Anybody know if it’s possible to obtain multiple cellphone SIM cards that are all activated as the same number?

I noticed when I upgraded viv’s phone a ways back that it came with a new SIM, which I did not use. If I had, would the old SIM remain usable? If not, is the deactivation automatic?

There are two parts to this question, then. Is it technically possible to have a dual SIM number, and if so, how does one go about obtaining a second, duplicate SIM without alerting the cell phone police that you are threatening their holy monopolistic bizmodel?

I dreamt that three fat honey grubs pupated into thrre brilliantly plumed baby birds, one a toucan. Another appeared to be an African Green but was afflicted with some sort of worm.

The grubs were deam-grubs, about an inch long by a half-inch and translucently filled with honey, like insect sushi candy.

I wonder if the grubs were inspired by miniature halloween candy bars.

I don’t really know if this is interesting in the least, even to my self, except that it must be to me since I just spent the last hour fiddling with gadgets in order to realize that maybe I had something worth the hour I’d just spent.

A few years ago I picked up a weird, japanese-market private label (IBM, for god’s sake) Palm V and entertained myself trying to figure out what the heck one could do with an ancient 8mb Palm.

A fair amount, as it happens. Games, for one, though they are old-skool in spades. Offline AvantGo, for another, though getting the increasingly creaky Palm sync conduits to play nice with Mac OS X was painful at the time.

Since the whole Palm hardware line was undergoing a series of very rapid changes, a great deal of remaindered hardware appeared on ebay for under $10, and I picked up this and that, including a folding Palm keyboard, which works but not so well that I ever used it much, although this blog entry is an exception.

Anyway, long story short, the device worked as a test case and convinced me that I would enjoy a Treo as a phone when the time came, not so long ago.

I retired the Palm V as a bedside clock and handheld reader, and chronicled it here. I read a few Project Gutenberg and Manybooks.net

argh, just lost a whole bunch of this entry due to fumblefingers. I lack the patence to recover it. Looks like I’ll just delete the entry. so sorry, never mind!

The ability to stream internet radio on my Treo has me unwarrantedly fascinated. It’s inadvisable to do so if not plugged into a powersource, but I am fascinated by the idea of tuing into WFHB late at night.

The Treo’s built-in speaker is crisp and does a decent job with music, as I would expect based on the impressive sound quality the unit’s predecessor provided.

Chloe, my sweetheart of a cat, knocked our vintage 2002 iSight webcam to the floor as I was using it to videochat with my parents. It’s dead. I still have to do a couple of tests, but it doesn’t appear on the firewire bus of any of the computers I have checked it on, with differernt cables. Googling for repair options yields only info on the new, monitor-embedded iSights. Aargh.

On the other hand, maybe this is an excuse to shell out for a firewire DV camera.

Thanks to the kindness of, in order, a friend and Mr. Steve Jobs, I now have a Treo 680 in place of the past year-or-so of a Nokia 6620.

In the intervening time, I have grown quite used to numeric-keypad navigation of the two Symbian OS java apps Google Maps and Gmail, and the switch to Palm’s web browser Blazer to access these services is notably less efficient in terms of keypresses. I seem to recall that there was a way to get a Java environment for Palm and that might simplify things from a button-pushing perspective.

Google Reader, on the other hand, is a browser-based app. Unfortunately for Palm, there’s no contest: reading my subs on the Nokia is a matter of a single button (the nubbin) consistently navigated: down, down, click. On the Palm, it’s variable based on the page render and other factors I have yet to isolate and therefore more time consuming.

Other issues and adjustments are either hardware-based and intractable or outside the purview of the phone per se. Movable Type, for example, has had a disabled remote posting interface for about a year now. Without a full keypad, I was not gonna do any moblogging. With it, I sure did, and might again, but it’s a waiting game. The Palm camera sucks compared to the Nokia, except for the non-time limited video clip shots.

Then there’s the rickety, end-of-life nature of the Palm OS. That means that a bunch of creative, API-cracking apps for previous Palm OS handhelds and Treos just don’t work on the 680, an understandable development decision. It does mean, however, that some of the interesting media-oriented apps I used on the 650 are NF on the 680.

At any rate, the 680 was relatively inexpensive and will certainly bridge me to the iPhone 2, which is likely to resolve my media-creation issues with the initial attempt. However, to my surprise, a year with a java-based phone provisioned with a decent amount of memory satisfied many, if not all, of my issues with a keypad-oriented UI.

I will certainly never actually write or even take meaningful notes under Symbian + keypad, though. On the Treo, I have written entire first drafts running to thousands of words: it is transparent to me for that purpose, and while I have yet to earn my living entire from the act, it seems likely I shall in the event that I choose to.

I am heartbroken. Last weekend Lindsey kindly had us as guests on the Saturday afternoon battle sail between the Lady Washington and the Hawaiian Chieftain on Lake Union. I had a camera full of great pictures and video. I just erased it completely due to the non-standard unmountable camera chip file format. Goddamnit.

My suburban childhood home was built in a subdivision which was built around an extant railbed. Although the rails were about a mile away, the nights of my childhood often included that rumble, that jingle and that roar. Often the plaintive hoot of the engine’s warning horn was also heard. These are sounds I have not heard in the night for over twenty years, and I miss them.

The earwigs, each the size of a full-grown housecat, tugged at the potted plants, lugging them in an ineffectual attempt at camouflage. As they eventually dropped the containers, we were surprised to see hows many of them there were.

Viv and I celebrated our ninth wedding anniversary at Ballard’s delectable Se&241;or Moose. The food was as delicious as ever and it is always something else to watch the staff running flat out to get the food out from the tiny, tiny kitchen.

Sleepy, we returned home and accidentally caught an episode of the absurd Discovery Channel game show ‘Cash Cab,’ in which unwitting Manhattanites play a TV quiz show while on a cab ride from point A to point B. The show looks and feels like an escaped artifact from a science fiction movie – obviously something reminds me of both Blade Runner and The Fifth Element, SFR movies that incorporate elements of reality TV, gameshows, and cabs.