I signed up online and for whatever reason Comcast won’t finalize your order until you have spoken to a representative via their chat application. Some how I managed to talk my way into faster internet service, for a lower cost, without the need for a second service, and mostly importantly no introductory rate. What I received is 16Mbps downloads 2Mbps uploads for $29.99 per month plus taxes.

They claimed the installer would come out to my house about 5 days to setup the cable and modem. Well I got a little impatient and decided to hook it up myself. Turns out the condo was already wired for cable and after pulling up a web browser Comcast Technician’s Service site came up. Well it’s not rocket science and I clicked through the screens, that took care of allocating my modem and line testing. I then called Comcast up and stated I didn’t need an installer to come out and paid for the first month’s service now without the installer fee ($25).

I have had the service for 9 days now and am impressed. It’s just as fast as my Charter connection I had in Fort Worth and the upload is a bit faster. In those 9 days I’ve downloaded 131GB and uploaded 44GB. I hear Comcast has a 250GB cap, I hope that isn’t true because at this rate I’ll hit that limit by the 15th.

Now for a screen shot:

New
Its easy to spot this type. They are timid and obviously aren’t fully comfortable with their bike. Generally the way the handle their bike in parking lots can tell you a lot about the rider. Hopefully you’ll never realize you are riding with a new rider in a corner.

Social
These riders generally meet up at a local venue to chat about past experiences and general social conversations. These type of riders spend a lot of time not moving. And generally use a motorcycle to attract females for the purpose of fornicating.

Stunters
These riders are generally wide cannons and love the rush of adrenaline. Part of the reason they stunt is there competitiveness and partially due to the rush they get from the stunts. Generally have no/low concern for others, this rider type seems to attract some very immature riders.

Enduro
These riders are pure riders, they enjoy riding from destination to destination but not thinking of it like that. They ride to enjoy the experience of riding and the stops along the way. Think of them as tourist in a all-in-one package on the motorcycle.

Track-only
These are some crazy riders in themselves. Blasting knees isn’t a big deal, reducing lap time is where their focus is.

Anything-paved-is-a-track
Very similar to track only riders except they don’t have a concern for themselves or others and take the same track level of riding to the streets. No reserves just balls-out-riding all the time.

Well with the bike gone I sure as heck didn’t want to keep the truck. It was old, diesel, and turns as well a a yacht does. I put it on Craigslist and priced it below KBB hoping it would sell quickly. It being a turbo diesel work truck I figured it would. Well it took about 3 weeks which is a little long than previous vehicles I have sold on CL. I eventually sold it to a woman who lived 20 minutes from the Colorado border. She didn’t have a car and didn’t have a way to get to Santa Fe. If it sold the truck I would drive that far (3 hour drive). Well she wanted me to drive up there on a Thursday as she had commitments that weekend. So after work I start driving out to her place, I eventually arrive at 9pm in a storm. A storm which she is unwilling to drive me back in.

Also due to this storm, water is running down the hill her house is at the base of, straight into her house under the front door. So after spending 2 hours scooping water out of her house I tried to fall asleep in one of her guest bedrooms. Very unsuccessfully. My alarm went off at 4am and well I was mostly conscious already. We discuss the final arrangements for signing the title over, she then drove me back. Well she was a little timid driving at speed through the mountain passes and made me late to work. Oh well I figured as I sold the truck.

During all of this and several months previous actually I had been looking at buying a Miata. Ever since 2004 I’ve wanted one when a friend asked me to change the oil her 1990 Miata which she lent me for a weekend. After changing the oil and driving it a bit I didn’t want to give it back and even offered to buy it from her.

Unfortunately there weren’t any good deals in Albuquerque or Santa Fe for a Miata. However there were a couple in Colorado Springs that I wanted to check out as they looked promising. But there was a bit of a problem, Colorado Springs is a 5 hours drive from where I live and even further walk considering I didn’t have a car. But I had a plan. So Saturday afternoon I walked to the train station (9 miles), then took the train to Albuquerque (54 miles), then walked again (300 feet) to the bus station, took the bus to Colorado Springs (380 miles). One of the sellers was willing to meet me at the bus station so I could check out the car.

Over the years I checked out several Miata and this one was, without the extras, in good condition considering the price. The extras were a bit of a bonus (the hardtop and extra set of wheels). The only problem with the car is the engine, specifically it was one of the early Miatas with the short nose crank. I’ve still in the process of buying parts and gaining knowledge to fix it but should be a fairly straightforward process. I should have the car running by winter as I don’t really have a need for a car until then.

Here is a photo of her:

That is all.

I had this crazy idea to ride up to the ski basin after I got off work. According to Google Maps it should of took me 3 hours and 44 minutes. I’m not exactly sure on the heuristics used to figure that number but I figure I could beat it. And I pushed myself hard to do so. I made it up in 3 hours and 14 minutes, success right? Well I still had to make it back and it was ~7:30, I figured it wouldn’t take me as long to get back because it was mostly downhill. I was flying down the mountain, I passed a few cars actually which in itself is a rush. At one point I hit 39 MPH (according to the computer on the bike).

Did I mention I ran out of water once I reached the top. There is a refill station about half way down but on principle it is hard to stop when you are going fast and have to get home as quick as possible. So I passed up the refilling station and kept pushing myself to get home. Well I exerted myself too much and I was going through a very large intersection with a rail road diagonally cutting through it. I was too tired to do a wheelie over the track and the front tire got caught and my moment kept going straight. I hit the ground doing 25MPH. I landed on my shoulder first, then my body rolled a little, and the front sprocket dug into my shin area. My first thought after I knew I was crashing was “Shit my phone” as it was on a outside mesh pocket to get better GPS signal. It was fine. While I was laying on the ground I assessed I would get hit pretty soon so I jumped up and got my stuff out of the street. No visible damage to the bike. A couple of kids witnessed the crash and thought it was the coolest thing ever watching me crash and then jump up so quickly. I was spent and gave the kids some cash for some substances from the gas station. After some recouping with the water and sweets recently bought I went on home and fully assessed the damage to myself.

Worse of the damage (dumb luck right):

At the time I had been selling a lot of items of eBay and needed to keep up with current and potential customers while at my real-day-non-desk-job. A smartphone was an easy solution and at the time the iPhone had no competition. So that’s what I got from Craigslist, a used second generation iPhone that I had verified could be jailbroken and unlocked for use on T-Mobile’s network.

Initially I thought the phone was great. It had many more features than my trusty Nokia. A plethora of applications for anything you could think of. Plus it fulfilled my need to check my emails and interact on eBay’s site. After enough time and many updates to the OS on the iPhone I realized it was slow and laggy. Something which annoyed me terribly, plus I was limited to 2G service being that T-Mobile uses different 3G bands than any iPhone uses. At this point I started searching for a new phone.

Ironically at the time I was looking for a new phone I heard that Google had released a phone. The Nexus One certainly has some impressive specs for a phone. A 1Ghz processor, MicroSD card use, 512MB RAM, HSPDA Network, LED-lit screen, 5MP camera just to rattle off a few. Most things I buy used from Craigslist or eBay but the Nexus One was to recently released and actually was going for a higher a price on eBay than it was selling from Google for. So I bought my phone from Google without contract, a steep price for a phone surely but cheaper than if I would of gone the same route for a 3Gs iPhone.

I received the N1 from Google the next day via FedEx Overnight shipping. That was certainly plus in my book. I turned it on and well it was a learning curve. It took about 2 days to get used to but Androids is such a great and well designed OS. The integration between applications on Android is impressive. Not to mention the phone is so much faster than my previous iPhone. I’ve since used other older phones running Android and it’s impressive how Android manages resources even on older phones.

Android 2.2 is incredible fast, much faster than iOS4 or any other phone OS out there. I can’t see a reason to switching phone OSes anytime soon.

I originally wrote this guide to revert my modified N1 back to stock configuration. The reason I wanted to go back to stock is I wanted to install Froyo before there was a binary available from any dev such as Cyanogen. This guide could also be used if you want to sell your N1 or need to send your N1 back to HTC for select warranty work. It took me several attempts and lots of Googling before I found a way to produce easily repeatable results.

After lots of tinkering and many errors I finally found my problem was related to trying update to Froyo from a rooted and modified image. I had a rooted version of Froyo FRF50 and Amon’s custom recovery image flashed on the phone, later I found out both will cause errors when trying to flash an image straight from Google (duh type of hindsight).

Here is an example of one of the errors I received when trying to flash from Amon’s recovery image:

--Installing new image!
--Press trackball to confirm, or
--any other key to abort
--Install from sdcard...
Finding update package...
opening update package...
verifying update package...
E:No signature (411 files)
E:Verification failed
installation aborted.


This guide was written with the assumption that you purchased a random Nexus One on ebay and have no idea if the N1 is rooted or if it’s the system files have been modified in anyway. Or you just don’t know what the hell you are doing. This guide can be used from any starting point on your Nexus One; in terms of what is currently flashed on it.

Over the previous version (FRF50) of Froyo I was running this version has a much more responsive camera (as in the refresh rate seems higher), the gallery is much quicker as well, and my data speeds on this radio version are wicked fast (fastest to date on any of the speed test I’ve run; also worth noting the bands seem much more sure of themselves before just switching around and guessing which is the best to use.) Also Adobe Flash is… well it’s there but not necessarily working well.

Requirements

Software Needed:
Android SDK tools with fastboot binary
terminal
unzip – a binary version runnable from CLI (The GUI versions of the unzipper improperly unzip on OSX)

Google Binaries Needed:
Stock ERD79 full image
    22607-ERD79-update-nexusone-stock-images (mirror)
    md5: bef86698cafc88ca03fff5758571d9d6
ERE27 from ERD79 image from Google
    signed-passion-ERE27-from-ERD79.a487b405.zip (mirror)
    md5: 8b0d8390ae2fc680390a3662dcce89c3
FRF91 from ERE27 image from Google
    signed-passion-FRF91-from-ERE27.e410116a.zip (mirror)
    md5: 260520315add0ab8ac027b4014a79c1c

OS:
Linux or Mac OSX (Sorry Windows users, it will be the same concept. I just haven’t ran Windows since XP’s SP2 release)

Hardware Needed:
Nexus One
Micro USB Cable
Charged Battery

Skill Needed:
Some basic working knowledge of phone flashing
Comfortable running from CLI

WARNING You DO have the possibility of rendering your hardware useless by various means of deviating from this guide and even following it. Flashing the radio image is especially detrimental if flashed with a bad image or interrupted during it’s flash. Always flash with a full battery. Always flash with CRC/MD5/SHA checksum the files. There is risk involved so beware of that fact.

Backup:

Nandroid backup
So you can return to your current state. I suggest using Amon’s recovery image.

Backing-up the Call Log and Text Message threads
Really this is the only important piece of data that isn’t saved on the SD card in my opinion. There are two applications that backup and restore these data sets. The Backup Call Log by Kazuyuki Eguchi is here. And the SMS Backup & Restore by Ritesh Sahu is here. These applications are pretty self explanatory and I’m not going to hold your hand on how to use them.

Flashing

You want to have downloaded the SDK and uncompressed it. For simplicity purposes I have the SDK folder in the root folder (of this guide). Also you’ll want to have the fastboot binary uncompressed to the ./tools folder of the SDK.

Flashing to stock (ERD79 in this case; which is the original shipped rom)
This step is the most difficult but will put your N1 back to stock shipped state minus the unlocked bootloader which there is no way to revert to date.

Open a terminal and change to the tools directory of the Android SDK:

cd /android-sdk-mac_86/tools

Unzip the stock ERD79 image by issuing the command:

unzip 22607-ERD79-update-nexusone-stock-images.zip -d erd79/

Output of unzipping files:

  inflating: erd79/android-info.txt
  inflating: erd79/boot.img
  inflating: erd79/hboot_8x50_0.33.0012_091210.nb0
  inflating: erd79/microp_Passion_Passion#C_LED_V0B15_88V_20091203.img
  inflating: erd79/Radio_1202_2_20091214_Signed_PASSION.img
  inflating: erd79/recovery.img
  inflating: erd79/spcustom.img
  inflating: erd79/splash1.img
  inflating: erd79/system.img
  inflating: erd79/userdata.img

These files are unzipped to erd79 directory. Next you will need to clear the caches. Issue the following commands:

fastboot erase userdata

fastboot erase cache

If you get any errors for the erase commands just ignore them. It should be fine. This is the same as doing a factory data reset on the phone by accessing the menu options: Settings > Privacy Settings > Factory Data Reset.

This will actually revert all the system files and such back to the stock setup:

fastboot flash userdata erd79/userdata.img

fastboot flash system erd79/system.img

fastboot flash boot erd79/boot.img

fastboot flash recovery erd79/recovery.img

fastboot flash radio erd79/Radio_1202_2_20091214_Signed_PASSION.img

At this point you have a stock shipped N1 minus the unlocked bootloader which is as said before unable one thing that is unable to revert.

At this point you can continue to follow this guide if you don’t have an internet connection. Or if you turn on the phone and connect to a WiFi or Data connection and let your phone idle for about 8 minutes (depending on your internet connection). The phone will phone-home and prompt you install the latest publicly available build. You can also go to Settings > About > System Update for the status of the download for the latest build.

Flashing to ERE27

• While booted into the Android OS connect the N1 to your computer via USB.
• Enable the USB Storage on the phone.
• Move the file signed-passion-ERE27-from-ERD79.a487b405.zip to your root directory of your phone.
• Rename signed-passion-ERE27-from-ERD79.a487b405.zip to update.zip
• Shutdown the phone.
• While holding down the trackball, press the power button for a moment. This loads you into the fastboot basic OS.
• Select “BOOTLOADER” and hit the power button
• Wait a few seconds on this screen, it seems to take about 6 seconds for the menu system to start responding.
• Then select “Recovery”
• After a minute an Android robot with an exclamation point inside a triangle is displayed.
• Simultaneous press the power button and volume up hardware keys.
• Now use the trackball to select “Apple sdcard:update.zip” and about 4 minutes later you should be booting into ERE27.

Finally Flashing to Froyo (FRF91)

• While booted into the Android OS connect the N1 to your computer via USB.
• Enable the USB Storage on the phone.
• Move the file signed-passion-FRF91-from-ERE27.e410116a.zip to your root directory of your phone.
• Rename signed-passion-FRF91-from-ERE27.e410116a.zip to update.zip
• Shutdown the phone.
• While holding down the trackball, press the power button for a moment. This loads you into the fastboot basic OS.
• Select “BOOTLOADER” and hit the power button
• Wait a few seconds on this screen, it seems to take about 6 seconds for the menu system to start responding.
• Then select “Recovery”
• After a minute an Android robot with an exclamation point inside a triangle is displayed.
• Simultaneous press the power button and volume up hardware keys.
• Now use the trackball to select “Apple sdcard:update.zip” and about 4 minutes later you should be booting into Froyo.

Rooting

You’ll want to install a Amon’s RA Recovery image or Clockworkmods Recovery image and then this rooting zip if you want to root:
[ROOT] [KERNEL] [2.6.34] Quick rooter for stock FroYo systems + 2.6.34 kernel – XDA Developers

Helpful links and Credits:

[ROM] Original Shipping – Tutorial – XDA Developer
10/May Stock ROMs – ERD79 -> EPF21B images / zip / online kitchen (optional root / insecure / himem) – Modaco
How to manually update Nexus One with Android 2.2 FroYo (ERE27 to FRF50) – Bongizmo.com
The comprehensive list of update.zip links – Google Support Forum

The solution is to flash your phone with a rooting zip.

Today I went over all the photos I’ve shot. I’m at 4557 photos as of now, not including the few videos and LiveView which also actuates the shutter. My percentage of what I deem ‘decent photos’ is increasing from the initial 5% to 15% on this last hike; this is on hiking shoots.

The rating and tagging system that is in Lightroom I resisted at first. It’s the kind of thing that seems like too much work to be useful but being able to filter certain file with the Smart Collections is extremely handy when going over that many photos.

I’ve also gotten better at editing photos; I think, I could be wrong and if I am, please point it out. I won’t get butt hurt. I really should invest in a monitor calibrator at this point, in a few months I think I will. People are excited when I go on the hikes because of the shots I get. Which is ironic considering they are experiencing the real thing. Below is an example of edit. The post processed photo still looks washed out but a little better than it started. I would of been better off not shooting into the sun on this one. And honestly I don’t know why I spent the time editing it. But here it is.

Lightroom also exports the metadata from the camera into the JPEGs it exports which just turns on my geeky-ness. And lastly LR3 has a super effective export function to directly upload photos to a lot of services which eliminates the step for the user of creating the JPEGs and then uploading those JPEGs to that web service. Last I checked Facebook, SmugMug, Meetup.com, Adorama, ShutterFly, SnapFish, Photobox, Flickr, Photocart, KodakGallery, ImageArchiver, MobileMe, WalMart PhotoCenter, Costco PhotoCenter, CVS PhotoCenter, Photobucket, Gallery 1 and 2, and Google’s Picasa have plug-ins for at least LR2 and lots are being ported to LR3. The one for SmugMug is hands down the most developed of the ones I’ve used and it shows. That in itself makes has made me considered paying for SmugMug service.