Unfortunately, I'm probably one of the few Pre owners that will run into any problems updating their phone to WebOS 1.4, which was released just hours ago.

The "updating" throbber froze at just over 1/3 complete, leaving me with a completely still screen telling me at the bottom "Installing Update Do not remove battery". Crap. After giving it another 20 minutes to make sure it was really stuck… it was.

So I did exactly what it was telling me not to. I opened up the back cover (and was surprised by how much dust had accumulated inside my phone), pulled out the battery, put it back in, and turned the phone back on.

And it worked. The Pre went right back into the update process and a few minutes later was already past the point where it had originally frozen.

So, if anyone else has this problem, and the throbber isn't even spinning. Try yanking the battery.

If that doesn't work, you can try the webOS Doctor available from Palm's website (webOS Doctor [palm.com]). webOS Doctor will completely wipe and restore your phone to the latest webOS version, this means you'll lose any pictures and media you had on the phone (try mounting the phone in USB mode and downloading all files before doing a recovery). Your contacts, calendar events, and tasks will be synchronized with your palm profile.

Check out this cool flipbook – "RAINBOW IN YOUR HAND"

Ok, this is pretty ridiculous… who would ever come up with the idea of casting The Hoff as Jekyll (and Hyde)?

I just found out that Quentin Tarantino's birthday is the day after mine.

That's kinda neat. To me at least.

These are the current flavors of Fruit Roll-Ups, I've bolded the ones that rock extra hard.

• Blastin' Berry Hot Colors
• Cherry Orange Wildfire
• Crazy Pix Cool Chix Berry Wave
• Crazy Pix Wild Ones Blastin' Berry
• Electric Blue Raspberry
• Flavor Wave
• Rainbow
• Strawberry
• Strawberry Kiwi Kick
• Sunberry Burst
• Tropical Tie-Dye
• Electric Yellow
• Sizzlin'Red
• Screamin'Green
• Super Sour Lemon Drop Dead
• Screaming Apple

Crazy Pix Cool Chix Berry Wave? Super Sour Lemon Drop Dead? I want to be on the flavor naming team!

I just realized how funny it was to have the latest post titled "The End" sitting at the top of the blog for over 2 weeks. Nope, sparxMind isn't ending – I'm sure that'll disappoint a few of you.

Where are the posts? What happened to the daily thing?
Apparently Twenty-Ten is the year that I pull back a bit from the intarwebs. For now at least. I've been trying to focus on "decluttering" my life a bit. This involves cleaning, organizing, and reducing my "stuff" both online and off. I'm still in the process of eliminating as much stuff as possible from my closet (as a bonus, it'll make the next move easier, yay!), mostly trying to get rid of things I don't need. It's hard. I'm also working on revamping a few of my work processes and the programs I've written to help streamline things.

Also, I'm trimming my RSS subscriptions (a little) and did a massive cleanup of my email. A few weeks ago, my gmail inbox had 430 unread items, and 2200ish emails in total. At the moment there are now ZERO unread emails, and 428 total emails sitting in my inbox. The goal is to keep the "unreads" below 10, and get the total inbox count below 200 by the end of February.

Right now though, the blogging thing is hard for me to focus on, but eventually I'll get back on the horse. The blogging horse. I just did a google search – there are 43,700 results for the phrase "the blogging horse". Wow.

I remember, waaaaaay back in grade school, being discouraged from ending a story with the words "The End". Why?! Unless I'm planning on writing a sequel, those two words give perfect closure to a story. "What happens next?" nothing! It's The End.

We were told that it's "not professional" – by the same people that taught us not to start a sentence with the words "and" or "but". Ever. And you know what? I hate that "rule" too. But, I do it all the time anyway. And it's accepted. It's acceptable.

I recently read the book "The Road", and was frustrated at first by the lack of punctuation. The dialogue was mixed in with the story with no quotation marks. A couple of times I had to reread a section of dialogue to figure out whether the even or odd lines of dialogue were "the boy" or "the man", as their was no other indication.

Did Cormac McCarthy miss these "rules", or did he just say "fuck it all – I'm going to write the way I want"? Granted, even Cormac didn't end the book with "The End", but he could have, and they still would have made a movie out of it.

The End