So, I now have a Motorola V195 with a t-mobile prepaid plan that seems to work ok, and an OpenMoko Neo1973 which, out of the box, boots a Linux kernel which then panics when it can't find the root filesystem.
In the OpenMoko's defense, this was the advertised behavior. In fact, the intention was to ship it with only a bootloader; the kernel slipped in there by accident.
We've been having stormy weather lately, and Saturday looked likely to be another rainy day, so while Sara went out and worked and (later) roasted marshamallows in a mosquito-infested swamp somewhere (reportedly, this was fun) I stayed home and loaded the OpenMoko software and played around a bit. The software's still too primitive to be much use, though.
There was a particularly dramatic downpour Friday afternoon. Just as I was thinking of leaving work to meet friends for the final show of the summer Japanese film series, I started getting warnings from coworkers of the "mother of all storms" headed our way. Estimates based on staring at the radar suggested I had 10 or 20 minutes, so I packed up and set off to see how far I could get before it started.
I got to our meeting location, a small hot dog place just a block from the auditorium, with time to spare, and enjoyed watching the clouds roll in. Sara and Rachel both got drenched.
The movie, "All Under the Moon", was funny, in both senses of the word. Sara's uncle Bruce told us once that he usually only watches about the first 15 minutes of any movie--the part where you still don't know what kind of movie it is. I never quite lost that feeling in this one. I did follow the outline of the plot--here a man and woman have a falling out, here they reunite, here the friend who previously flaunted the gains from his shady business deals gets what was coming to him, etc.--but a largish cast of characters, a bizarre subtitle translation, and some missing cultural clues (the things that identify someone as Korean to a Japanese (or some other less clueless) audience are mostly lost on me) all left me ignorant of the details. I like being confused. I'd still get a lot of fun out of a second viewing.