Cingular 8125

We're looking to standardize wireless devices at my work, so I'm testing several devices. Currently, I'm carrying the Cingular 8125.

On the plus side it has a slide-out QWERTY keybord, wi-fi, bluetooth, EDGE, 1.3mp camera, and Direct-push email updates for immediate messaging.

On the downside, the sound quality isn't as good as my previous Motorola V551. The QWERTY keyboard, while larger than the TREO or Motorola Q, feels a little cheap to the touch.

It runs on Windows Mobile 5.0, so if you have a Microsoft Exchange 2003 SP2 server, the setup is super easy. Just take out of the box, do the screen alignment wizard, then input the address of the exchange server. Enter your name and password and you are done. The device then configures itself. With SP2, Exchange introduced some remote administration features: the admin has the ability to remotely lock or wipe the device. Pretty cool if you are worried about compromised proprietary data when one of your users looses the devices.

Next week I'll be carrying the Cingular 2125.

Dallas Mavericks

I'm dissappointed that the Dallas Mavericks lost the NBA Finals, but at least I won't have to look at all the fair weather fans touting "their team."

I don't follow sports very closely, but my heart goes out to the guys that own my company. They've had season tickets to the Mavs since 1980. THEY are not fair weather fans, and if willpower alone could win the championship, the owners of my company would have made it happen.

Thanks for the great season, Mavs. There's always next year.

Bill Gates

So Bill is retiring. I suppose he has enough money to retire. A lot of people have gripes about the way he ran his business, but no one can truely say he's not a genius.

Microsoft has really been synonymous with Bill Gates for some time. You can't think of one without the other. There aren't really a lot of companies like that, with a notable exception being Steve Jobs and Apple. I wonder what the new face of Microsoft will be. I don't think any mere mortal can fill Bill's shoes.

I hope Bill is able to devote more time to his Gates Foundation. It's his philantropic organization that spends over one and a half billion dollars a year. Just so we can see some numbers, that's $1,566,809,000. Seriously, if you knocked off the first 3 or 4 digits, that would still be a truckload of money.

Bill, thanks for the many years. Your company was a driving force behind the ability to put an inexpensive PC in the majority of US homes, and a workstation in every cube. For that, we are grateful. Goodbye.

Google Picasa

I'm sure most people are aware of this already, but Google distributes a great photo and movie organization software called Picasa. I believe that they purchased it and made minor modifications so that it fits in their grand scheme better, but it is a nice progam, and best of all, it's free. As a nice bonus, it can post pictures to Blogger.com.

Tivo

I love Tivo. If you don't have a Tivo, you won't understand. I don't mean it as if it's some secret, exclusive club, but unless you've used a Tivo, you just don't believe us Tivoites when we gush and go on and on about how great they are.

They are a great time saver. You can watch a 30 minute show in 20 minutes, and more imporantly, you can control what you want to watch when you want to watch it. I live in the Central time zone where TV shows are on an hour earlier than the other time zones. Having a Tivo lets me watch the shows that come during prime time later in the evening when I actually have time to watch TV.

I have 3 Tivos. That may seem like a lot, but it's just one on each TV. One in the bedroom, one in the living room, and one in the kid's playroom. My favorite Tivo is a Pioneer that has a DVD burner integrated in it. It's easy to archive shows onto a DVD, and I don't need a seperate player. I wish I had one of these for each room, but they were fairly expensive when new, and they are no longer made. I've been considering picking a couple up on eBay, but my beer budget gets in the way of my champaigne taste.

Unlike most Tivoites, I do have a few minor gripes about the sacred black (or silver) box. First, part of the greatness of Tivo is that they can be networked. However, until just a month ago, they did not come with a network connection. You had to purchase a USB network connector seperately. Duh. What makes it worse is that the large files involved with transferring the video from Tivo to Tivo is limited to the speed of the USB connection. Therefore, it doesn't matter how fast your network is, the USB connection bottlenecks your transfers. Double duh.

I also have a gripe about the "Season Pass" feature. Each Tivo has to have the passes set up individually. Aside from it being a pain to manage each one individually, if the networks move time slots, the shows can conflict with one another. Depending on how you have them set up, you can wind up missing a show even if you have two other Tivos sitting idle. It's a bit too much trouble to manage all the shows in great detail, so sometimes I just wind up missing some shows.

About a month ago, Tivo released their latest box. Basically, it's what they should have come out with a couple years ago. Dual tuners, integrated ethernet, and no phone line needed to set it all up. This is what they should have come with a few years back, and by now they should have dual (or more) tuners, cable card for On Demand video from your cable company, integrated gigabit ethernet, and HDTV capability.

Tivo has been putting all its efforts into expanding the software of the boxes, and the hardware is being neglected. You now have access to several different types of downloadable content, but most of it amounts to a bunch of advertising. They've got a great interface, but if they don't get their act together, they are going to lose out to the cable companies' proprietary DVRs.

My Kids

I promise not to turn this blog into a slideshow of my kids, but since they are just ridiculously cute, I'll post just a couple pics to show them off.

The two girls in the toy tub are Alison and Amanda. The little guy with the bear is my new son, Evan.

Webpages with sound

I can't think of many things that bother me more than websurfing in the middle of the night when the family is asleep and surfing over to a page that has sound on it. I went to ABC.com just now, and I was greeted with a blasting rendition of a Hanes commercial. What really hacked me off is that the volume of the page was in no way related to any of the media players I have installed on my computer. Just to make sure, I fired up each of the players and each one was playing at a reasonable level. To make matters worse, the microscopic pause button below the video doesn't actually work with the commercials. It only works with the ABC content that comes on after the commercials. Stupid, stupid, stupid. There's nothing I hate more than software that doesn't allow you to control your own computer.

Speaking of software that doesn't let you control your own computer, my rant of the day is about Real Networks Realplayer. What a freaking joke. I wanted to play last night's David Letterman monologue from CBS.com (which, by the way, looks like you accidentally surfed to GMC.com due to the size of the ad at the top of the page). I've been using IE7 as my browser, but the overly sensative security "features" won't let me play embedded video with WMP. So, not being in the mood to mess with it, I fired up Firefox and surfed on over.
Firefox will only let you play the video with Realplayer, so against my better judgement, I tried to install the plugin. Of course, you're not just getting a plugin, they require the whole bleeping program. I blacklisted Real about 5 years ago when they were installing several other things like AIM and Gator without letting you choose, so I thought I'd give them another chance. Immediately after installing I'm greeted with a flurry of crap coming from a little icon in my systray. What jackholes at Real think that I only have a PC so I can run their stupid software. So, I'm about to uninstall Realplayer for the rest of my life, and I guess I'll just have to get by without watching Dave.

The today show had a clip of last night's monologue, and I wanted to watch it again so I could quote it correctly here, but it was something like, "Al-Queda wasted no time appointing the successor to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, or as Special Forces soldiers call him, 'Next'."

24

Funny quote for those of you that watch the Fox show 24:
"Superman wears Jack Bauer Underoos!" - Heard on my favorite CNET podcast, Buzz Out Loud.

Part Experiment, Part Therapy

Welcome to my little experiment. Ok, it's not all that experimental, but I wanted to put my thoughts down somewhere, and I suppose seeing if anyone actually reads them is the experimental part. I also wanted an outlet where I could vent my feelings about the sorry state of politics, the government, the national debt, and prime time TV. Thanks for spending the time to read my little blurbs. Maybe you'll get something out of it, and maybe you can give something back, too.