lived in Boston for 5 years).

The weather plays such a huge factor in my happiness that I couldn't even think of moving to somewhere cold. I love talking to people who have to shovel snow and point out how warm it is here!

Samsung A900

I've been using my Samsung A900 cell phone for a few weeks now and am pretty pleased with it with one notable exception. The size is great, screens are great (internal/external), sound quality is acceptable, having a flip phone is great, being able to send contacts from my desktop is great and the phone has a good feel to it. The one huge problem with it is that Bluetooth headsets start beeping at random times. I've tried 3 headsets and Samsung has admitted a problem. I'm sure that this will get fixed as I'm not the only one reporting it. I did my part to report it by calling Sprint, going into a Sprint store, and calling Samsung just to make sure that I was complaining to the right people. (I see a lot of people complain about technology things, but tell the wrong people and are real mad when their problems aren't fixed.)

In a few weeks (I hope), when the Bluetooth issue gets fixed, I'll be pleased as punch.

Switching to new blog system

I was using RapidWeaver's blogging system up until today, but found it quite limiting and frankly slow at creating new entries. So I've decided to try GeekLog as it is a more full featured system. Unfortuantely, I have to move all my old entries to the new system. I've moved about 25% of the entries over. Slow process, but I think it will be worth it.