Day Log

So I've been using the 72 for a little over 24 hours now. It put in a full days work yesterday and only used about half of its battery, this included playing with the camera and bluetooth stuff a lot.

Even with the minor issues that I mentioned yesterday, mainly design issues. I love this thing. The screen is awesome and the speed is to. There is so much difference between the m505 and this one. Its a keeper for sure. I spend some time yesterday tweaking it out with my programs and such and now its working for me full time :).

I did manage to find a screen protector and a usb charger/sync cord for travel. I wasn't worried as much about syncing on travel as much as I am about charging, a dead PDA doesn't do anyone any good. I also set it up where I can connect to my powerbook via bluetooth to surf the web, so now at home as long as I'm in range I can do email and surf from the couch. Cool stuff.

I've only spent a few hourse with my Zire 72. Part of last night just getting it in sync with my powerbook and part of the morning getting it in sync with my work laptop. Here are a few of my thoughts. Its nice looking, seems very fast over my m505. I don't like the fact it doesn't have an attached flip cover of some sort. I did come with a case, but I tend to stick it in my pants pocket or shirt pocket, with out some screen protectors its gonna get all scratched up. I'm not very impressed with having to have a sperate power and hotsync cable. Its USB, why can that be the power and they sync cable, come on Palm third party developers have made these cables for years for the other models. Nobody wants to travel with a wall wart, I guess "consumers" don't travel. I also miss the cradle at work. That's not really much to complain about I guess. Having a 1.2 mega pixel camera is nice, but I haven't used it much yet. It does video as well, but you need to put in a SD card for that. The voice memo feature is nice. I haven't played back any music on it yet. So far so good, I'll have a good idea about battery life soon, I fully charged it last night and want to see how many days I can go.

So I've been a slacker around here for a couple of weeks now. What can I say I've been spending lots of them with the family and friends. I have a lot more "home work" than ever before also. Now that I'm back at the office maybe I can get back to this place.

Here is a review of the new Zire 72. Looks great, even without WiFi, I think I want one. Luckily its $300 cheaper than the Sony I was looking at. Heck, I might even order one today.

Update: Ok so i did order one.

Well I'm back in the office today. It was a great crazy week last week, and I really didn't want to come to work today, but thats the way it goes. The drive in was only 3 hours today thanks to some trucks that played crash up derby in the construction zone. They don't have the plumbing working either. I guess I'll play catch up for a while.

I guess that you can count on me making few posts this week and then baby ones :) I just put up a new pic at our baby blog if your interested Go here

Just the first of many I'm sure :)

I just wanted to make a be public thanks to Kevin and Merrin for being such great neighbors and helping us out these past few days. Thanks Mr. Air Conditioner repairman.

Mini is here, we are home and mom and baby are doing fine. More details soon.

Wow. Well things are about to change for sure.

Well day 3 without water. The biggest draw back is that its about a 12 minute round trip to goto the nearest restroom. Looks like its gonna be that way for at least a week or more.

I got to play with yet another printer today the HP 1100dn business model. Nice printer, but 8 printer cartridges, wow.

I added a new 512mb SODIMM to my power book last night, brining it up to 640mb. There is a huge difference, I should have done this long ago.

You know its gonna be a good day, when you get to work and discover water flowing out of the electrical sockets. Luckily its downstairs and not in my office. I did have time to power all the servers down before we killed the main power. Plumbers are on the scene. Its been frantic moving people around and such all morning. I could really go into a rant here about being prepared for this sort of thing, but it wouldn't matter. I hope that some of this plants management thinks about these sorts of things in the future and makes the much needed changes to be ready next time.

Last week i setup Cygwin-X on my laptop. I've used Xceed as my Xserver for windows for ever. So far this seems faster to me. And it was so easy to setup and get going. I haven't used any of the local apps much, just connecting to remote servers and workstations. But it does load several things for you to play with.

Today I setup cron from Cygwin on my Win2k laptop and copied several perl scripts from CVS and modified them for win32. I now have my whole development setup locally on my laptop and can sync it quickly with my servers. I did this so that I could grab my laptop and go when I get "the call" :) Not many days left until 2.0 is here.

And just for fun I loaded up the cygwin version of Smartmontools.

Another great weekend on the mound. Let me see if I can document a summary for you. Friday night Camille and I stayed home and enjoyed a meal (Bacon and Avocado Sandwiches) and a movie (Signs). Before the move could start we did have to make a candy run to have a proper movie watching environment.

Saturday, mostly home improvement stuff, lots of it. Saturday day night we went to Simply Fondue in Flower Mound with some friends P&K and had a great time. After that we came back to our place for coffee and hung out late.

Sunday, more home improvement. I finally fixed the floor (best I could) and started getting the quarter round down. I also delivered the couch, chair and tables that we sold a friend. We had some great burger's with our friends J&J and headed back home.

It seemed like it went by so fast.

I've been in deep Organizing/Cleaning/Planning mode for the last few weeks. I'm sure that part of it is being brought on by the fact that Camille and I will be parents in a few more weeks (man that sounds weird, me a parent) and also since our house is now ours, we can do what we want with it as far as organization goes.

Deep organization on the powerbook. I've been going through all the stuff i dump in the NEW folder. Some of its audio that goes into iTunes, the docs go into DEVONthink. And i give the various bits of software a try before i keep or toss. I started slowly moving photos from iPhoto to iView Media Pro (the trial, will have to purchase soon). Working in small groups I move them over and overly catagorize and tag them. I've then been moving them from the local hard drive to the firewire drive, as I'm running low on space. I hope to continue doing 100-200 a night until I'm done. I've been moving a few albums over from the network share into iTunes also. Lots of tag cleanup involved, so just a few every night. Lastly I've been sorting and working with the docs in DEVONthink, I can find just about anything now. I've also been organizing stuff on the Win2K box many media files and its coming together. A digital spring cleaning.

On the home front, lots of things have been going on. I've developed a master cleaning plan in Bonsai on my palm. Its got daily, weekly, monthly and yearly tasks in it. So far I've been staying with it, and must say that the house is staying very clean these days. I've even gone so far as to schedule the tasks in my calendar so I make sure I do them, I know your starting to think I'm nuts.

Something else I've been trying for the last 2 weeks is a weekly menu. Sunday afternoons I plan out all the meals for the week, with Camille's input of course. Then I gather all the recipes and make a list in SplashShopper and head to the store. Its really worked out great. I've managed to freeze about 10 meals along the way, so when Camille is home with the baby, she want have todo anything but thaw something out and heat it up.

I've been spending some time on the weekends working on on things in the house. Our kitchen is perfect for us, I know where. everything is. When I unpacked all the kitchen stuff, I left several things in boxes. So only 1 item has been missed so that show we had junk we didn't need. I have one small item to finish this weekend in one of the drawers. Of course we have some grander plans for some appliance replacement, but that can wait a few months. The next target area is the pantry, it needs a few things removed and organized better.

We've spent a bit of time getting the laundry room organized as well. New shelves laundry bins, wall hangers that sort of things. It turned out really well and seems room and uncluttered.

The dinning room and living room are open and there isn't much to organize. The next focus will be to get a narrow entrance way table made to match the other tables and to decorate more, its pretty bare at the moment.

The office is sitting there with some of the old stuff in it. Its sorta clean sorta messy. My big plan is to build in some work areas and book shelves this summer.

The master bed room needs some more work, I've got to finish fixing the floor ASAP. That's really the room that needs the most work before the baby gets here. That's my priority for the weekend.

I've been doing similar things at work. Thanks to my palm work and home are synced. I've been making much use of my tools to stay organized. At work: Lotus Notes (email, todo, calendar, memos, address book), DayNotez, Bonsai, FireFox. At home: Mail.app, iCal, iSync,iTunes,iView Media, DEVONthink, iMemo, OmniOuliner, Safari, SplashSuite and NetNewsWire. On the Palm: DayNotez, Bonsai, ToDo, DateBook, Memo, SplashSuite. I'm sure there is more, thats one heck of a brain dump there if I had a wireless link to my brain I would blog more :) . Back to work.

Its getting close to a point where I need a new handheld. My m505 has been great, but Its just not cutting it for me anymore. I've had it for 2ish years (or more). I have 2 contenders: Sony Clie PEG-UX50 and the Handspring Treo 600. Each have there strong and week points.

Sony Clie PEG-UX50 Pros:
WiFi
Bluetooth
Voice Memos (don't know if the Treo does them yet)
Cons:
Connecting to my existing cell phone to the net is expensive.

Handspring Treo 600
1 Device, no need carry Cell Phone + PDA, it also does Audible, so maybe even leave the iPod at home? This could cut down on gadget clutter.
Always connected to the net, no need to have to connect to it via a seperate phone, some services providers make this cheap, unlike the terrible rates from AT&T i get at the moment.

Right now I'm leaning towards the Sony. Anybody with either of these devices care to comment?

Looks like its gonna be a long busy day today. We goto the baby doctor today we are just weeks away at this point. Hope you have a good one.

Last night Kevin took me out to a Dallas Stars game. It was a blast, thanks dude!

Camille and I headed to the country this weekend for a lowtech weekend. A cell phone was all we carried. I was great to get away for a few days. I got todo some fishing with my dad and visiting with friends and family. Thats gonna be our last get away for some time. Just a few more weeks til baby is here. I'm running around like a mad man at the house trying to finish up all the little projects, trying not to be nervous :)

4 Years ago today, it all started with a test message. That was on blogger i think. Prior to that eveything was done with some hand rolled perl. I hope to find that content on a CD one day and add it to my archives.

Mikes got a good post up today on his views of Open Source and small business. Since my response was jumble in the comments I'll post them here. It would be a good idea to read his post first.

My Response:
"Let's try and find a sales person whose familiar with Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla, and Evolution. Remember this is a non-technical job, so we're talking about a non-techie who is familiar with these things. Sort of limits your possibilities, doesn't it?"

Since this is a non-technical job, the assumption to me is that anytime the computer breaks, they will call you anyway. So first off the OS doesn't matter that much, it boots up, they log in, they have a window manager they have links to there programs and files. This is fairly standard across the board these days in Windows/Linux/Mac/whatever. This is all setup by IT so, it shouldn't matter as much. Navigation is pretty much the same in Linux and Windows. Second up is OpenOffice, if you've used MS Office, using OO is the same to me, different names, but since this is non-technical they shouldn't have a problem writing a letter/memo or a spreadsheet. Third up is Mozilla, other than the name, there really isn't a difference, a web browser is a web browser (for the most part). You have bookmarks, address bar, back and forward buttons, what else do you need? And lastly Evolution, if you have used outlook, you can use Evolution, again since its non-technical, you can get mail and you can send mail. Now maybe I'm over simplifying that, based on not knowing specifics.

"OK, so we'll just find someone with the ability to pick up some techie stuff relatively easy. Except who's making the hiring decision? Not a technical person. Someone who would have to be pretty darn familiar with that stuff already himself, and comfortable not only in using it, but in knowing who is going to be best able to learn it. No one in management fits that description for Windows, let alone Open Source."
That's a problem that we all have to deal with. Its not often that any non-technical gets a once over from IT, usually the required skills for the job cover that, if they don't its even worse. Its easier to hire a person that is good at what they do, computers can always be taught. Most companies would go for the hot shot sales guy with little computer knowledge over a computer guy with no sales experience.

"Or if they find someone but later decide they want them to be able to do some database manipulation, is there going to be a place I can send her to learn MySQL, or am I going to be spending a whole lot of my time teaching it to her? Is the person making the hiring decisions, who has been unable to discern Access skills previously, going to be able to discern MySQL skills?"
You've got a good point here, there probably isn't much training out there for desktop mySQL usage. That probably really is the weakest point in some ways. Depending on what database manipulation you're looking at
basic client software isn't that hard to write if its really deemed necessary, or a web front end. Now you don't have to do this with access, so it would be a stumbling block.

"You see where this starts to get really complicated compared to Windows and Office, don't you?"
Personally I don't other than the Access/mySQL issue.

"I haven't even begun to get into the hassles of training current users who are not at all technically inclined, or the additional cost of finding someone to run all of this if I leave, compared to the cost of finding someone who can step in and admin an existing Windows network."
Your going to have training issue regardless of what platform your running on, at least we do here. As far as the additional cost of finding someone, I think that you probably wouldn't find it that much more difficult as more people are learning linux/open source these days. I also think that there are probably more windows admins out there that have learned some linux stuff than you think. At least in my area, most of the guys that I know are familiar with it , even if they don't use it at work.

"Microsoft products may cost more, and may be more vulnerable to bugs and hackers, but there are a ton of people who know how to use them. And isn't getting things done the point of having PC's in your business to begin with? Having Windows and Office makes it easier for us to get things done. Using other alternatives, right now, unnecessarily complicates things. Until using open source is common and wide-spread among non-techies in the workforce, I don't think it can compete. How to get there is the challenge developers should be looking at. "
MS stuff does cost more, way more. What would be interesting to know is what is the total cost of MS Software + training cost vs Open Software + training costs.

Now let me say, I'm glad you brought this up today, lots to make the brain work. Several things would have to be clarified before I would be sold on the "Open Source doesn't compare in small business". I should also point out that I think that MS is an excellent office suite, I'm not MS basher we run our business with it on the desktops. Mike, if you don't mind sharing some numbers, what are you considering small business?

This really on touched the topic of the desktop, perhaps tomorrow the topic would be behind the desktop on the servers. I'm curious to know your thoughts on that.

Another Monday just about gone. I finally heard back from the sotware vendor today (its been 7 days) and they confirmed there is a bug in the upgrade (duh!). They were supposed to contact me today around 2 or 3, but never did and of course couldn't be reached. On the positive side, I got to start back developing stuff this morning and put the finishing touches on 2 systems that can now be used by the staff. Thats left me with just enough time to play with REALbasic some more. I've started work on this simple program to help me with some development chores. Very basic at the moment, but I've got big plans for it.

Often I get emails and such from people that want to know how I do so much stuff. I get tons done at work and have more hobbies than anybody should. I try to lead a balanced life between work, home, and hobbies. I've been on several mailing lists about GTD for years now and believe in good organazation (except in my home office at the moment). I'm always looking for new ways to get more done. Anyway yesterday I came across a few GTD type weblogs that I thought i would share.

GTD to me
David Allen

If you have any releated blogs you would like to share on GTD or organization or Life Balance comment or email them to me.

I've seen the Soyo TechAid online for 35 - 50 bucks today. It looks like a great piece of hardware, has anybody every used one of these? If so would you recomend it?

I'm still (day 4) waiting on my database problem (actually probably a software export problem, since the database works). I guess they are having a harder time with it than they expected. Anyway this leaves me with time to experiment.

Today I've learned alot more about Bind and DNS than I've ever known before. I also got to get my feet wet with setting up virtual servers on apache, something I've never done. Getting a nameserver setup was no problem, we didn't have one running in the company (don't even get me started I can go for days) now we do. This is going to be helpful to me I think, even though have so many ips in memory. After that was working i setup some subdomains and virtual servers, just for fun. I guess its good practice for one day when I have to host all my own stuff.

What a morning, the database issue still hasn't been resolved so I've been taking advantage of the non dev time.

I've managed to empty my inbox, some of this went into the to-do list others got done on the spot. I've really caught up on my to-do list. I resetup the CVS server after last weeks drive failure and checked in a lot of my work to it. After I finish this post I'll be modifying the unix backup exec agent to backup the new location. I installed ntop 2.2 on it and got that all going. Now I need to reimage the whole machine again so I won't have to do this steps next time disaster strikes. I also caught up on tons of non-server related stuff. My to-do list is nice and slimmer now. Back to it.

I got a couple of new things in this week
SanDisk 256 MB CompactFlash Card with a nice fat rebate almost got it for nothing. I'm so afraid to run out of space when I'm out taking photos this should help.

Viking IntelliFlash 6-in-1 USB Flash Memory Reader - My old reader didn't work with my Mac and I haven't been downloading my photos as often as I should, now I don't have any reason not to.

I've been a fan of Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell since high school. I'm not sure of the exact year, but I'm guessing around 1991. I first discovered the work of Boris through his Series 1 Collector Cards (of course they weren't called Series 1 back then). A friend of mine BH had recently introduced me to the world of comics and comic shops. I discovered the tiny bits of artwork and really was amazed at it. It was nothing like this small town boy had ever seen before. I've enjoyed his work ever since. I think I still have all those cards plus several of the art books. My introduction to the work of Julie Bell came not long after that. I think it was mentioned on the back of one of the cards or in an art book. Soon there was a set of Julie cards that I collected as well. I still enjoy there work but haven't thought about them in a while, until I came across there site tonight and the memories came to me.

Every so often (ok several times a day) I find my self over at Feedster doing searches instead of google. I could write a post on why, but not now. Today I typed in "Flower Mound" just to see what all comes up, lots of my stuff and my friends and some new stuff.

What I find notable today is Flower Mound's best restaurants - the definitive list. Its from another bloggers perspective, and that's usually the most honest. There are a few places on the list that I've been to but most I haven't but now look forward to trying. I have been to #1 and #2 on the list and agree they are both great.

I'm still waiting for the software vendor to respond to the database issues after the upgrade. I honestly knew better than to upgrade to a new version when the old version was working fine. I should have stopped myself but didn't. Now I'm paying for it. Its even worse now that they have new people there. My old college/friend who has been there 8 years, is no longer there. I can tell the difference already, and its not good. Looks like I'm gonna have to call in another hour or so. I really don't want to bug them, but this is my development database and I can't develop, so.... At least I'm catching up on my to-do list.

For the last couple of working days, I've been caught up in database hell. I've been trying to run an export out of V6 so it can be distrubed to customers and internal staff. I've been getting this message:

"Master record missing violation of FOREIGN KEY constraint "FK1_FRATYPE_BLOBS" on table "FRATYPE_BLOBS"

I've been thinking it was something that I did that was server related since I've reconfigured my mashine since I did the last export. This morning I realized that it was not my fault, it was the programs. I had all most forgotten that the vendor sent out programe/database update a couple of weeks ago. I haven't done an export since then. Whe I did the roll back to an older version it worked fine. So now I've got to wait on them, there is to much work that would be lost to actually roll back and redo, so I hope they come up with a fix. As it stands they haven't returned my calls or emails I sent at 8 this morning.

One day last week Camille pointed out that one of the pieces of flooring was not flush anymore. This piece happened to be in the middle of the closet entrance. Thats not to bad i thought.

Today I removed all the flooring from the closet and got down to the piece and discovered that it had gotten wet. Don't know how that happened with the moisture barrier and all, but it did. So I finally worked it out and its all warped up. So now I think there is another one to fix so I've to try to figure out what caused it. I may actually have to call in a professional on this, not sure yet. But I'm not jacking with it anymore tonight thats for sure.

Well it was another exciting night in the Mound last night. Kevin and Merrin came over for some grub. Kevin and I cooked up some of the thickest steaks around. It was a short night, but the food was good. This is becoming a weekend habit, and a good one at that.

Lots of projects planned for the weekend, lets see how they go.

So I guess its about time that I actually posted something in person not one of the bots. I think a new visitor would suspect that this is just another link dump site, well normally its not.

Work has been very intense lately same for the home life. My calendar has been full from 5:45am to 12:30am for the last couple of weeks. Any spare time that I've had has been sent relaxing. So in summary, the bots haven't taken over and life and work are great and busy.

Working Papers X - "WorkingPapers lets you scan in business documents and color photos using many of today's leading scanners. Search by content, filename, volume name, comments, or categories of your making. Organize your documents into collections and find files stored on floppies, CDs, cartridges, or Zip drives." - More on this one tomorrow after I deal with several weeks worth of paper.

"gpsWrite is an application that allows you to enter, import and organize waypoints, tracks and routes. With it you can easily enter waypoints, tracks or routes and save them to file." Looks good does exactly what it says. I'm not sure it will replace my current GPS tools but it offers a different perspective.

QIF Master "QIF Master makes it easier to enter banking, credit card, and investment transactions into Quicken. " - Not sure I need this at the moment my plan is to get Quicken installed and setup tomorrow.

Coccinella looks interesting. I need a drawing board like this the other day.

Powemate Driver updated

Salling Clicker 2.1 has lots of changes, including using the external script editor (good!).

Home Guardian Review I've been thinking of giving this a try.

Proteus 3.0.6 fixes the MSN and Yahoo problems we've all been having.

I know its not a viewsonic, its a sony. The specs look good what do you LCD masters think? Sony 17" LCD on sale.

Since we were so close to Apple store yesterday we swung by to get some new software. The haul was:
Quicken 2004 - Since leaving my PC for a Mac, i ditched MS Money but never replaced it. Now its time to get caught back up. Looking at quickens bill pay service, I can't figure out why its so much higher than other places. I have been using msn for a couple years now an its about $6 a month, I plan on trying my banks bill pay now that they have it setup.
Turbo Tax - Its that time of year.
iLife '04 - I can't wait to give the new iMovie and iDVD a go.

I also purchased Unison online. My trial was up and this is just a really good app for usenet.

I got myself a new DeWalt drill today . Sure they are pro tools, but I'm a pro (in my mind). So far so good this baby should last a while. I used it to setup the work area in the garage today. Now i just need to install some pegboard later this week. Perhaps I'll post some pictures after I do that.

We finished up the class today. My N.A.D.D. really kicked in, the pace was way to slow. I did actually pick up a few tips and I guess we need to practice our breathing over the next few weeks.

We went to the first part of our lamaze class tonight. To be honest it was a bit boring, the instructor really needs to pick up the pace. Camille brought me a yummy BLT from Crescent City , man now that's a BLT.

I don't know how it came to mind today, but I found a link to 2-XL. I had one of these great learning tools as a kid. I rember playing with it alot. I hope that it still around my parents place somewhere. If not, I noticed one on ebay, not that i need one.

When we moved we were pretty orgainzed. The only few boxes that I didn't label or color code were the very last ones. I know what is in about every box. But there is one box that I really need, and I can't find it. Its been very frustrating. This weekend I plan on finding that damn box, I will probably have to unpack more stuff than I wanted to accomplish this. This might be a good time for dowing some "clean sweep" piles also.

I think Camille sums up our KR experience from last night. While not a bad show, we both came away a little disappointed.

Well its about ti