tigertoy

This is somewhat painful for me to admit, but I've never owned a smartphone and I don't know enough about the market to be able to make good choices.  I'm looking for advice, in the hope of being able to get something that will actually help me with my problems rather than just wasting a lot of money that I don't have to spare.

I am hoping to get something that will let me connect a computer to the Internet at home where I have lousy dialup as my only option.  I am worried about whether that's actually a viable option, but as dialup is working less and less well for me, I am becoming more and more desperate.  So I'd like to learn what I could really get, what I'd have to do to make it work, and how much it actually costs.  (Which I do know enough to understand is more than the big print in the ads wants you to think.)  I need to learn: which company is best to deal with, what phone and plan would work, does it actually work at my house, and what do I have to buy in addition to the phone and the plan to get my ancient Windows XP box to talk through it.  My big problem here is that I want this to be my primary Internet connection, not just an occasional supplement.  I'm really hoping to hear from people who have actually made this work.

If, after learning all the details, the verdict is that it's just not economically useful to use this as an Internet connection, my fallback position is that I'm looking for the cheapest option that allows me to do basic phone things (very few voice calls, but I need the option, a few dozen or a few hundred texts a month) and also lets me surf the web, take pictures, and maybe run an app or two.  Is there a prepaid option for an Android phone?  Has anyone actually used it?

Any chance anyone can give me the name of the song that Talis did at the Dead Duck filk that's a follow-on to Witch of the Westmoreland?

I'm doing my Pegasus nominating ballot, at the last minute of course, and it's hard to nominate a song when you don't remember the name.

I'll also take this moment to remind anyone else who has opinions and hasn't filled out a nominating ballot to go do it.  Remember, you don't have to have five nominees in every category to be a valid ballot.  If you have some stuff you want to nominate but have been holding off because you don't think you can fill the whole thing, just go put down the stuff you really want to nominate!

Several weeks ago, just as we were learning that a major oil spill was happening in the Gulf, I distinctly recall hearing a news story that explained that the reason that the now infamous blowout preventer failed to work was that it was built with two redundant control systems, but one of them had been disconnected and they let the batteries go dead in the other.  In more recent weeks, we've heard lots of finger pointing and grandstanding and promises to get to the bottom of what happened, but I haven't heard any repeat mention of the specific, extreme negligence described in the earlier report.  Was I hallucinating?  Was that report discredited, or was it quietly forgotten because it's in some people's interest to have a big ongoing controversy about what went wrong?

Someone linked to this comic in a locked post.  After I finished sporfling, I had these random thoughts:

Everyone is familiar with Clarke's Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")  A lot of people have come up with jokes or tag lines twisting it around in various ways.  A piece, I'm pretty sure by Arlan Andrews, I'm pretty sure published in Analog in the 80s (probably a Probability Zero) called "Indian Summa", took a couple of pages to set up "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."  Berry Gehm quipped, somewhen, that "Any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced."  There was a fortune cookie on one of the Unix systems I once worked on that claimed "Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature."

Does anyone have any more good variations on this time-honored theme?

My Internet connection is so crappy right now that I don't think I have a prayer of extracting real sense from any of the weather sites tonight.

Does anyone up Chicago way have an opinion as to whether, if I drive up to Chicago tomorrow during the day (which I don't think will be a problem), I'll be able to get back again by early Sunday afternoon?  The last I heard there was supposed to be some weather coming in Saturday night, and I'm wondering how it looks from up there right now.

Last weekend at OVFF I conversed with a woman who had the badge name "Badger".  I'd like to stay in touch, but I didn't think to get any sort of contact info.  I saw her real name once, but I'm doing well to remember the badge name.  I don't know if she's on LJ.  If anyone who was at OVFF knows how to contact her, let me know.  Replies are screened.

ETA: Badger has been located.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a web site for keeping general to-do lists?  I'd like something that's semi-secure (i.e., requires login and doesn't share my list with the world) and is convenient and dialup-friendly the way frequently editing an LJ entry is not.  I want it to be web based so it's available from any computer.  I thought LiveJournal had a to-do list feature, though I never used it, but I can't find it now.  (Am I delusional, or did they remove it?)

Suppose I wanted to sew something made of heavy duty fabric that needed to stand up to a lot of stress, such as if I wanted to replace a broken clip on a backpack strap.  What kind of thread is strong enough to hold well?  Does it require a special needle?  Is there a better way to get the needle through such heavy fabric than "use a thimble and push really hard"?

What is the simplest/best way to control the line spacing of HTML lists?  I'm specifically talking about putting a list in an LJ entry, so I don't have a separate style sheet I can reuse and I want something concise.  Specifically, I want to avoid having any extra blank lines before and after the list and between the items.

( example behind cut to spare your friends page )

Also: do best practices include a </li> at the end of each item?  I thought all tags were supposed to have ends, but the examples on the W3C web site don't use </li>. Hah, I answered a part of my own question: if I leave out the </li> it doesn't put a space between the items, but it still puts extra lines at the beginning and end. But I want to know if leaving out the </li>s is going to screw up somebody else's browser. Or if putting them in does.

Yes, I did spend some time trying to look this up myself, but I don't want to spend all day learning HTML.  So please don't point me at a reference web site unless you can point me to a specific page on that web site that answers my question.

Some time ago, I looked into Hughes satellite internet and determined that it was a complete non-starter even when there are no wired options available -- even the most expensive plan is limited to 100MB a day.  Until tonight, I was unaware that there were other satellite providers that were different.  I've just learned of the existence of WildBlue.  It's still satellite, it's expensive ($90/month for the real version), and the bandwidth is limited.  But it's limited at a possibly-livable level of 17GB/month.  And I'm really sick of dialup.

And they're offering free installation (apparently worth $200+ -- I say "apparently" because I'm somewhat worried that the "I'm an idiot" installation that they'll do for free won't be acceptable and the "I'm not an idiot" installation will still cost) until the end of the month.

Does anyone out there in LJ-land have anything good or bad to say about this service?  I'm especially interested in actual personal experience, but reliable rumors and trustworthy hearsay are also welcome.