I made my first trip up to Tahoe in a few years this past Sunday/Monday, and aside from the snow (2′+ fresh), the weather (beautiful), the mountain (Alpine rules, as always), and the company (good friends and more on the hill), I was really happy with how the Element handled the snow. Granted, the conditions were fairly favorable, with snow on the roads but no ice, and temps in the 20’s that make for good snow tractions, but the AWD worked really well and we had no trouble getting around in the snowy twists and turns of Tahoe Donner. The Element also did much better than I expected up and down the I-80 grade, and overall mileage wasn’t any worse than it is around the Bay Area. Overall, a good snow car - although it ain’t no Scout, it worked well.

I don’t eat a ton of energy bars, but they are handy at the climbing gym now and then. There seems to be a new one out every week or so, but of course you have to try them to find out how they taste… These Think Thin bars are particularly nasty - I bought two and did eat them, but only to get them out of the house. Never again!

My favorites are Bumble Bar (mostly sesame seeds),

and Pro Bar,

which actually taste like real food (fruit and nuts). Quite different, but both are super tasty.

OK, it’s a given that the Oscars are a complete joke, but what in the hell is going on with The Departed being nominated for five Oscars??! Best Picture, Best Director, Adapted Screenplay, Editing, and Best Supporting Actor?!?! We watched it the other night, and we both laughed all the way through. This is, it’s not supposed to be a comedy. Of errors. Let’s see. The story is entirely predictable, and yet not at all believable, the way it’s presented. The dialogue alternate between overblown, hokey and fairly amusing, but again, that’s not really the point. The movie reads like Friends meets The Sopranos, with Friends winning. The acting is mostly quite bad. Jack Nicholson is an old fool in a bathrobe - perhaps he’s supposed to represent Scorsese? Leonardo diCrappio is actually OK, but Whalberg, who I usually like, doesn’t do anything interesting with the purely character role. We were incredulous. The Departed gets a D+ — don’t bother!

I’m not really that much of a gadget nut, but one exception is cell phones. I’ve been waiting for a phone that successfully doubles as an MP3 player for quite a while, and this year there are finally some models out that at least come close to working well. Forget about Motorola’s efforts - they’re not even close so far, and I’m not sure why Apple partnered with them instead of Nokia.

Speaking of Nokia, I’m pretty much stuck on their UI - it’s simply the cleanest and best out there. I looked at the 6680/1/2, the N series, and the 6270/6280 before settling on the 6280 for my latest purchase.

I skipped the N series because for the most part they’re too heavy and large. A friend has an N70, and it’s similar to the 6280, but runs the Series 60 OS and is therefore much slower. The 6670/80 are already obsolete, with only 1.3Mp cameras and nonstandard MMC card expansion slots. The 6270/80 both have 2Mp cameras and miniSD slots. MiniSD is already available in 2Gb capacity, and 4Gb should be out soon. This is critical as 2Gb is my minimum for a usable music player. The 6270 is a tiny bit larger than the 6280, and it has a quad-band GSM radio instead of the 6280’s tri-band GSM+3G radio — I decided that the smaller size was more important to me. Otherwise, the 6270 and 6280 seem more or less identical. There’s also a 6282 forthcoming for the US market, but it seems a bit crippled, having only a 1Mp camera.

Pros

• *Excellent* screen
• Fast — the UI is very responsive (except for loading Music Player)
• 2 megapixel camera w/ decent quality
• “Recently used” address list helps with quick SMS addressing
• Integrated SMS-to-email addressing
• Cool slider action keeps your hands busy and makes you feel more like you’re using a phone than speaking into a little lego brick

Cons

• missing “secure” Wallet feature in organizer. Why did they remove this? Even if it wasn’t really secure (not sure on this point), it was useful.
• no predictive text input mode for entering numbers
• Music Player application slow to load and, more importantly, it uses static playlists. While an iPod allows you to navigate based on artist, album, track, genre, etc., the Nokia only shows you all tracks at once, or static playlists built with Nokia’s Music-whatever PC software application.
• No way to disable the PTT button.
• Needs page up/down navigation in contacts list.
• Just a little too big to fit comfortably in my front pants pocket.
• Feels much more fragile than my 6230. I wince when the 6280 hits the ground, whereas the 6230 could really take a beating. The 6230 still worked well enough to recover my data after being _run over_ by a car!
• No standard headphone jack - you have to use Nokia’s stereo headphones, or an adaptor.
• No way to adjust volume of message alert beep (it’s _very_ loud — sometimes too loud)
• I can’t get the voicemail indicator to work with Cingular (I bought the phone unlocked)
• Top three number keys are blocked just the tinest bit by the top half of the phone, which gets in the way just a little when texting. Just a little though
• Built-in button on the splitter of the provided stereo headset advances the Music Player to the next track. Handy if you _want_ to do that, but annoying as hell when you keep bumping it while working out at the gym.

The other big “con” was the cost. I paid something like £290 for an unlocked, unbranded, white-market 6280. That’s $530, I think. In the UK, you can get a 6280 virtually “free” if you sign up for a 1-year contract at £20 per month. That works out to £240 right there, and any phone on a contract is going to be SIM-locked. I don’t see any US carriers with this phone yet, but they are for sale on eBay for _far_ less than I paid. Ah well.

Overall, I give the 6280 3 1/2 stars. I love the screen, the miniSD storage, the fact that it has a working music player, and I do like the slide action, but the little UI issues bug me, and the music player needs to get much better. They took away or left out as many useful features as they added, so the net result is that the UI is a little disappointing, especially given all the screen real estate. If their strategy is to move to Series 60 for fuller UI, they need to make it run faster before I’ll buy.

For a full review of the 6280 head over to GSMArena - they do a much more thorough job than CNet with cellphone reviews.

I find myself using LinkedIn more and more. Fantastic service, really. But there’s one thing missing. One big thing. Why does LinkedIn not offer the option to attach a photo to your profile? Is there some point of strategy I’m missing out on?