It's a wonderful morning on the Interwebz today, and all is well. I hope all of you are enjoying the start of summer. Emily has just started full-time work and I'm putting in 40 a week doing research related things and getting ready for the class I teach next semester. Wedding planning is going, that's all I'll say on that.

This past week also saw the ending of my phone contract coming closer. I didn't want to wait, so seeing that I indeed had permission from the almighty phone company to upgrade my phone before the contract ran out, I decided to ditch my poor old Samsung flip phone of boringness. It had Tetris and a Jimi Hendrix ringtone, and that was about the best of it.

Now I have a sleek new shiny phone! It's a Palm Centro! This sucker's pretty fan-damn-tastic. It's still small, but it has a great visible shiny bright touchscreen. QWERTY layout on tiny buttons that I'm getting used to. I was surprised how not bad it is to type. It runs Palm OS, obviously, which I'm used to since the Palm IIIxe days. Ah... IR pool in geography. Those were the days. With the Centro I have fulfilled my tech desire for a few devices. One, I get a planner with all the calander/task/memo goodness. I get my silly tetris and solitaire games that I MUST have so that I can waste time when I need to. It has a music player so I don't have to go get a separate Mp3 player. The camera on it isn't something I had to have, but it's a feature, and following good engineering principles, you add more features till things break. MicroSD expandability is good, it has bluetooth but I can't seem to get my laptop to like it... something about making virtual serial ports isn't going so well. I don't need bluetooth to sync it, but c'mon, it's there, you gotta play with it. 

As far as smartphones go, this was my pick of the bunch. I could have gotten a blackberry, I guess, but the 8120 or 8130 just weren't my style. Although, they're still grabbing much more market share than the iPhone. I have no wi-fi, and I don't do e-mail checking, but at work I'm by my computer all the time anyway, so those aren't necessary. If I do need the internet, I just pay whatever the hell AT&T says I should pay. It's ready to do GPS once I buy a bluetooth GPS thingy. Which I might do much later when I have more money.

Now, onto a Top Five list, since I think this site needs more of them. 

Top Five Singers\Styles I Want to Sound Like:

1. Robert Plant: Aside from a kick-ass voice he has great screaming vocals. Go listen to the end of No Quarter or to Dazed and Confused, Whole Lotta Love, and especially Immigrant Song. 

2. Stevie Ray Vaughan: Great blues singing has been something I've always wanted to do. Texas Flood and Can't Stand the Weather are amazing. It's a kind of heartfelt and soulful vocals that lets you use any lyrics you want and still sound fantastic. Check out any ZZ Top blues song for this point proven. Also, go find Joe Bonamassa. 

3. Gordon Lightfoot: For all your ballad and folk song needs. Sundown is a personal favorite, and there's obviously The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and Don Quixote. Cat Stevens and Simon & Garfunkle would work too. 

4. Chris Cornell\Maynard James Keenan: (Soundgarden & Audioslave \ Tool & A Perfect Circle) Hard rock, alternative metal, art rock, or whatever you want to call it. I enjoy it and am always singing along in the car to this stuff. 

5. Grace Slick: Gotta love Jefferson Airplane. She doesn't have some silly girl's pop singing voice like we always here. It's a hardened drug fueled power plant of vocals that just sounds amazing. Janis Joplin would work too. Hell, I could settle for Stevie Nicks.

Thoughts? Musings? Your own wacky top fives? I know Nolan's probably bursting with possible ones...

-Mike