| September 7, 2008 | | | | | Feedback | | | Calendar | | | Archives |
Time for a technology update. Two things I've acquired in the last couple of months. One is a new phone, the Blackberry Curve, in red of course.  The T-Mobile version of the curve comes with Wi-Fi so that if you're not in range of the mobile network, you can make calls over local broadband.
The calendar, task list and memos are very useful, and the full keyboard lets me do text messaging easily.
Lots of good apps available for this smart phone including SplashID for managing my gazillion logons/passwords. I'm still working on getting it to sync my contacts with Thunderbird. I will put a finger nail sized 8 GB memory card it in for tunes and use it like an iPod.
And the key feature: unlike a Treo, it fits discreetly in a pocket. No geeky stuff hanging off a belt thank you. Cell phone moment: Yesterday of all places I was in a golf cart in Vassalboro with Faith who had her phone turned on (special occasion) in case the realtor got back to her. I pulled the cart over to the side and she accepted a counter offer on the house she's buying downtown. She bought a house over a cell phone while riding in a golf cart. I just hate golf, but once a year we sell the boys a bonding experience as a fundraiser.
The other thing I bought in July is an Asus EEE PC, a Linux box with an 8.9 inch screen, a GB of RAM and a 20 GB flash memory hard drive. It travels in a purse; the flash drive is shock proof. Great for doing email and reading newspapers and blogs. I was a bit too much of an early adopter on this one. I bought the 900 series; the 901 uses the new Intel Atom, a low power chip that lets the battery charge last 8 hours. I see that Dell is coming out with a Mini that uses the same chip. And in some markets the broadband mobile access is built right in. There will be lots of these around soon and they will be cheap. Next year I'll probably sell this one and my regular laptop and settle on one Atom powered 12 inch screen laptop. I write web applications for a living so the advent of a new browser, especially one developed by Google, is an important event. I'm directing my work people to this comic book explanation by the great Scott MacLeod of Chrome's features and innards as well as a clever way of showing the development team credits. I'm particularly excited by the advent of compilable javascript, and tabs that run in different processes.
This week at work we'll probably switch to my new AJAX(Asynchronous JAvascript XML) timesheet application. I actually use JSON (Javascript Object Notation) instead of XML. An AJAX app is all javascript with some calls to a database. The page never changes; the information on the page changes just like a desktop app. The timesheet app was a good candidate because there is mostly only one page view. We have a project management system called the Folder System which I'm integrating with the timesheet.
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There. It's all out of my system. I won't go techie on you again for a long time. Back to obsessing over political news. OBee-JoBee 2008 !