I’m here in Bangkok Thailand, and brought an extra iPhone with me. Rather then just give the phone, I wanted to prepare a guide so they would understand the steps I’ve taken to setup it up. Since others might also be interested in understanding Jailbreaking and unlocking as well as a initial dashboard setup, I’ve decided to write and publish the guide here 
Enjoy, -Paul
Ok, so monday I was doing some research at the library when I get a message from a fellow vagabond about a flight deal, this time it was with JetBlue. I walk over to the nearest computer and start looking. The promotion was to celebrate their 10 year anniversary. Any flights on tuesday and wednesday, 10 dollars one-way or 17 roundtrip + taxes/fees. Ok, where to? To maximize the deal, I’d fly out tuesday, and back wednesday. That ruled out long flights like west coast trips. After some thought, I decided on New York City. I hadn’t been there in a while, I wouldn’t need to rent a car, and I wouldn’t spend long on the plane.
Next, I found a great deal on hotel on 95th street, a block away from Broadway and near the middle of Central Park, $67 including taxes.
From JFK to my hotel, $7.25 airtrain/subway, and same back.
Not bad for next day travel and 20minutes on the net
I switched my wednesday work day to tuesday (I typically commit to work only wed&thurs). Som already had wednesday off of work, so the timing worked out perfectly.
So I go in a bit early on tuesday, work a full day, then head home. There, my roommate Mark drive Som and I directly to the airport. Isaac my other roommate, graciously offered to pick me up on wednesday:)
Getting through the airport with simply a backpack was a breeze. Dulles looks so much better now that they have finished remodeling it and adding rail to the concourses. Upon arriving in JFK, we noticed lots of signage celebrating JetBlue’s 10 year birthday:)
When we got to the hotel, it felt like something out of hippyville. Each floor had different color walls. Some were orange, others were green, our newfound friends from Tokyo one floor down from us were yellow, the lounge was purple
That evening we walked down Broadway street. This city never sleeps. At the end of the night stopped in “Hot & Crusty” for some Manhattan style pizza. mmm mmm good:)
The next morning we took the subway to midtown and walked to Times Square. We had breakfast at the McD’s allowing for a great view of the square. The second floor was heavily decorated the NYC iconic theme, including a replica of the city.
After breakfast we went to learned more about Times Square at an information center, which included the New Years Ball that I’ve seen drop so many times in TV, and in person years ago with Angie.
Next we cruised through more of Manhattan and over to the NYC Public library.
Then up Avenue of the America’s to walk through the Rockefeller Center and see the NBC studios.
More sightseeing and eventually walked by the Apple store on the way to Central park. Had a great time in the park, such a beautiful piece of nature, surrounded by iconic skyscrapers and advertising blitz.
Including food, hotel, subway, and airfare, it ended up costing less then $100 each of us for a wonderful, last minute experience in NYC which didn’t interfere with work or any other commitments
We are imprisoned by habit, born of: comfort, social norms, repeated behavior, conditioning, and complacency.
Today I thought about two things, one to appreciate what we have at that exact moment, and second to live life to our potential at each moment.
Often we take for granted not only what we have, but also our ability to bring change, our capabilities. We often function with a day-to-day routine which neither uses the gifts we have, nor expands the boundaries which our daily activities continue to fortify. continue reading…
I had a discussion with my brother, Peter, and it got me thinking. Later when explaining things to Isaac, I could hardly believe how obvious it seemed, yet how programed we have been to resist it.
I learned many things in San Francisco, most jewels coming from my experiences at OneTaste. One lesson was to follow your desire, especially if you hesitate for some useless reason like social norms, public embarrassment, fear of tarnishing your image, etc. Those reasons just don’t make real sense, however they provide a “safe” sandbox for us to live our lives in. continue reading…
Sometimes in life, even when events start at different times and build at different rates, they still seem to all reach their inflection points together. As if they were the components of a carefully prepared feast, all orchestrated for consumption together.
I’m talking about a pragmatic shift in my view of programming. Let me start by giving you some history. I started professional Java programming back when java 1.2 just came out and I worked for SAIC as a Java programmer doing CORBA work (basically a precursor to SOAP, which was a precursor to REST). Java was a good evolution for me, as my background was in C/C++. I appreciated how programming in Java was faster, yet still had the clean, logical, syntax and expressiveness of C++. continue reading…
This afternoon in a flash of understanding, I realized something profound. I was talking about relationships, and how important it is that people are open and genuine with each other. Often people bend the truth, or leave things unsaid when interacting with others whom we like, and who we want to like us back. We show them the parts of ourselves that we think they will appreciate, and leave out the parts that we think they wont. continue reading…
Ok, if you’ve followed Apples’ release of Snow Leopard, you’ve probably heard that that out of the box it defaults to running 32bit, that it’s suppose to have speed enhancements, and that it’s slimmer in size. It’s all true. You can boot it into 64 bit by holding command-option-6-4 on bootup, or change your com.apple.boot.plist file. Even running 32bit mode however, it can still run 64bit apps, infact looking at activity manager, most of the apps running are 64bit regardless of boot mode. Also, things seems to run faster in 64bit mode. For example Geekbench ran ~3300 in 32bit, but 3600 in 64bit. Similar things can be said about other apps. continue reading…
If you own a home, you have certainly felt the loss in its value of the last few years. But, there is a silver lining. Mortgage escrow for property taxes, and home owners insurance. While home values have decreased, your payments in those areas has not adjusted as quickly as falling home values, but with two phone calls, you can update them now and make three valuable changes.
Here’s a detailed explanation: continue reading…
Any computing device that can’t fit in your pocket will be obsolete in >3 years.
Am I crazy? What am I talking about? Imagine this, you have a mobile, always connected device like an iPhone, with even more computing power, and faster wireless connectivity to others and to a massive datastore, i.e. virtual network storage of 10 TerraBytes.
When mobile, you can use the device to stream video from your network storage or from a video service like netflix, you can call friends and have a voice or a video call with them, you can check your schedule and invite friends to play basketball or over for dinner, you can receive a reminder from your dentist about your appointment coming up tomorrow. All this, and you are doing it from anywhere. continue reading…
Ok, so if you are like me, you’ve probably got a few email accounts huh? I have the one which I use for web purchases, one that has a silly name I made when I was in school, one I made so I could use MSN, another that is just old… oh, and there is my Gmail address just because:) continue reading…
