Phone
My old phone had an unfortunate accident and its antenna snapped off. It doesn't work very well without its antenna, so I'm looking for a new phone. Usually, when I'm in need of new hardware, I turn to Ian's House of Secondhand Electronics. Ian is almost always up-to-date with the latest gadgets, and hence often has older technology that he's no longer using. Since Ian had recently showed me his new super-phone, I figured there'd be a good chance he had another, unused phone lying around somewhere. Sure enough, he did.

My old phone has the size and functionality approaching that of a small housebrick. It can store numbers on the SIM card, dial them, turn itself off without no good reason, and snap its antenna off should you sit upon it. I was hoping for a new phone that had about the same set of features or better, so Ian's "old" phone was a bit of a surprise.

The phone has a Java Virtual Machine, mp3 player, WAP, an assortment of games, voice dialing, dictaphone, infra-red port, and a variety of other things that I'm sure are completely unnecessary on a mobile phone. It uses multi-media memory cards (MMCs), exactly the same things that my Palm uses. In fact, it talks to the Palm rather well. I've almost reached the stage where I can get my Palm to dial out through the phone, and establish an ssh connection with a remote machine.

I've only found two problems with the phone. It doesn't appreciate my Palm trying to send its entire vcard database at once (it only accepts the first entry), and one of the most useful buttons is broken. The broken button can be ignored 90% of the time, and is a complete and utter pain in the rear for the remaining 10%. On the other hand, Ian is selling the phone at a very reasonable price, so I'll have to see what I think over the coming week.

Work
I so want to be back on holidays.

Frontier: First Enounters
Wow, it really does work under Linux. In fact, it works really really well under Linux. I'm very impressed.

Chickens
One of our chickens is still broken. For reasons unknown, she's laying eggs with very thin shells. This is very bad, since they break in the nest and foul it. This messes up the other eggs, bedding materials, and any chickens that are inclined to go broody. The chooks have plenty of grit and calcium sources available.

Unfortunately, I have no idea which chicken is having difficulties. Separating a few of the hens around laying time should reveal the culprit.