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While we're talking phones...... I'm now a week in with the Gallaxy S4. I'm real impressed. It's like having your tablet in your pocket all the time. All the 'tablet' functionality is superb. The display is razor sharp. We're talking like pretty decent printing on coated paper sharp. Rant (There are Hydrogen Audio-esque chuckleheads out there who claim the human eye can't detect quality above 300 PPI. Not. Forget assault rifles, there should be sanity checks before people are allowed to carry trigonometry.) /rant. All the places where it looks like Samsung customized Android feel successful. Dialogs and settings pages and the like are intuitive and straightforward. As opposed to my iPhone, if I want to set something up a certain way, it just does it - without me spending hours on Google and getting all frustrated. I wanted all my email accounts and texting to have unique ringtones, for example. No problem. It just does that. The camera seems to be pretty good. It's big enough (12MP) to actually use. It's pretty sharp. Colors are good. Low light performance is good. It's no D-4, but it's a phone for crying out loud. I showed it to my boss. He was over the moon about the camera. So it's like having a real camera all the time, too. It actually focuses, by the way. In low light, it focuses in not too much of a hurry. Just like itty bitty real cameras. For telephony, its RF performance is good but not as good as my old Motorola. Better than my iPhone on ATT by a long shot, but not like the Motorola. Audio on phone calls is very good to excellent. In the Motorola / Blackberry range. The voice command system is like Siri. It's server based. Which means that if the server is hosed, so are you. It's not as clever as Siri. You have to know, for instance, "Make a note" will get you a note, but "Make a recording" gets you an offer to Google that. You have to say "Record voice". It doesn't like my Bluetooth headset. If I use the mic in the phone, it does what I ask. If I use the Bluetooth, it gets all bratty. I'm going to the off-price big box to look for a hopefully better matched Bluetooth tomorrow. Audio for playing music is OK. With an amplifier, it sounds about like my iPod. Without, dynamics aren't so great , music doesn't have a great sense of time. A number of USB DACs are supposed to work out of the box with it. I haven't tried any yet. If that works, this thing would rock for music. Battery life seems good. I accidentally left Neutron playing for about six hours and it didn't murder the battery. It plays 24/96 FLACs just fine. (And they sound pretty darn nice) I wasn't expecting that. That's pretty cool. The earphones that come with the phone could be used for enhanced interrogation, not that that is exactly shocking. Ergonomics are fine if you put a case or bumper on. Without one, I could barely pick the thing up. It's very, very thin. I guess that's fashionable, and if I need to carry it in a suit coat pocket, I suppose I'll appreciate it. But, come on - a big, shiny, thinner than all crap thing with rounded edges just isn't gonna be easy to handle. If the internet is to be believed, it doesn't offer much protection to itself if you drop it, either. I'll probably end up with a heavy duty case like an Otter box. The upside to it being so thin is that, even in an Otter box, it'll still go in my Nightize holster. Be forewarned that the thinness of the phone may mean that the hole in your case for your mini plug might not be very big and there might not be enough stock to safely enlarge it. I had to go to Rat Shack and be overcharged for a really fashionable mini to mini to adapt. It's not perfect, but overall I think as I get used to it, this phone will grow to indispensable status. It's pretty effin fantastic, actually.

So very sad to learn of your loss, Steve. I think that it's safe to say that we're all here for you, but please don't be afraid to seek professional help and guidance. May he rest in peace, and may you and his children, family members and friends find positive ways to cope.

^ Don't worry Jim, we knew that you were a molester as well as a drunk, and proud of you we all are!

^^ Nice ... Is that biscuit with bacon? Approved.

Brent's birthday cake

"The sea cucumber, however, has a fish in its butt. Win-win." I'm going to be giggling about that one all weekend.

Sorry Raffy! I ate lunch with a hawk* today (well, he was outside on the top of the physics building, and I was inside the math building...). He was hungry. He wouldn't share. *At least, I think it was a hawk.