Zero Logix Zone

Last night I had time to waste before praise team practice, so initially me and my daughter Abby were going to go to Red Rooster, which is really called Red Racks, but I can’t help myself in calling in Red Rooster… That is Zero Logix..(shameless plug) So we instead stopped at 7th Heaven in Blue Springs.

7th Heaven use to be the best place to find import CD’s or other great obscure bands. I have many memories of going to the store on troost with some college friends to spend a few hours going through CD’s.  Skip 20 years forward and I have pretty much zero CD’s, yet I have 80 gigs of music sitting on my drive in my computer. I don’t even download music from torrent anymore because for 15 dollars I can stream any band I want via napster at work.

I ended up buying 3 cd’s. Not exactly sure why though. They were used CD’s, so the “man”, whoever that is made no money off me. I picked up Best of King’s X, Best of INXS, and a Gene Loves Jezebel album called “Exploding Girls”

I tried to explain to Abby about the History of these bands, and why they were “cool” for us Gen X folks, er, middle aged old people in her eyes. I told her about the first time I heard INXS’s album Kick, and how I saw them in concert, how great King’s X was, and how awesome of a guitar tone that Ty Tabor had, and how everyone back then agreed… There was no point to this discussion, it wasn’t even as cool as Justin Bieber in her world.

I have successfully rooted my phone. For those out there who own Motorola Phones on the T-Mobile network know how precious those words are. Let me explain, back in April I was able to upgrade my Razr and finally get a Smart phone. My choice hands down was Android, though somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I would have turned toward an iPhone had this phone been available on another carrier besides AT&T.

Back in April when I got to choose a new phone, the next gen android devices, which I call them were staring to arrive. In fact, the only one out there was the Nexus One which could only be purchases on the Google website. I’m not one for waiting.. So my really only choices were the Cliq, Cliq XT, and the myTouch.

Yada Yada Yada, I went home with a Cliq XT not fully understanding what I had bought until I start researching android phones. yes, I know, after I buy something I then study..stupid, eh, yea..but that’s how I roll sometimes…

So, long story short, Motorola has been extremely slow in trying to get the Android 2.1 update to us cliq/xt folks. This has been very discouraging for a lot of Motorola customers. If you’ve spent anytime on the t-mobile and motorola forums, the hate is seeping out of these websites. So by the Grace of God, and the folks over at ModMyMoto, they have successfully rooted the cliq xt, paving the way for hopefully a 2.1 or Froyo ROM. 

Over the next week, I will be documenting the steps I took in order to root my phone. I want to warn everyone. Rooting your android phone is not something for anybody to do. I don’t consider it difficult or hard, but I have been in the computer industry for almost 20 years and feel comfortable controlling my own destiny. I have seen many posts on the forums of people who buy android phones and starting installing apps, the phone gets very bogged down and low on memory and runs very slow. They then contact T-Mobile customer support and complain about how crappy the phone works.. Well, it’s not the phone, its you.. sorry. Rooting your phone is very exciting and really opens the doors for many possibilities. But you have to be able to control your own paths here and take responsibility for learning how this phone works first.

So, in closing, I put together a blog entry on just getting the phone actually rooted. This part is not very difficult to accomplish, the next step after that is understanding the custom recovery aspects of the phone so you will be able to backup and restore your phone. Performing this step will bring about comfort in knowing that if you do something it will be easy to pull back and restore your phone to a usable step. After that, it’s on to installing a custom ROM. So far there is only one I’ve seen available, it’s the Rapter F-22 ROM. That is the ROM I have installed.

This is more or less a rant after reading a discussion on my gaming clan website about Global Warming.  I thought, Gee, this would make a good blog post, since I am still new to blogging and looking for topics.

Nobody questions the logic of becoming "greener", and as post have come before have stated that we are all better off not sending pollution into the air. But where does it stop?  I have read my comments from friends online who take a very stern approach to this issue that they are right and everyone else is wrong, and any attempt to discuss is pointless because..they are right and everyone else is wrong.

This is where I have to draw the line and poke at this. If allowing one party to make the rules about what is good for the environment and what is bad, then we are in for a bad future. They will never admit this, nor will they like this truth that Global Warming is a political issue right now. I’m not talking about cheaper energy or cleaner air, but people with questionable motives making earth shaking policies and laws with the slightest remote understanding of the negative impact that these policies will have on human lives getting a free pass just because of the "well, I just don’t want to destroy the planet" That is not at all acceptable.

Just this morning, I read something on msnbc that says they are reconsidering the whole research around cholesterol, the good and the bad, just because they are learning more about it… These are Doctors, they are scientist that are rethinking these common upheld beliefs over how this issue effects heart disease. Yet, we are going to put full faith in a politician to introduce legislation that could impact how many people around the world or in our local communities provide for their families just because the "scientist" say the earth is hurdling toward destruction because of man. I may not be the smartest person out there, but I think it is our responsibility as citizens to stand up and say "WTF" are you smoking?

I feel it has gotten to the point of silliness now with save the planet. I see people using these green bags at Walmart to put their groceries in, then go out and get in a Lincoln navigator to go home, all the while thinking "I’m helping the earth stay green"..uh..not your not.  Even without the SUV, your not doing a damn thing to help the earth. nothing….

Do you think any company out there really care about the environment, or do you think the fact that putting the word green on a product seems to sell more of that product.. keeping in mind that just because it says green, doesn’t guarantee that your doing one act of goodness toward mother nature.

Quick post on how you use jQuery to call a WebService. I have created a standard Visual Studio project and added a web service. You’ll want to add the [ScriptService] attribute to the top of your web service code behind file that will expose the web service to the client script in ajax.

...
...
...
[ScriptService]
public class Service : System.Web.Services.WebService{
    public Service(){ }

    [WebMethod]
    public string GetContent(string ContentId){
        return "Some kind of content";
    }
}

Then, in your aspx page, or any standard html page you add the following code.

$(document).ready(function(){
    $.ajax({
        type: "POST",
        async: false,
        data: "{'ContentId':'1854'}",
        url: "Service.asmx/GetContent",
        contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
        dataType: "json",
        success: function (msg){
            alert('We Made it!');
        },
        error: function(){
            alert('Something bad occurred');
        }
    });
});

Got my gmail updated this morning with the google buzz enhancement.

Google claims that Google Buzz is going to go a step further than twitter and facebook status updates in communication. Let me say as of yet, I’m not had the light bulb come on this product. The first problem i see is, 99% of my friends are on facebook, and as of right now if there is no integration between these two products, then google will be on the losing end of this because you can’t convince anyone to switch to a new service. I’ve yet to convince my wife to switch to gmail instead of the ad infested yahoo. I say “but we can create schedules and keep them in sync in google calenders, we can do buzz’s, waves, etc.. it’ll be great” and she goes “eh, if I need something I’ll just call you.” hmm hello 2010…

So, long story short, which I really don’t have much of a story, check out the buzz if you have a gmail, you can add me (dapcook @ gmail.com ) to your follow list and we can chat online..

Today is the biggest sports day of the year! Super Bowl XLIV with the New Orleans Saints taking on the Indianapolis Colts. I am hoping for the Colts to win, but in all honesty, if the Saints win today, I will not be upset. Well, maybe just a little. Go Manning!

I have finally gotten this wordpress software working tonight. I was getting a 500 Error for IIS7 when trying to run phpmyadmin or the WordPress setup script.  After jacking around with this issue for a couple of days, I figured out that there was a entry in my hosts file that mapped localhost to an Ipv6 address. Even though I had disabled this on this server, it was still in local host and php was having issues talking to the local copy of mysql. I will have to explain this further and document the error messages I was getting.