Ryan McCullough's Home Page

The last 4 months or so have been very busy for me. There have probly been a few interesting things I could have written about but I don't remember. My parents came up to visit me in February. We really enjoyed that and look forward to seeing them again.

The community we live in is having a community garage sale this weekend. We are participating and hoping to clear out some of the boxes in our garage. I think we are hoping more to clear out the stuff more than make some extra cash. We may just end up taking whatever we don't sell down to the local goodwill.

So I found out the hard way that there are some limitations to using MP3 files on my cell phone. I have the green LG enV and a 2GB Kingston microSD memory card. When I first got the card, I started throwing music onto it using a USB card reader. I put the card into my phone and none of the songs showed up. Strange. I found out that the mp3 files must be in a folder called "my_music" and that there can't be sub-folders. The easiest way to fix this was to use the phone to format the memory card. Check your manual, but on my phone I had to 1) open the menu 2) select settings and tools 3) select memory 4) select card memory 5) select options with the right soft-key 6) press ok to format 7) enter my lock code (last 4 digits of your phone number) 8) confirm the format.

So, once the card was formatted I could start putting songs into the my_music folder. Remember not to put songs into sub-folders of my_music. I put about 250 songs on the card and I then put it into my phone and tried to play the files. I found out that only about 70 of the files showed up. Strange. I discovered that the filename has a length limit of about 30-35 characters. So I renamed the files to be <track number>-<track name>.mp3 and renamed any files that were longer than about 33 characters to be shorter. This time almost all of the files showed up but a couple were missing. I ended up finding out that the comma ',' caused the player to not catalog the file.

I now have 298 songs on my memory card and they all are recognized by the phone. Characters that appear to be safe are numbers, upper & lower case letters, dash '-', underscore '_', right and left parenthesis '(' & ')', and spaces ' '.

I would avoid the question mark '?", comma ',', period in the middle of the filename, apostrophe, colon, and the semi-colon. Some of these characters may work, but I have them replaced with an underscore in my file names.

So Maurice and I got new cell phones the other day. Our 2 years were up, so we figured we might as well get the maximum benefit and upgrade our phones at a discount. We got a pretty sweet deal. Maurice got the new chocolate. Here is a picture:

I got the green enV:

So, we re-upped out contract for 1 year and that gave us a $90 credit on our next bill. Then we upgraded Maurice's phone on Verizon's website. The new chocolate is $179.99 with a $50 online  rebate + a $100 "new every two" rebate. So the phone cost $29.99. I kind of wanted the enV, so I called Verizon to find out what kind of deal I could get. I found out that Circuit City had the Green enV for $129.99 with a $50 mail-in rebate bringing the phones cost to $79.99. The Silver or Orange enV is going for $199.99. So I called Circuit City in Idaho Falls, ID and was able to upgrade my phone and have the Verizon representative at the store FedEx the phone to me. I didn't have to pay sales tax either since I was shipping the phone to Montana. So, if you figure it like this -$90 credit on bill + $29.99 for the chocolate + 79.99 for the enV, we upgraded our phones to the latest models for less than $20.

I then went to  NewEgg.com and ordered 2 x Kingston 2GB microSD memory cards with microSD to SD adapters + a USB SD reader for about $47 total and it included free shipping. I am fairly pleased with the experience, especially compared to past experience with carriers like Nextel and Sprint PCS (when they were seperate companies).