My Desultory Blog

Posted By RichC on September 10, 2007

Four CinciTDI members headed to the Mason Ohio/King’s Island area on Sunday to scout out conference hotels in order to put in a proposal for 2008’s TDIFest. We’ve started the ball is rolling and hopefully area TDI members will consider stepping forward with ideas and their time. We visited several hotels and came away with some preliminary thoughts — see this link. The four of us agreed that the King’s Island Resort Conference Center looked as if it might meet our criteria. (photos below)

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Posted By RichC on September 9, 2007

Last year I mentioned Dodgeit as a great way to reduce spam when websites require you to use an email for confirmation. I noticed that a few months ago that their servers could no longer handle the volume of traffic and re-release the same service under a new domain dodgit.com. For those that might have contributed to the service, you’ll be able to access your existing email through a the dodgit.com/private URL and a gmail account set up by the dodgit folks. Read more over at the blog.

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Posted By RichC on September 8, 2007

This ‘snake in the grass’ may have met his match …

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Posted By RichC on September 7, 2007

Oh how I do like tech-toys … and I’m not alone. Yesterday a discontented Palm Treo user told me about a new gadget that he was thinking about; he is considering the $800 micro computer in hopes he can replace his aging full size notebook as well as his smartphone. A quick look at the full function but very small HTC – Advantage X7501 and I could see why he was excited. Not having much experience with these small mobile office devices, I was impressed with all the features that were included in this little package. Its not truly a phone, or even a pocketable PDA … but it is feature loaded and includes a phone. I would still question having to pouch or pocket this device all day, everyday, for use as a phone? (although it might be perfect for a ‘small fingered’ female ‘geek’ who always carries a purse?)

I’ll include a review below from Tiger Direct that explains the HTC X7501 pretty well. Prices online range from about $850 to $900 as of September 2007.

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Posted By RichC on September 6, 2007

It is probably not a surprise to anyone, but Fred Thompson has finally announced that he intends to enter as a Republican candidate for President of the United States in 2008. He has had a bit of time to develop an excellent website (Friends of Fred Thompson) and has included his thoughts in a long-ish web video. Compared to the many other candidates who spent last night debating each other, Thompson has a little ground to catch up on in getting out his message, although not that big a deal from my perspective. About the only glitch running as a conservative Republican seeking party support is that of his personal life. (Same for Rudy Giuliani) On the other hand, Thompson should be able to tap into that ‘beat Clinton’ mantra that continues to thrive in the GOP and might be able to draw upon his likable southern charm and Presidential TV personality. Fred Thompson is certainly going to be formidable and seemingly qualified candidate, but he does enter an already full field. In the Republican debate last night, several other candidates wished him well as they took jabs at his late entry. )Personally I think the rest entered too early requiring a long and more costly fundraising effort?)

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Tags: fred thompson, jay leno

Posted By RichC on September 5, 2007

Well the Palm Folio didn’t last but a few months … a blunder from the start in my opinion. Palm created a notebook looking sidekick for it Treo users that just didn’t offer enough reasons for users to buy it. Its not quite a notebook, but still a big enough package to not want to tote it around. As a Palm Treo user, I couldn’t see a reason to even consider it when it was announced. I’d much rather have (even for more dollars) a popular OS computer — Mac, MS Windows, Linux — than a limited use product that still requires one to own or use a full feature computer.

The company will continue to work on their need PDA and smartphone oriented software and products. They have a new product coming out being called the Palm Centro that frankly has me wondering if they will be around in a few years. It ‘looks chunkier than the new Blackberries is certainly not as sexy as the iPhone. I hope they know what they are doing because I would like to continue to be a satisfied Treo user. For the most part my Treo 700p has been excellent — although could use an improved OS and Bluetooth connectivity, higher resolution camera and smaller ‘chunk-print.’ The pre-release photos I’ve been seeing of the new Palm Centro have me wondering it its enough to hold off competitors?

A Message to Palm Customers, Partners and Developers

As many of you are aware, we are in the process of building our next generation software platform. We are very excited about how this is coming together. It has a modern flexible UI, instant performance, and an incredibly simple and elegant development environment. We are working hard on this platform and on the first smartphone that will take advantage of it.

In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts. To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.

Because we were nearly at the point for shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on second platform and a separate development environment, and we need to focus our efforts on one platform. Our own evaluation and early market feedback were telling us that we still have a number of improvements to make Foleo a world-class product, and we can not afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus. That would not be right for our customers or for our developer community.

Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category. We’re not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first.

I would like to thank our customers for their interest in Foleo. I know there will be disappointed folks who were looking forward to carrying a Foleo for all their mobile computing needs. I am certainly one of them. I would also like to thank the developers who have supported our Foleo efforts. They have been loyal to Palm and have worked hard to deliver some compelling solutions on the Foleo platform. I know that they will understand that the right thing to do for the long run is to focus on one platform that will live for years, rather than invest energy in a one-off solution. We will make every effort to make sure we bring our developers forward to our next generation platform.

This decision will require us to take a limited charge of less than $10 million dollars to our earnings. This is a lot of money, but it is a small price relative to the costs that would be required to support two platforms going forward. This decision is in the best interest of our customers, our team, our products and our shareholders. I hope this renewed focus at Palm will allow us to deliver more compelling solutions to our core smartphone market, and it will allow us to position ourselves for the long run around one Palm experience.

-Ed Colligan, CEO

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Posted By RichC on September 4, 2007

Hurricane Felix hit the Caribbean coast of Central America hard today with Category 5 winds of 160 miles hour and heavy rains. The coastal area of Nicaragua is primarily rural with many shallow water areas before the elevation changes in to steep hills which pose a serious mudslide danger. The life threatening winds and heavy rains sent thousands fleeing for their safety as it destroyed homes and flooded low-lying areas. This is the second Category 5 storm to hit central American this year; the first time two Category 5 hurricanes have ever hit in one season. (see Dean)

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Posted By RichC on September 4, 2007

I haven’t posted using the Flickr to blog on my Palm Treo recently and wanted to be sure all was working. I’m including a photo from my (and my son’s) favorite ‘escape from women’ hangout … although this is no surprise to my wife and daughter. Acapulco Mexican Restaurant at 5953 Boymel Drive in Fairfield, Ohio has the best chips abd salsa.
🙂

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Posted By RichC on September 3, 2007

Labor Day weekend is generally way too full for me. First, I always miss the TDIFest (held in Montreal Canada this year), I am obligated to work the Airshow/Pancake Breakfast at the Red Stewart Airport as it is the only fund-raiser my EAA chapter does (a big success this year), generally have a family reunion of sorts at our house (thankfully not this year) and have the draw of the fireworks in Cincinnati that we call Riverfest (post from last year).

If you’re not from southwestern Ohio or the surrounding area you might ask, “Why do people come back to Cincinnati each year for Riverfest?” Could it be 40 years of the most impressive firework display I’ve ever seen? Over 500,000 people seem to agree year after year (40 years now) and make their way to downtown Cincinnati and Newport Kentucky in order to position themselves along the river. This year the usual WEBN radio crew, Cincinnati’s WLWT Channel 5 along with countless corporate sponsors help put together an unbelievable 45 minute pyrotechnics spectacular … and although a YouTube video clip will not do it justice, I’ll include a 2 minute snippet below. (BTW … this year Arm Forces TV picked up the feed and televised the event around the world)

EDIT: A YouTube contributor PhatTaxi posted multiple part WLWT Channel 5 feeds:
Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4
(Don’t miss that last segment! Thanks to WEBN and Cincinnati Bell.)

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Posted By RichC on September 2, 2007

It is interesting to see what a small community can do to improve their green footprint on the planet. Folks in the rural farm town of Reynolds Indiana have that opportunity. While I pretend to make changes by trading out my incandescent light bulb for compact fluorescents and run little biodiesel in my efficient car, this community is making a bigger change. For Reynolds Indiana, known as BioTown USA, the goal is to create a model community that is energy self-sufficient. According to the Indiana Agriculture Director Andy Miller, “Our goal is to make Indiana a leader in the future of agriculture, and to do that, we must be progressive in advancing new uses for our products and finding more environmentally-friendly ways to dispose of our byproducts.”

Here’s a segment from Motorweek highlighting what is going on just over the state line.

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