A Damn Tough Phone.

My Casio EXILIM C721 by Verizon.

Do not try this at home.

I have had this phone for about 3 months. I regularly use it for taking photos for work. (Accident scenes, and so on.) There were three major factors in choosing this phone for my personal use.

• Price: I think it was $25 with my plan.
• Camera: This phone has a 5.1 mp camera with OPTICAL zoom. (Seriously, how many phones have optical zoom.) Good enough to shoot a 3x5 print.
• Mil-Spec rating: It is rated 810F, meeting standards for Water (immersion and rain), Humidity, Salt-Fog, Shock, Vibration, Dust, Altitude and Temperature. (From the manual.)

I am hard on my equipment (you should see my prior phone, still alive after 4 years.) So I was looking for something durable. This was it.

Just this last week I was on vacation in California, and was taking photos at the beach. After the last photo, I bumped my hand while re-holstering the camera, dropping the camera into the receding surf. It was immersed for about 5 seconds in a salt-water and fine sand slurry. I jumped down off the rock and recovered the phone giving it a quick shake and rinse in the salt water to remove the sand. Great relief showing that it still worked. About 20 minutes later at the car, I gave it a fresh water rinse to be sure that the salt would not damage it. My wife gasped as I poured water over my phone, but it did the job. Still works like a charm. Mind you, it was in 'sealed' mode, no ports were open (the SD card and headphone port have watertight seal covers.)

A recent addition was getting a Zagg Invisible Sheild for the phone, it covers the screen, back and back of the flip. It still fits in the charging stand, it is maybe 4 mils thick, and protects the body from scratches. It took about 20 minutes to apply.

I hate network problems.

The network at work is crashing. It sucks. We can still do our job, but we actually have to work now. This trouble has been going on for about 2 weeks now, luckily it only affects our monitoring systems, not the e-mail, network drives, or internet.

Like I said, it just breaks our "Das Blinkenlights." installation.

(Funny thing, Google Chrome thinks that page is in german!)

Dang how time flies

Ok, so I am not so good at actually keeping up with this blog thing. Yes, I could say that I have been busy, but that is a lame excuse for not taking a couple of minutes to at least post something.

People are funny critters. There is a video of a guy racing (on foot) to keep up with a train as it leaves the station. He ran full bore into a sign post. Watching him regain consciousness is interesting, one limb at a time moving slightly. After a bit, he stands up, and jumps a railing into auto traffic (nearly getting hit by a Caddy.)

Two weeks later, similar gig, but he fell towards the train. He was released from hospital the next day. Lucky guy.

I heard the sonic booms this afternoon, fighter jets scrambled for an airspace violation in Seattle. I didn't think they sounded quite like the Ft. Lewis shelling we get a lot of around here.