Long story short, I decided to pair my Motorola HS850 bluetooth headset with my Pearl and I ran into problems — Read on to see how I fixed it.

The basic instructions to connect your HS850 with any phone are this:

1. With the boom closed, press the ‘receive call’ button on the headset — hold it for 5-10 second until the blue light stays on
2. On your phone, attempt to connect to any new bluetooth devices

Normally, that’s all that’s involved however for some reason, my Pearl would never connect!  So, after searching thru a number of message boards, I figured out the solution.  Basically, during step 1, when the blue light turns on, flip open the boom and the light will stay on for a longer period of time.  This will then allow the connection to occur.

Simple, yes, but it wasn’t perfectly clear.

Hopefully, someone finds this and it saves you from having to search for an hour like I did!

In case you’re wondering — Gutsy Gibbon is the name of the new Ubuntu release. Ubuntu is a “flavor” of linux. I have actually had Gutsy running on my laptop at home for months and this release will probably be the first release I put on my main system. My hope is to break my ties with the Windows world (although I haven’t fully made that jump yet). Anyway, check out Gutsy if you get a chance — I don’t think, outside of the theme, you’ll notice anything different between linux and windows.

Those who know me, know that I’m an avid player of a game called World of Warcraft (WoW for short).  As part of the WoW experience, Blizzard allows users to create add-ons (called mods).  These mods will do something within the game like change the layout of the interface, add some functionality or just allow you to send a message when you’re resurrecting another player (among a million other things).  I’ve decided to pay some homage to my favorite mods (and mod site) by linking to them.  This will also help me point other WoW players to some of my favorite mods.

• World of War’s UI site – Arguably one of the largest mod sites.  It happens to be my favorite place to search for new and updated mods.
• UI Central – Mod Management Tool – While you’re at World of War, get this tool.  It’s an automatic update tool.  It makes the task of keeping your mods up-to-date MUCH easier!
• CT-Mod – This adds a whole set of mods that add alot to the game.  This one is almost mandatory.
• Gatherer – Gatherer makes the task of collecting materials (ore and herbs) much easier.  It will mark every node location (where you pick up your materials) on your maps so that you can go back later and check those nodes to see if they’re available again.  Another excellent feature is that it will actually synchronize node collections across your guild, so if another player in your guild is using Gatherer and you pick up a node, it will send that location to that other person.  One hint: if you are an herbalist but not a miner, you can send mining node locations to your other guildies by simply running by and right-clicking on them.  Help your guild mates out by clicking on everything!
• Auctioneer – Auctioneer is one of those nice-to-have mods for people who like numbers and statistics (Jerome, this probably isn’t you).  Basically, what it does is it will keep a record of every item in the game (that you’ve seen anyways), then it will scan thru the auction house and check the price for any item it can find.  It then can keep track of the average starting and buyout prices for those items along with the number of times you’ve seen that item in the auction house.  So, for instance, if you pick up a blue item while out grinding (like I did last night), it will tell you approximately what that item would be worth if you were to put it up on the auction house.  It can also recommend a price when you put an item up on the auction house too (based on previous prices and current demand).  It’s a very slick tool for those who use the Auction House alot.

That’s enough for now.  I will try to add more as I think of them.

Today, I received an e-mail from our software secretary that was sent to the handful of individuals that work for the same company as me (there were 11 of us). She goes on to tell us that we are going to get access to this new travel software. I think to myself “Great!” because travel can be somewhat confusing — especially since I’m not employed by the primary contractor here. Now, here’s where it gets whacky — she goes on to state that in order to get this set up, “What we need from you: Send us your full name and USGS email address“. eh? Wait a minute, didn’t she just send ME an e-mail? And now she needs MY e-mail address and name? She obviously knows my name…and since she sent me an e-mail, I’m going to assume that she knows that too. That’s like calling someone on the phone and saying “Hey Bob, can I get your name and phone number?”. What the hell?!
Anyways — I obliged, and sent my name and e-mail — however in the back of my head, I keep thinking how dumb it is.

Oh well…hopefully it gave you a giggle.

“OK, so I was thinking one day after I played a good 1/2 hour of Wii Sports that I was getting a pretty heavy duty cardio workout. I decided to try out an experiment, where I would do everything I normally did, eat everything I normally ate and see if anything changes after playing 30 minutes of Wii Sports everyday for 6 weeks. If I miss a day, I’ll make a note of it and that weeks report.”

He will finish up on January 15th, so be sure to check back there for his progress…I know I will…

Here’s the link

• ‘Rider Girls Basketball – Home of the Sioux Falls Roosevelt Roughriders High School Girl’s Basketball team. My friend Brad came up with a great website design to support the outstanding basketball legacy of the Roosevelt Girl’s team. Get updates on the statistics, news on the team, photos and any other great tidbits of information about the Roughrider girls past and present.
• KBKG Photography Inc – KBKG is an exciting new photography company. They’re based out of Madison, SD, but are probably willing to travel to your location. They do a great job of capturing candid, un-staged photos (which is hard to do sometimes!). Check out their samples section! They do some excellent work.

That’s it for now. Please support the people that support us.

• Joe Spammer spoofs SPAM e-mail “From” some random e-mail address at mentele.net to jack@some-random-address.com (i don’t know if that really exists, but lets assume it doesnt).
• The e-mail server at some-random-address.com receives the e-mail “From” me.

• Since the mailbox for jack doesn’t exist, the server is most likely set up to bounce the e-mail back to me so I know that “jack” doesn’t exist

So, because this spammer sends this one e-mail, it gets bounced two more times AFTER the spammer originally sent it! Now, multiply that by 500 or so (that is the approximate number of those e-mails that I receive on a daily basis) and we begin to see why SPAM is such a problem. Okay, my 500 is a bad example, but mentele.net is a low-profile system — imagine something like usgs.gov or digg.com or some other LARGE domain with more than 5 users!

SPAM is only becoming a larger problem. We really need some successful legislation against spammers. Hell, we just need to confiscate their servers and computer systems…and give them to me! hehe…well, I’d be happy if we could just do the first part.

———— Update 11/07/06 ————

Odd, the day after I post this, there’s a front page article on Digg titled The Spammers Fight Back talking about a very similar topic (the increased SPAM lately).  Here’s the link directly to the Eweek article.

Google Video

Since I’m currently using WordPress, it seemed appropriate. I might add a few of these myself!

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