The Musings Of A Wandering Phoenix

The HTC Once arrived Monday morning, and so far, HTC is continue their tradition of excellent build quality in a phone. The HTC One is the best feeling phone I have held. It’s just the right size for my hands, and it’s weight is light, but not so light that I think it will blow away.

For the HTC One, they went with a uni-body design, that is slightly curved on the back side, and fits nicely in the palm of your hand. As you hold the phone, you can truly see how much work went into the design. As you look at it, you notice the screen. The screen is very vibrant and looks amazing. Everything I have looked at so far looks amazing on it. Pictures, videos, and web pages.

The phone does not come with stock Android, it comes with HTC Sense, which is just their launcher that is used. It is actually better than I thought it would be and the built in widgets work very well.

The phone has great battery life, which, with Android phones, is not always the case. I have owned 4 Android phones, including the HTC One, and this is the 1st time I have made it through an entire work day and not needed to charge my phone. I took the phone off the charger as I walked out the door yesterday morning, and did not need to charge it until 8:30-ish last night. And that was through slightly moderate use.

HTC has a partnership right now with Beats By Dre and the audio from this phone is pretty damn good, for a cell phone. I like that there are two speakers on the phone. One at the top and one at the bottom. When I am looking at a YouTube video and the audio is playing towards me and not away from me as it does on other phones, it really does make the listening experience a little nicer. I don’t own a pair of Beats By Dre headphones so I can not tell you if there is any kind of special audio intelligence going on there, but I hope there is.

To put a few things into perspective, there are the smart phones I have owned throughout the years, in the order that I had them.

Nokia E62 – Symbian OS
iPhone 3G – iOS
Motorola Droid X – Android
HTC Thunderbolt – Andorid
Samsung Galaxy Nexus – Android
Samsung Galaxy II – Android
iPhone 4 – iOS
HTC One – Android

I would rate the phone an 8/10, and it is still the best phone I have ever owned.

It’s no secret that I am an audiophile.  I love good music that has great sound.  Now, I at times bash a lot of the music that is played on the music, and yes, I think most of it is garbage, however, there is some good stuff out there.  The main issue that I have is there is a lack of balance in the music, and other forms of media that we, as people consume.

I have always lived, no, I have always tried to live my life by some very simple rules.  I have done a pretty decent job in not breaking my rules.  As time goes on, I’ll get more of my rules written for people to read.  As I sit here about to leave work, I am looking at a few videos on Youtube, and I am listening to some less than conscious music.  Now, those who do not know me very well would call me a hypocrite for listening to this music.  And that is rule #005 comes in;

Rule #005 – In All That You Do, Let There Be Balance

Yes, I think that you need to listen to music that has a message and meaning behind it.  Music that tells the story of the struggles of people.  Music that gets a message across to the masses.  Music that is meant to touch your soul and cause you to have a spiritual experience.  However, there is also some music that is mean for no other reason than to cause you to move your body.  Music that is meant for the club.  Music that is meant boob out of a pair of 15” sub woofers in the trunk of your 1985 Chevy Caprice.  Music that is mean to have bass so low that you can feel it bouncing on the inside of your chest.

All of it is good music to someone.  But, let’s please get back to a time when there was balance.  After you have dinner, you have desert.  Sometimes to follow up a great novel, you may read a trashy romance novella.  However you bring balance to the force, do that and keep your balance.  Do not allow music, movies, tv, books, or whatever your choice of entertainment is cause you to lose balance.  Balance is what keeps us focused and centered.

Rule #005 – In All That You Do, Let There Be Balance

Recently, actually, I have no idea when this happened, but my agent who managed one of my IRA’s quit and moved, and I was reassigned to a new agent. No big deal, except no one ever told me my agent quit and that I had a new agent. A simple form letter to all of the people being assigned to this new agent is a simple piece of technology to implement.

This being the final straw with this company, I called to cancel the IRA that they managed. And you know what, no one at the company tried to deter me from canceling or do anything to keep my business. What was really funny is that my new agent’s assistant, could not find me in the system as being a customer of her boss. But when I log on to the web site, I can see that I am still a customer of this company, they still have, what I consider a large amount of my money, and that he is my agent. I guess I really am just a number to them and that the amount of money I had them managing is not enough for them to care.

It’s a good thing I kept all the statements that they sent me to know exactly how much of my money, they seem to not know that they are managing. Oh well, they will no longer reap any benefit from my money and no longer forget that it is there.

I really need companies to be aware of who they do business with. Maybe I would matter to them if they had millions of dollars of mine to watch over.

If you go between multiple operating systems pretty regularly like I do, you will end up with a lot of hidden files. There was a previous post where I talked about removing .DS_Store files if you use a Mac and a Linux box. This is a more refined version of that post, and this one addresses all hidden files in general.

Use the following command to list all hidden files in /path/to/dest/ directory
[darkmatter@metroplex]$ find /path/to/dir/ -iname “.*” -maxdepth 1 -type f

To list all hidden directories use the following command:
[darkmatter@metroplex]$ find /path/to/dir/ -iname “.*” -maxdepth 1 -type d

To delete all hidden files under UNIX or Linux use the following command:
[darkmatter@metroplex]$ find /path/to/dir/ -iname “.*” -maxdepth 1 -type f -delete
OR
[darkmatter@metroplex]$ find /path/to/dir/ -iname “.*” -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec rm {} \;

To delete all hidden directories under UNIX or Linux use the following command:
[darkmatter@metroplex]$ find /path/to/dir/ -iname “.*” -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;

Now, I am an advocate of good music with meaning and depth and lots of thought provoking imagery.  I’m also an advocate of balance in music.  If we have that deep meaningful music, we must also have the other side of the coin.

Right now, I am in the mood for some dirty raunchy music.  This is the only track of his that I have heard that is dirty and raunchy, and it is damn good.  I need him to make more music like this.   Some of you will know this song, some won’t.  For those who don’t know it, it’s about time you were introduced.

I don’t drink a lot of soda anymore.  I used to drink a lot of it though.  However, if you show up at my place with either or both of these, you will forever cement your place in my life.  :-)

See, this is the exact reason some of you need to be removed from the gene pool.

I went to the barber shop yesterday to get my hair cut.  Nothing real special about that, but as I walked in I saw something that made me laugh.  Mall security riding a 3 wheeled segue.  These do not move very fast.  Why is mall security riding this thing?  Can someone give me a logical & rationale explanation?

You know what, some of you need a good kick in the head.  Far too many times people have told me, “I posted it on Facebook, why didn’t you see it?”  Maybe you idiots have forgotten how Facebook works, but you are not the only person I have on my Facebook friends list.

I have told people, unless you tag me in your status message, or I happen to log in right as it passes through my feed, then the odds of me seeing it are pretty damn slim.  Why some of you think that all of your FB friends will always see your status messages, for the life of me I have no fucking clue why you think this.

No, I don’t go and look at your page every time I log in.  There is a high likelihood that I never look at your page unless you tag me in something and I go check.  So please stop assuming that just because you posted something on Facebook that I will see it.

For those of you who continue to think this, you’re a dumb ass.

If you have connected an external drive to a mac and then back on your linux box, you are familiar with the .DS_Store file.  It is a file that OS X uses for some of the custom settings in the finder.  It’s a bit more complicated than that, but for the sake of this post, that is all that is important.

If you are like me, and do a lot of file manipulation and data moving, those .DS_Store files can be a pain in the ass.  Well, here is a quick command that will delete them.

As root, or a privlidged account, cd to / and run the following command;

find . “-name+ “.DS_Store” -exec rm {} \;

Depending on the size of your filesystem and the processing power of your linux box, this process will complete quickly, or it may take a while.  But in the end, all of the .DS_Store files will be removed.