December

School is finally over for the semester, and its an incredible relief. even though i'm not too optimistic about how i preformed in my classes, its good to have them over with. School was incredibly difficult, i spent most of my time trying to understand things and trying to get assignments done. I was in the library for most of my spare time. I need to pass all of my classes to continue to get the pell grant, and since that is how i am paying for school if i don't pass i will have to take some time off, save up some money, and thats not something that i want to do at all. I have already wasted enough time with that approach.

A cousin is getting married in idaho, and my family wanted to attend the wedding so i rode up with layna and my mom, then we picked up my other sister from the airport. She has been going to MSU on the star scholarship. By the time we got into idaho it had gotten dark, we could see the glow of rexburg in the distance, suddenly it all went dark. As we got into town almost no lights were on except the headlights of other cars. even the stoplights were out. luckily the rout to the place we were staying was out of the way and avoided stoplights. Some of our other cousins were there playing games by lamplight. I was curious what had caused the outage, but my phone had died on the trip up. i borrowed a blackberry, and luckily the towers were still working. there was nothing in the local news, and nothing on google news. I finally did a search on twitter and found tweets saying that a substation exploded, and that power to the surrounding areas was out as well. luckily power was restored about an hour later, though some places were out for three.

I hate social events so i stayed at my cousins during the wedding. Though they are having a gathering of sorts here soon, so i better make myself scarce.

Where i am

For a little experiment i am going to share my location via google latitude tracking software on my phone. I really see few issues with sharing this kind of information unless you are a person that has to worry about personal safety. I added a widget on the right that displays my location information. Its not likely to be too exiting but i will leave it up until i get nervous enough to take it down.

Droid

Phone coverage in wyoming isn't that great with tmobile, but i had been using it with an iphone for quite a while and it worked okay, but the edge data connection was aggravatingly slow at times, and i needed the internet connection to set up google voice calls that i would route through a number that i had set in my fave five, effectively giving me free minutes.

When i heard about verizon coming out with an android handset i was exited. up until this point verizon only had a collection of crappy phones, and their network was extremely closed. The fact that they were offering an open source handset on their network meant they were changing their mentality towards openness.

I had always wanted to try using data exclusively for my communication, make calls via voip and IM instead of text. Verizon's network speed is more than fast enough to handle everything, i just wanted to make sure that they didn't cap data consumption as i had heard some networks did. I sent an email to verizon, and they said that the internet plan provided was indeed unlimited. Just to make sure i called them and confirmed this.

Tmobile canceled my contract with no termination fee, i sold my iphone to writer. Then i bought a droid on a one year contract, on the cheapest plan offered, and no texting plan. The price per month is almost the same as i was paying for tmobile, but i have significantly better coverage and its 3g as well.

I installed the google voice application for texting. the downside is the app is not instantaneous, there is some delay but hey, its free. Luckily i had signed up for a gizmo5 account before google bought them and stopped letting people sign up. google voice has built in support for gizmo5, and this allows you to get calls on any device that supports SIP protocol. With google voice all calls made are incoming so that means free unlimited calls from wherever you have an Internet connection. I tried a few different SIP applications before settling on sipdroid.

Calls with SIP over 3G work perfectly, there is very little noticeable lag and call quality is as good as making a normal call. I do have to leave the app running all the time and that takes away from battery life some but the battery life is quite good. I hope that verizon offers an internet only plan in the future, as it would be ideal for my situation.

As for the phone itself, i am extremely happy with it. Coming from an iphone to something that offers so much freedom is quite a liberating feeling. There are plenty of apps for doing about anything you would want to, and this phone does about everything. the keyboard takes a bit getting used to but i am starting to prefer it over the on screen one.The only thing thats bugged me is that though the phone hardware supports multitouch, for some reason google didnt build it into any of the native apps. There are third party apps that have multitouch support but i will really miss multitouch for the native apps.

If you are getting a smartphone in the future, go for android.

Thanksgiving

For the holiday i really hadnt planned on doing anything. Alayna wanted to visit my sister abby out at MSU but when i found out abbys boyfriend was driving out with her as well i dismissed the idea entirely. Its not that i dislike ryan, but he is so infinitely annoying. I cant wait till she breaks up with him. anyway alayna took my car because it gets better gas milage and i was stuck in wyoming with no way to get out. at the last minute i decided to travel out to utah to visit my friends and family out there. i talked my parents into letting me use their car and i headed off. i spent thanksgiving with my cousins the hardins. it was a blast, but unfortunately i had contracted the flu or something and couldnt keep anything down.
while down there i was able to cancel my tmobile contract, i sold my iphone to the writer and then picked up a droid. its really nice, in fact i am writing this on it right now. i got it with the idea that i could make all my calls over the 3G internet connection. in the tests ive done it works perfecly, but i will blog about that later.