Blog.JonECat.com

Well I leave to head home tomorrow. I actually had more fun in Arkansas than I thought I would.

If you enjoy eating fine foods, you will love Little Rock. I am glad that I was able to come here and enjoy what it had to offer for that last couple of days.

One thing that was interesting to me, was that fact of all homeless people that were around downtown. I know every large city has its homeless, but from all the cities that I have visited this year, Little Rock seemed the most apparent to me.

I took a walk around downtown last night at about 10:30 local time, I was looking for a Circle K or any store that I could go get a pack of Hot Tamales at. As I was walking around I went past a parking garage not too far from my hotel and I saw rows upon rows of people who were either camping in downtown Little Rock or they were homeless. It made me realize how fortunate most of are in our lives, and how much I take what I have been blessed with for granted. It is too bad that people have to live in such poor conditions in this great country that we live in. This is just an observation that I made.

Unfortunately I did not have an opportunity to meet “Slick Willy” while I was here, but he let me walk down his street.

So long Little Rock, thanks for the grub!

Red version of the Minimal Zen theme is available. I changed the background to a photo that I took. Once again this is a 83XX version for OS 4.5.

Downloads:
Zip File
OTA

I just arrived to Little Rock, Arkansas today. It was about 9:50pm local time when I arrived to the Peabody hotel. I was hungry and I noticed that the restaurant was open for 10 more minutes, so I thought I would try to see if I could get in before they close.

The name of the restaurant here is the Capriccio Grill. They claim to have “The Best Steaks In The City. ANY CITY”. So I thought I would put them upto the test. I figure if I have to be in Little Rock I might as well enjoy myself while I am here.

So I decided to go with the 8 oz. fillet. Of course I ordered it medium rare, like every red blooded American should. They served some very nice bread to go along with the meal.

The steak came out with a pad of garlic and chive butter on it. The steak was cooked exactly how I would have expected it to be cooked. The first cut I made into the steak told me that this was going to be good. I took the bite into my mouth and it confirmed that their ad campaign was not a farce or untrue in any way, this was the best steak I ever had. It was so tender, juicy and completely full of flavor.

I literally asked the waiter to give my compliments to the chef and tell him this is the best steak I ever had. So if you are ever passing through Little Rock and have the chance to go to Capriccio Grill, DON’T PASS IT UP!

Here is a picture of the steak taken with my phone, so don’t pass judgement from the picture, it looked much better than this picture can represent.

Well I got quite a few requests to make a Zen version of this theme so I did it. I made a few changes between the Zen and Icon version. I removed the titles for the icons (zen icons are significantly smaller) and I updated some of the icons. I also removed the boxes around all of the icons. Let me know what you guys think.

Update:
I have updated the theme to include the profile icon in the banner.

Requirements:
4.5 OS
Blackberry Curve 83XX

Disclaimer:
I take no responsibility if this ruins your device!

Downloads
ZipFile
OTA

Well I decided I would give it a go on creating my own BlackBerry theme. This is an icon theme for BB OS 4.5+. I am calling it “Minimal Blue“. I really don’t have any desire to create non icon themes unless there is a lot of need for it.

Do not try to install this theme unless you are running OS 4.5! So far I have only made one build, it is for the Curve (83XX). I have tested it on a Verizon 8330 running OS 4.50.51. That is the only model I currently have access to.

Requirements:
BlackBerry Curve 83XX
BlackBerry OS 4.5 or later
A Need for a truly original theme

DISCLAIMER:
I take no responsibility for this software if it wrecks your BlackBerry and turns it into a pile of molten ash. So user beware!

Click Here To Download ZIP

Click Here To Download OTA

UPDATE:
OTA install is now working, I also update the theme a little.

Well I installed the latest beta of the 4.5 OS (CDMA Version 4.5.0.51) on my 8330 Blackberry Curve last week. Now that I have had a few days to test it out I just thought I write down my impressions of the new OS.

First and Foremost the thing that jumps out at me is the speed improvement. With 4.3 I needed to reboot the phone every couple days in order to keep things running smoothly. This problem does not seem to be as apparent with 4.5, it has yet to become unresponsive at any point.

One new item they included with 4.5 is HTML email, this is nice. Before 4.5 if you received an HTML email it showed all the tags for Links, etc. Now it is nice and clean.

The media player is much improved over 4.3. With 4.3 there would be a considerable delay between songs during playback. It is by no means an iPod replacement yet, but it is much more palatable. In fact I am using it as I write this listening to the best band ever. The audio quality is unchanged still sounds as good as a 3rd gen iPod Nano to me. Disclaimer, I am not a super high end audiophile so take this into consideration.

The Bad:

Vlingo no longer works. If you give it a voice command it just spins for 30 seconds and then times out. I imagine this will be corrected with the final release.

Some of your themes won’t work if you use custom themes. My favorite theme is bPhone, unfortunately it has not been updated for the 4.5 OS.

4.5 has the same old browser. It gets the job done most of the time, but it can be a little slow on CSS heavy pages. I don’t imagine it is going to get much better anytime soon, but one can only hope.

The Verdict:

Even with the bad (most should be corrected in the final version of the OS) I am extremely happy with the new OS. I would definitely say get it when this OS comes out for your carrier it would be worth your while.

I have had troubles with my RSS feed so I updated to 2.6. I am not sure how to fix this but in my settings I am getting an error that says the following:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: date_default_timezone_set() in /homepages/46/d148457583/htdocs/jonecat/blog/wp-content/plugins/rss-stream/rss-stream.php on line 412

Line 412 of rss-stream.php says:

date_default_timezone_set(get_option('RSS_Stream_timezone'));

I know some of you guys use wordpress for your blogs, any ideas out there?

This is a shot I took while in Utah a week ago, goto my flickr page for more.