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Yes, I’m still alive. Just in case you were wondering.

With that out of the way, I’ve been enjoying my Sprint Galaxy S2 variant immensely. It feels orders of magnitude faster and more powerful than my old Android Eris. And really, the stats reflect about a 4x multiplier over every attribute of the Eris. It took some getting time to mentally transition from a 3.2" screen to a 4.5" screen, but I did it. Now when I look at my old phone, sitting idly on a nearby end table, it looks like a Chiclet in comparison.

Well, that was an interesting couple of days. Unfortunately my birthday came right after and I didn’t feel like writing anything for the duration. Now though? Why not!

In the end, I think my presentation, NVRam for Fun and Profit went over okay. Not a ton of people showed up, but I did get ambushed afterwards with questions after I got off the stage. Why those people didn’t ask while I was in Presentation Mode, I can’t quite understand. But Greg Smith was there, and he played the required heckler, so it wasn’t all bad.

The Samsung Galaxy S II is currently the top selling phone in the world. And it’s not a popularity thing, the device is genuinely exceptional. Reviews across the web have effectively hailed it as, “… the best smartphone, period.” What’s notable about this, is that various US carrier shenanigans have guaranteed we get it dead last, right after India and Mexico. And Verizon? Won’t be carrying it at all.

Technology has come a long way, hasn’t it? Fortunately (or unfortunately) for me, we could never afford braces while I was growing up. As a consequence, my mouth contains unspeakable horrors, a jumbled mess of crooked trolls, crowding haphazardly around a fresh carcass. I’m not kidding. While my smile won’t crack any mirrors, I have the overbite of a horse and the canines of a timber wolf. And like an unbalanced chair, my wobbly bite has ushered in periods of intense jaw cramps over the last few years.

A few months ago, Greg Smith of PostgreSQL fame suggested I submit a proposal to the new Postgres Open conference here in Chicago. Some of us residents of the Midwest have long waited for a PostgreSQL-related conference of our very own, and now the glorious day has finally arrived. I was asked to submit proposals to other conferences, but the travel involved quickly put me off; now I can be lazy and still help spread The Word.