How To

Check the minutes in your cellphone plan instantly

T-Mobile minutes usedI’ve been trying out a Firefox extension that displays the minutes used in my mobile phone plan (I’ve got T-Mobile) since yesterday, and I’m really excited about it. Once you install it, you can configure it to query your plan and display the minutes used out of the total monthly minutes, right in the status bar, at the bottom of the browser window.

One note of caution: make sure you configure it to query seldom, not often (every two or three hours is plenty). It’s not polling a feed, it’s actually running a query on your provider’s database — this is because cellphone companies haven’t yet moved to the Web 2.0, so to speak, and aren’t providing feeds for the users. If you configure it to poll every 5 minutes, it’s going to be deemed excessive by them, and they might cut off your access. So be nice and gentle to their databases. 🙂

The same fellow who came up with this extension, Winston Huang, also wrote another extension to allow you to check your Verizon minutes used. There are also two extensions to allow you to check your Cingular minutes used. Here’s the first, and the second.

These extensions are wonderful productivity tools. You have your minutes used right there in front of you, the whole day. You can pretty much eliminate overage charges, and I’m all for that.

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Places

Fantastic fall foliage

If you live in a place where you don’t get to experience the wonder of nature called fall foliage, then you’ll probably enjoy the photos I took on two trips to Shenandoah National Park and its most prominent and well-known feature, Skyline Drive.

I wrote about our September trip to Shenandoah a few weeks ago. Ligia and I took a trip in October as well, and that’s when I got some pretty cool photos of the changing leaves. I think it’s pretty hard not to get good photos from Skyline Drive. The landscapes are just amazing. The road hugs the very mountain peaks, and you get to peer down into the valleys of Virginia and toward the peaks of the neighboring mountains. The overlooks are plenty and offer tons of scenic opportunities, although sometimes I wished I could just stop the car in the middle of the road to take photos.

It’s a gorgeous place! I’d like to take a week’s camping trip out there with a quality dSLR, batteries, lots of CF cards, and a good tripod, to see what photos I’d get. And maybe a good book to read in the quiet evenings, by the campfire.

Skyline Drive is shown below.

Skyline Drive

The road to color

What’s wonderful is that one can see little villages and houses in the valleys below the mountains. I took these photos from various overlook points on Skyline Drive, and as you can see, the valleys below are quite picturesque.

Little villages

Patches of green

Taking advantage of the wonderful zoom on my Kodak v610 point and shoot, I was able to get fairly close to the lake in this photo, even though it was quite far away.

Lake of color

Some of the slopes were just getting some autumn colors in them.

The colors of fall

Autumn starts

Some slopes were already fully colored, and they were quite a beautiful sight.

The colors of fall

Descent into the valley below

Shenandoah Valley

Barrage of color

A short walk through the forest yielded even more beauty.

Parallel lives

Trees on a mountain peak

A glimpse of the autumn sky

One of the other impressive sights was that of the lone peaks arising from the valleys adjacent to the mountain ridge. I found them quite unusual. In shape, they resembled hills, but they were as tall as the mountains we were standing on.

Peppered with gold

Overlook on Skyline Drive

And with that I close. The Shenandoah valleys and mountains are quite beautiful, and I invite you to visit them if you get the chance.

Incidentally, the Shenandoah Valley is part of the story in “The Howards of Virginia” (1940), a movie about a colonial family that played a part in the American Revolution. The title role there was played by Cary Grant.

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Thoughts

Microsoft Keynote Bloopers

It was only fair that I dig up some MS Bloopers after posting a reel of Apple bloopers yesterday. Unfortunately, there weren’t that many of them. Found the one below on YouTube, and another of Bill Gates banging his head on a camera, but that’s not really funny, it’s just an accident. You don’t laugh when someone hurts themselves, you laugh when the technology they tout as fantastic doesn’t deliver. So here’s a clip of an MS guy touting Vista’s speech recognition, only to have it fail miserably on the demo. It doesn’t help that he’s arrogant and hard to like, either. Schadenfreude, revisited:

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Thoughts

Apple Keynote Bloopers

Get your Apple schadenfreude here… A blooper reel assembled by MacTV and posted to Google Video. These are the perils that await you when you hold a tech show and the technology refuses to cooperate. Being live makes it a whole lot worse. Anyone know of a Microsoft blooper reel?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6529834901915639077

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Lists

Another EepyBird Diet Coke + Mentos Video (Experiment #214)

This one’s called “The Domino Effect“, because it uses inter-connected Coke bottles that start each other, in series:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-274981837129821058

And, for good measure, here’s their original video, which I’m sure you’ve already seen:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2755541280271963544

Their videos are by far the best Diet Coke + Mentos experiments. Not only are their videos coreographed and set to music, but the two dudes do a decent job acting in them as well. For more of their videos, visit their site, EepyBird.

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