Today was my second day, and I’m glad that I did this. Even if I were to learn absolutely nothing (and that’s not the case, I’ve already learnt a few things) the networking opportunities are tremendous! If you are in my situation, a course like this I think will take you from the mountain top to the stratosphere, since quite aside from the things you learn you get to put your work and your work ethic in front of people who can break you into the industry. I’m really, really excited about this course, I can’t wait to get deeper into the work!

…anyway I find out next week. We shall see.

Meanwhile, Michael drove his rental car around the neighborhood. When he returned to meet us he was exasperated. “The food here is awful! No fruit, vegetables are moldy. Only meat, canned food, and soda. What do kids eat? The guy at the store told me no one would eat fruit unless it’s in a can. Is that true?”

Curtis shook his head. I told Michael, “When we get back to New York, I will talk with you about diet and quality of food availability in poor neighborhoods.”

I am not a multi-millionaire, but I have never been lacking for anything that I needed, nor most things that I wanted. It was an eye opener to read about how people can live with such little money, and how creative they were in managing what little they have. It’s a great read.

Seventeen people, including a child left in a critical condition, were injured when soldiers fired live bullets instead of blanks during an open day display in Carcassone, France, regional officials said.

What is it with the French?

(EDIT AT YOUR OWN RISK!)

The “carousel” menu

I like this menu, but I don’t like that you can’t change the programs that it displays. From the “Recent Applications” screen you can click on the right softkey to go into the “Main Menu”, but that’s time wasted waiting for the carousel to load and go away. The name of the carousel menu app is “Hotlist.exe”, and to change the program that is launched when you press the “Start” key, go to:

\ HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Shell \ Rai :MSHotlist\ 1

…and change the value to a different launcher. I used the app that shows the “Main Menu”, which is called “Gridview.exe”.

The side hardware button

The Treo 500v ships with the side hardware button (not the volume buttons, the one below those) not linked to any program on a click, but will launch Pocket IE when held down for a time. There doesn’t seem to be any reason for this except that either Vodafone or Palm forgot about it when then were setting up the phone. You can change it so that when you press down on the button it will launch one program, but when you press and hold down it will launch another. To do the former you have to change these two keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Apps \ KeyAssignment \ Click \ 195 <br/> “Open” = “\ Program Files \ YourProgram.exe” <br/> “Remap” = dword: 00000000 <br/>

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Apps \ KeyAssignment \ Default \ Click \ 195 <br/> “Open” = “\ Program Files \ YourProgram.exe” <br/> “Remap” = dword: 00000000 <br/>

…and to change the latter:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Apps \ KeyAssignment \ PressAndHold \ 195 <br/> “Open” = “\ Program Files \ YourProgram.exe” <br/> “Remap” = dword: 00000000 <br/>

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Apps \ KeyAssignment \ Default \ PressAndHold \ 195 <br/> “Open” = “\ Program Files \ YourProgram.exe” <br/> “Remap” = dword: 00000000 <br/>

I’ve changed my phone so that it launches the “carousel” menu on a click, and the camera on press and hold:

Click — Open: “\Windows\Hotlist.exe” <br/> PressAndHold — Open: “\Windows\Camera.lnk” <br/>

The Vodafone Live! softkey

I bought my phone unlocked from eBay, and I don’t use Vodafone, so it’s pretty pointless to have a button devoted to a link I can’t use. I do, however, lean pretty heavily on my tasks program, so I changed it to launch Tasks instead:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ software \ microsoft \ home \ key \ 113 <br/> “Default” = “Whatever the label should be” <br/> “Open” = “\ Program Files \ YourProgram.exe” <br/>

You should be able to change the icon as well with the “IconResDll” and “IconResID” keys, but I’m not sure where the icon for the Tasks program is, and it’s not that important for me anyway.

Start Menu icon order

The last thing I did was to put all the apps that are useful but aren’t used too often (like the calculator, voice notes etc) in a folder in the Start Menu. But folders are placed low in the list, with Windows prioritising application icons. To change the order, and to “pin” my “Quicklist” folder to the top of the menu:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Shell \ StartMenu \ Order

…and edit the “Order” key by adding (or removing) a line from the list.

That’s all the changes I’ve made to my phone so far, and it’s working pretty well for me. I’m no expert though, so you make these changes AT YOUR OWN RISK. I also had a fair bit of help to find these myself, the solution for the “Start” button I found here, the left hardware button here and the Start Menu order here.

Hope this works as well for you as it does for me.

There is almost no user-generated information about this phone online, which tells me: people who are likely to write about this stuff isn’t interested in this phone, or it’s not selling very well. Which is a shame, it’s actually a pretty good phone.

The microphone is very loud, and has excellent noise cancellation. I’ve been asked to speak softer by a few people on the other end of the line even in noisy places.

The keyboard is very good, I’d say as good as a Blackberry Curve. It is a tiny bit stiff, but the keys are well spaced and I can almost touch type on it. The only thing I didn’t like is the spacebar, there are two separate buttons on each end, and when you press it feels a bit inaccurate.

The “carousel” menu, which is only on the Vodafone version, is very good — if you’ve never used a smartphone before. It provides no customisation options, it’s hardwired to show only the programs that the phone ships with, so if you prefer Opera to Pocket IE, you have to navigate deeper into the menu structure into the basic Windows Mobile menus to find it. On the other hand, the menu is very clever, displaying favourite contacts, messages (email and sms/mms), recent programs, upcoming appointments and the like in a slick interface.

There are very few user customisable features at all, although this may be because this is the Standard edition of Windows Mobile. It is rather annoying that Microsoft ripped out all the bits that would be too hard to navigate without a touch screen, rather than spending a bit of time solving the UI problems.

(If you are comfortable with digging through the registry, I’ve found a few of the keys that can be edited to customise the phone. More in a later post.)

The UI itself suffers from all the general Windows Mobile problems, but the smartphone verison isn’t as fiddly as the touchscreen version, and can quite easily be used one-handed. One thing it does fall down hard on is you can’t quickly switch from one active program to another, the way that you can on a Symbian phone (which uses a special hardware key to do it). It’s pretty dumb, given that you can’t actually exit most applications from inside the application, you have to dig through a billion menus to find the Task Manager program to close applications. But, overall, it’s not too bad, and it’s snappy enough most of the time.

Push email and Activesync in general is awesome. This is my first exposure to Microsoft’s Exchange/Activesync/Outlook triangle, and I have to say that I am very impressed. I can definitely see why this is so popular for businesses, and why Apple licensed Activesync. That’s not to say that I haven’t had problems, though the problems seem to be network related rather than phone/server related. Combined with Mobipush, a free push email service, I now get push email straight from Gmail, with HTML, without having to pay Blackberry tax.

The camera, in good light, is exceptional — for a phone. In bad light? Forget it.