I’m happy. In their first game without Heisman Trophy winner, Carson Palmer, 8th ranked USC beat 6th ranked Auburn 23-0! This was suppose to be one of the harder games for SC this year and they seems to get by it no problem. You know what this means? We’re getting tanked tonight! I can’t wait for the rest of the season. Go Trajans!

So after ordering late in the day yesterday, I already have my hands on my Sony Ericsson T616 and have been playing with it for the last couple of hours. My first impressions?

This thing is built like no other Sony Ericsson phone and that’s a very good thing. It’s covered by an aluminum and mid-grade plastic body. It’s a bit larger and heavier than my T68i and that is also a good thing. I found the T68i way too small to handle. The “joystick” and buttons also feel much more solid. I wont be worried about breaking them off by throwing it in my pocket (a scare I had with my T68i). The screen is large (for an Ericsson) and very bright. There’s no problems seeing it in the sunlight. It’s spec’d at 68k colors, but I haven’t really been checking out photos on it to tell.

This phone is quick. Startup is quick. Moving through contacts is quick. SIM card loads are quick. With my T68i, I felt like I could turn on the phone and walk away for 5 minutes before it was ready to use. None of that with the T616. I’m guessing you can credit that to the updated OS running on it which is simply a lot less “dry” than on other Sony Ericsson phones. The T616 is Bluetooth enabled with full iSync compatibility. Mac OS X found it instantly and had all of my calendars and contacts transfered within a minute or so. You gotta love Apple for this kind of simplicity.

There is one thing that I don’t like about the T616. There is a camera on it and I have no need for it. In fact, I don’t know who would need it. Seems way too gimmicky. It’s really not that great of a camera anyway and it takes up a lot of memory I could use for other things. I haven’t fully tried it yet, but I’ll put up a gallery soon for you check out.

Now back to the pros. For me, this is the pro. Unlike my T68i, I am actually getting strong signals in places where I couldn’t before! The reception is incredible from what I’ve seen so far.

So I guess you can say I like the T616. Ok, you can say I love the T616! It’s damn sexy looking, feature rich, does work as a stand-alone phone, and performs all of the tasks I need it to do extremely well. Anyone want a T68i? You can have it for a big bowl of nothing and maybe some shoelace ends.

So being the spastic buyer I am, I just couldn’t wait for the Hiptop plan to go though. Just bought the Sony Ericsson T616 to replace my T68i (easily the worst phone I’ve ever owned) and unlike that one, the T616 is getting great reviews. It should be coming in on Thursday. That’s the worst part of any kind of online order. You need to wait.

Wired.com does a small interview with Snow Crash author, Neal Stephenson. His new book, Quicksilver, will be released later next month. I’ll be there to pick it up.

Wow. I must be bored this morning. Using Google’s language tools, here’s my site in Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Portuguese. I have no idea how well it was translated. Here’s also a friend’s site (originally written in Spanish) translated to English.

Now I just need to figure out how it works.

The Aug. 18, 2003 InformationWeek magazine has a great cover. It’s a picture of New York at night during the black out with the title “What A Week: The Blaster Worm. A Massive Power Outage. What’s Next?” Very nice. Time has a similar one, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as nice as the one on IW. Check it out if you can.

Timothy Muris, Federal Trade Commission Chairman: “If such a list were established, I’d advise customers not to waste their time and effort… Most spam is already so clearly illegitimate that the senders are no more likely to comply with new regulations than with the laws they now ignore.”

If the penalty for not complying to the list is bad enough and the people in charge of enforcing the regulation actually enforce it, I don’t see how we can’t make some progress.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.: “The FTC chairman says nothing will work, but Americans know something has to be done… A do-not-spam list isn’t going to solve all the problems with spam, but it’s the most broad-based and aggressive approach we know.”

There ya go! It’s better than just saying “fuck it”.

When your team has one of the worst defenses in the league, you don’t go and trade away one of the best defensive tackles.