I’ve had my Pearl for a little over a year now…actually, I’ve had a Pearl for a little over a year now - my first BlackBerry Pearl was recently replaced on warranty due to a sticky little Pearl (rollerball). Apparently it’s a common problem.

Since I got my phone, it has called 911 from my pocket between 10-20 times. This is because of emergency access when the phone is locked. When the Pearl is in locked mode, touching the rollerball will bring up a menu that says: “unlock”, “emergency call”, and “cancel”. Touching the rollerball when on this menu has a 33% chance of dialing 911.

This always happened to me when I was out of the house and my BlackBerry was in my pocket, where it usually lives when I’m on the go. So I always forgot to resolve the issue when I’d get home - eventually getting another call from 911 asking if there was an emergency. The same way you always forget that you don’t have any butter until you need butter.

I did a quick search on Google for: “disable emergency call blackberry pearl” and the first page returned gave me the answer I was looking for: The Pearl has a standby mode, which you access by holding the “mute” button down for 2 seconds - it’s on the top left of your Pearl. This will allow you to receive calls but it deactivates any input from the user’s end, so you can carry it in your pocket without any call-out consequence. It was exactly what I was looking for.

from Pinstack.com:

…I also use the “standby” mode. My phone is always in my pocket and I find the “standby” mode to be much easier to use and pushing a button, while in standby, doesn’t flash the screen and wear the battery down while sitting in your pocket. Just hold the “mute” button on the top for 2 seconds and press the same button once to get it out…

Over the last week I’ve seen Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus presentation mentioned in many really smart people’s blogs (Darren Barefoot, Jeremy Zawodny, Warren Freyburg, Lifehacker…). The presentation took place at Web Expo 2.0 in San Francisco.

I’ve been so busy lately I wasn’t able to find the 15 minutes to watch Shirky’s presentation until this morning. It was really worth watching! Take the 15 mins away from a sitcom rerun to watch Shirky speak. Or read the transcript: Looking for the Mouse.

“He does such a good job at explaining how and why watching TV is no longer the de-facto spare time activity that I’m going to simple force people to watch it when they claim not to understand how I have no time to watch television.” -Jeremy Zawodny

To sum up Shirky’s presentation - we’ve been spending years in front of the TV instead of participating. He believes that “doing” is better than not. That the future lies in interactive media, because that is what we want and the younger generation expects; to participate. To give you an idea of how much time we spend in front of the TV when we could be doing something, he points out:

“So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.” -Clay Shirky

So it seems we’ve got a huge surplus of time on our hands that we spend in front of the TV. If North Americans were to give up their American Idol / Canadian Idol habits and do something with that time, I wonder what we could accomplish?

If you were to spend 30 minutes less time watching TV every day, what would you fill that time with?

Speaking of feet, last night I received a link to Vancouver’s Mostly Lisa performing a “feet” of agility in front of a Chichen Itza Pyramid in Mexico. This morning a link from Beyond Robson led me to Parkour in Vancouver, which led me to the following video of three people running around town doing things I could only dream of being able to do. It’s well worth the watch…

I hope to see more people participating in Parkour, as it’s entertaining to watch and it looks like it’s really good for the body too!

I learned about this from the Simplebits RSS feed:

50 Ways to Help the Planet

Great roundup of fifty little things we can all do to help. Part of Wire & Twine’s The Green Line.

Check it out - most of the changes are indeed pretty simple.

Happy Earth Day!

I was doing a little reading on Wikipedia about Earth Day and it mentions there are two different Earth Days - April 22 and on March equinox - who knew? Learn more about ourEarth Days at Wikipedia.

As I mentioned on twitter this morning…last night I discovered a cool TV show on National Geographic’s HD channel: Big Ideas for a Small Planet. They were having a marathon of all the episodes to date, I think.

I’m not sure, but it looks like Big Ideas for a Small Planet was originally aired on Sundance Channel. It was really inspiring to see so many people working to make the world a better, more sustainable place.

Last summer I posted about William McDonough and his Cradle to Cradle Design ideas, which I think are exactly what we need. If you’ve never heard of McDonough follow the links from this article to a good video about Cradle to Cradle design.

Not quite Palm Springs weather…

All week CBC Radio’s been telling me that we’re going to have a 21 degree sunny Saturday (tomorrow). I can’t wait to feel the sunshine, as it’s been a really LONG winter this year.

I booked a tee time for tomorrow morning for Bridget and I. I hope to pick up a BBQ tonight so we can have one full summer day in the middle of April.

Don’t let me down weatherman!

It’s been a busy week. I’m getting into the spring cleaning mode - it may be directly related to the Canucks’ poor showing last night… or it may be that I’m hedging my bets with the sun gods so we can have a warm summer.

I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. What a beautiful new interface - so clean! The upgrade process was painless. The same as usual.

I also installed a new theme today (links at the bottom of page), as I was bored of the old Kubrick theme and I thought I’d shake things up. Hopefully I’ll get a few hours soon to customize the blog once again.

This post is being written on my new computer too (I bought the parts at NCIX in Langley). I put it together on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning. Here are the specs:

• 2.40GHZ Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
• ASUS P5K-E/WIFI-AP
• 4GB RAM 8GB - Crucial Ballistix
• GeForce 8800GT XT 512MB
• 1 x 150GB WD Raptor 10,000 RPM HDD
• 2 x Western Digital SE16 500GB SATA2 7200RPM HDDs
• 20″ Apple Cinema Display
• 19″ Sharp LCD UltraSharp 2009W 20” Widescreen LCD
• Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit Edition

I’m loving the new machine - it’s so fast!

So check out Wordpress 2.5 - the new media uploading feature is really slick.

Just when I thought I could start getting my golf gear ready for some early season golf - here comes the snow again. I’m not really complaining. I like the snow and snowboarding.

Last Saturday we took advantage of this lovely winter weather by heading up to Cypress Mountain for a day of snowboarding. It was an absolutely gorgeous day. The sun was out, the snow was soft, and the lineups were surprisingly short. It was my first day of riding this season and it felt great to be back on a board again. Unfortunately I forgot my camera, but Flickr user “louder” posted some pics from the following day that looked pretty much the same as what we saw. We’re planning a Sun Peaks adventure sometime in the coming weeks.

So I guess I’ll leave the golf clubs packed away in the garage for another week…

I had a dentist appointment this morning on the Westside. Most people don’t like going to the dentist, but I really like to visit my dentist’s office. The views from the office are amazing, he’s a great dentist, and the staff always treat me really well. It almost feels like “Cheers” without the beer. I always get a “Jer!” whenever I walk in the door.

View a LARGE version of this image.

As I mentioned, the view from the chair is really good. I only visit the dentist once every six months, which means I always forget to bring my camera along. Today, with the weather being so good, I remembered.

The photo above is a panorama composed of five photos. I stitched them together using Adobe Photoshop CS3’s -> Photomerge command.

Enjoy the view!