Tuesday, January 30, 2007

syncing V600i and the mac (bis)

I had a reader post a comment on a post with the same title, asking a question. Since it's a very old post, and the reader doesn't have a blog, I'll just answer on here.
No, with a V600i the adress book images aren't synced (which kind of did bum me out, but when you realize how little storage space you have on the phone, and how you can't buy more... it makes sense)
The V600i is a nice little phone if you don't want to use it as your primary mp3 player. I only can put up like 10 mp3s on it. It's also a nice little phone if you like visio from time to time, but the quality isn't excellent. The quality of the pictures is OK, if you have a "real" camera on the side to take pictures.
Let's just say it's not an ipod, camera and phone all rolled into one. It's a phone that can occasionnally be somewhat entertaining.
What's nice is it's pretty cheap if you buy it with a "forfait", I got mine with SFR.

And here's my advice concerning telephones. Motorola phones are cute. They are pretty cheap and work pretty well. But steer clear. After a year or so, the battery dies beyond repair and it won't even recognise the charger anymore. When that happens, there is nothing you can do about it.

Alcatal phones tend to get a lot of bad press, but they litterally last forever and their battery is great. I just gave my old Alcatel to my little sister and she loves it. Obviously it doesn't have all the fun little features the newer phones have, but its battery life is excellent (I can spend up to 5 hours on the phone and still have enough battery to keep it on for a day or so, or I can just leave it on and make 10-minute calls here and there for over a week!!!).

The "best" as far as the interface goes, are the Sony Erricson, and they are generally pretty sweet looking little machines, too.

But the best of the best is obviously the iPhone, iPod, Camera, Pocket Pc and telephone all rolled into one, mac-style ;)
If you want to iSync in style, I'd say that's the way to go (but you need money - lots of it)
And you probably also need to wait, because there are no phone deals supporting it yet in Europe at least. Kind of a bummer.

Saturday, January 20, 2007

Ice-skating!

Today I'm going ice-skating... I havn't gone in almost a year now, so I'm pretty excited about that. Also I'm seeing some people I hardly ever see, which is even more exciting.

For the occasion, I decided to test l'Oreal's Color Pulse. I don't know what took me to say I got "copper red" last night- perhaps it sort of looked that color with almost no lighting, I was exhausted... And that's the color I would have bought if my hair hadn't been too dark for it to work. I actually got a sort of dark violine. What's nice is there are none of those products that ruin your hair in them, they are extremely easy to apply to yourself, and it goes away after 10 shampoos, and it is inexpensive (3.50 euros)

I like the result, but I am glad that it will go away quickly because then, instead of having to deal with "leffet racine", I can just get my hair back to how it was and choose to either dye it the same color again, leave it as it is (natural), or try one of the other color pulse boxes. And there is no risk. If a color looks awful on me all I need to do is just rule it out. Sadly, as I said, there's very little choice of boxes for brunettes with very dark hair.

When they were all the hype I never tried one because it was 10 euros per box.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

I really dislike real player

They want you to authenticate before downloading their software, and make you go through this long wait if you have a slow internet connexion for the authentication process, even if you're getting the free version.

And then, after finally getting your .dmg file, it won't mount!!! So I'm trying again but I really dislike real player right now.

It had better work now.

edit: I forgot to mention they have like 2 european mirrors!! Pathetic

Thursday, January 11, 2007

If my life were a TV show...

Do you ever wonder what the show would be about? Who the main characters would be? Would it be a drama or a comedy?

And, very important, what would the theme song be?

I'm glad my life isn't a TV show (that would just be weird). And no, I will NEVER do reality TV. But I just think those are interesting questions to ponder.

Would be kind of fun to create a video sequence with a theme song, pictures, even cartoon bits, to get some sort of idea, some sort of draft.

After 3 days of being very serious, I lost it and just started watching TV shows non stop, like I don't want to do anything else really.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Exams

Another one bites the dust...

Ok yesterday's exam went great. Two more to go :)

So this afternoon I have one, and friday I have another one. Then classes start back up.

This semester is going to be really busy. Last night I wrote out a list of responsibilities, and activities I plan to do regularly, and also some plans that I'd like to accomplish.

For instance, I have my first official webdesign job :)
Hope that works out good. Until now, all my webdesign I did for myself, or for school, or for my church, so not really a "job".
It'll be nice to be earning money again ever since I stopped my tutoring job, I hadn't actually earned any money.

I want to work harder on my classes, have a "normal" rhythm this semester. That's the main thing, but there are also other projects that tend to take time.
Not sure how it's all going to work out just yet.

For now I'll just concentrate on my exam. Back to work!

Sunday, January 07, 2007

french christian music

So you want to discover french christian music, but have no clue where to start?

Why am I saying this? Because considering the frequent keywords on my blog, I figure a lot of people who are interested in christian music and in france will find it. I also figure that you might wonder where to start as far as listening to christian music from France, especially since many french people are clueless because the french christian music scene is so tiny, because several albums and groups, although they have a good heart, just aren't something I would listen to, let alone spend 20 euros to buy a CD for, unless of course they were friends of mine.

This last song by Madison that I just posted the lyrics for, is a song that helped remind me what would bring me through, during one of the darkest periods of my life, when my everyday question was : " what for? "
I can only advise strongly that you buy Madison's album if you like gospel music, even if you don't speak french. If you're just curious to get a glimpse of french christian music, the 3 biggest groups out there, in my opinion, are Madison, Les Passages and Exo.

But those 3 groups, you're safe buying a CD from them, especially if you try listening to extracts from their albums first.

Les Passages and Madison both did a concert at Paques 2006, a huge french-speaking youth meeting that takes place every third easter in Switzerland, at the Geneve Bible Institute. There are some pictures in my photo album

Tout me vient de toi, by Madison lyrics

I just noticed something. Those lyrics are nowhere to be found google-searching on the world wide web and my blog is the only result for them!
And why is that? Because I mention the title in one of my posts!

So here they are:

Il est un nom
Toujours sur mes lèvres
Une chanson, gravée sur mon coeur
Car par ton nom j'ai été libérée
Et tout me vient de toi, tout me vient de toi

Une parole, une tendre voix
Qui me rapelle, tout au fond de moi
Que je suis libre, tu as tout effacé
tout me vient de toi, tout me vient de toi

Jésus, Jésus,
tu es le nom sur mes lèvres
la chanson, dans mon coeur
et tout me vient de toi
oui tout me vient de toi

Friday, January 05, 2007

Getting up early and polyphasic sleep.

As whoever read my new year's post knows, I want to readjust my sleep cycle this year.

Last night I was chatting with one of my best friends (at a shameful hour, I admit) and he sent me a link to a blog talking about polyphasic sleep.

I read through most of the posts and found them very interesting.

For those of you who don't know what it is, it's deciding to sleep 20 minutes every 4-5 hours during the day instead of all night. The "important" phase of sleep only lasts like 20 minutes, and you go through several cycles during the night, including unimportant ones, so a lot of the sleep is "wasted".
If you do polyphasic sleep though, apparantly there are no health issues (check the blog out for yourself).

Only problem with it is that it just sounds so abnormal! Being awake while everybody else is sleeping. And don't even think of having a job in an office (this guy works at home).
But as a college student it might be interesting to try.

I don't think I will though.

There was also a post about how to become an early riser.

That's more interesting for me, because it's more "normal" and I do want to be able to be an early riser, especially since this semester my 8:00 classes are actually important.

The method is simple, or so it seems. The idea is to go to bed when you feel tired (you need to jauge this by reading a book- I can already tell that it's impossible when on a computer) and wake up at a fixed hour, and get out of bed exactly when you hear the alarm, avoid the snooze button.

His idea is to "practice" obeying your alarm when you're conscious, that is during the day, to get in the habit of it.
I guess it's worth a shot. If it worked for him, might work for me.

An word of caution though : the other posts on the blog are really weird, almost occult. But the ones about sleep are common sense, so I found them interesting.

Monday, January 01, 2007

Happy new year!!

2007 (already).

So what about 2006?



Apart from a relatively short period of time I found absolutely awful, and an absolute failure at respecting last year's new year's vows, a good year.
I got my driver's licence, I know where I'm going as far as studies go (for now at least), and I am happy.
Hopefully the university won't be blocked again this year.

* Jan: nothing noteworthy. Perhaps the narnia discussion evenings
* Feb: beginning of university-blockage
* March: Code de la route
* April: Paques 2006 (a highlight of the year)
* May: Classes start again
* June: Exams
* July: ODDS
* August: Island of ré, Belgium... etc...
* September: New start in a new university and driver's licence
* October: Actux
* November: a blur
* December: webdesign



And now for 2007!


Goals and projects


* Get my year with honors if possible
* Go to the States
* Beat Zelda
* more... but not really blogging material

Traditional new year's vows


* Read my Bible in one year
* Go to at least 80% of my classes
* Stop bad habits (I want pretty nails!)
* Start playing my guitar again
* Go swimming more often
* Learn PHP, AJAX...
* Learn C, C++, and whatever I can. not sure what languages to work on really at this point
* Become a better typer. It'll be good for my efficiency.
* Work on the accessiblilty of my web sites. With handheld stylesheets, printer styles, keyboard shortcuts, total seperation of CSS and XHTML in my code. Make good site maps.
* Stop making a fool of myself
* Go to bed earlier (I can't believe I didn't think of this sooner!)


I guess that's about it.