Wheee.

So, I've long been against the trendy notion of the "cameraphone," not because I'm inherently against trends, or people having cameras on them 24/7, or even the convergence of handheld electronic devices. In fact, I'm all for the convergence of handheld electronic devices, because I hate carrying a lot of shit on me. Any technology junkie will tell you, however, that the first "matings" of various such devices inevitably results in utter crap. In technology, at least for the first few waves, swiss-army-knifery almost always means your blade can't cut a damn thing, your bottle opener has trouble with cork above the density of strawberry pudding, and the little piece of metal that makes your scissors spring back open breaks the first time you use it. I promise if you think about it enough, that metaphor is insightful.

The problem I've had with cameraphones is exactly that - they are usually cameras first, and phones second, and bad at both of them. This is important to me, as - novel as the camera idea is - I want a phone first and foremost, and I want it to be a good one. I want a Phonecamera. This is because I am geeky and personal-publishing-enthusiasty enough to find having a camera on me all the time, especially a connected one that can fire images off to the various internets, a huge draw, but I also need to be able to make phone calls and run on a single charge for days at a time. I'm not against the idea of a camera/phone device, I just want it to not totally suck at one or the other, preferably both.

Enter the Nokia 6230, scourge of the haphazardly designed convergence device. My brother got one for his job for the bluetooth functionality, and since my contract with Cingular ran out in December, I'd been hemming and hawing about whether to take advantage of the roughly 3,000 "PLEASE SIGN BACK UP, LOOK FREE SHINY PHONE, RAR NEED CONTRACT" promotions they had been sending me per second. Apparently free agency scares the hell out of these people. I like their service a lot, and have been very pleased, but didn't want a repeat of my rushed new-phone experience with T-Mobile. This time, I actually used the phone, and did a lot of reading on the truly excellent Howard Forums before going for it. Amongst the many other incredible things I could say about this phone, let me just leave it at this: mp3 ringtones for the win.

The pic of my nephew I linked a couple posts back was taken with this phone, and while the camera's not QGA 8000x6000 resolution, it's more than adequate given that it's built into a phone I actually like carrying on me and using.

As is the case for seemingly everyone who's as nerdy as I and had a cameraphone for more than 7 seconds, this morning in my insomnia I set up a moblog, or photoblog, or whatever the hell you want to call it. I'm still too cheap to buy into a data plan from Cingular, and I don't know if that means I can't send pictures via the cell network at all, or merely that they will charge me an exhorbitant per-picture fee. Right now, however, I'm easily able to copy pictures off the phone via the memory card, or even easier, the bluetooth networking, so while I haven't posted an event occuring at 3:15 at 3:19, I'm still pretty much able to hit it same-day, and no one cares enough about the stuff I'm gonna post to miss the intervening hours.

I've signed up with Buzznet, which is a nifty little community that furthermore actually provides the email-to-web translation necessary for moblogging, and is free. Cooler than that, they allow you to have them post to a real blog for you, so I've set up this blog on the patrickcentral server, so I have a little more template control and can skip the buzznet ads and so on.

I'll be adding some sections to the main PatrickCentral.com layout and to the Z axis layout to reflect the addition to my online panoply of whatever, but I'm also considering using some kind of feed aggregation service like Feedburner to create one unified XML feed for you pesky Livejournal folks, who now make up the bulk of the meager few who read this crap.

Furthermore, I'm now going to make a post over at the buzznet blog that has a picture of writing this entry, just because I fricking can.

[boldly doing exactly what others have done once assured of safety]