Anytime I have a promotion hanging in the balance I like to do something that will guarantee I don’t get it (and it worked). This year I decided to weigh in on the current “public-private initiative” for a private company to finance and build improvements to SR 316 to Athens. They would pay for this by charging tolls and it would cost something like $8 to drive from Atlanta to Athens using SR 316. If you want, you can still comment on this proposal (for two more weeks), but only if you agree with me. I wrote, not as a DOT employee, but a guy whose brother and family live in Athens. I sent it to the Commissioner of the DOT but found out later that it was supposed to go to [email protected] who is the Chief Engineer (and my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss). They sent me a nice form letter a few days later. I also cc’d the e-mail to my State Representative. I sent the e-mail on a Saturday (not at work) and within a few hours she had responded by e-mail and said she would bring it up when she met with the DOT board the following week. She also asked if I supported a higher gas tax and I replied “Of course!”
Memoparser (cont.)
It’s been one year since I wrote Memoparser and I get an occasional hit on its web page and 187 have downloaded it at Palm Gear. I did a search for “memoparser” and found one guy’s blog entry that said “Memoparser 1.0 sounds interesting”. That’s pretty good, I think. The guy that wrote Palm2iPod still hasn’t come up with a new version that exports memos so I’m glad I wrote the program.
However, I have to admit that I don’t generally use the notes on the iPod since I usually carry my Palm with me.
I still think the perfect MP3 player would be a Palm with a 20 GB hard drive. And it would need some kind of open source community to keep it constantly updated and configurable, unlike the iPod.
Unfortunately, I think Palms and other non-wireless (wireful? it still has no wires) PDA’s are dinosaurs. I was at Best Buy and they had maybe 3′ of shelf space for PDA’s and accessories. I think cell phones are doing more and more but I don’t really want a cell phone. I think eventually people will make fun of me for using an antiquated wireful Palm, like it’s a slide rule or something.
Movies to Video
After my DVD player died and I was able to bring it to life, I noticed a button on it I had never used before. It was the Progressive Scan button. I bought this DVD player partly because it was progressive scan meaning that instead of showing you every other line of the picture 60 times a second it would show you a fresh frame 60 times a second. But apparently it would only do that if you pressed this button and I had never done that.
Epinions
I joined Epinions today. I’ve always found their reviews to be kind of obnoxious because people get very wordy and cute with their reviews. But I think there is some value to them as well because they keep reviews of older products on record whereas Amazon has no reason to keep reviews of out-of-date electronics. Anyway, my DVD player died (while watching my Seinfeld DVD Christmas present!) so I decided to review it. You can go there to read the review or read it here:
The New Centurion
Hurray!!! This is my 100th blog entry! I have been posting since April 2003 when Jeb tricked me into writing my first blog entry by just taking an e-mail I had written to Kelly and putting it on my newly created blog. It was a month before I wrote another entry and again I think it was an e-mail I had sent to Jeb that he said I should turn into a blog entry (and may have done it for me again). Later on it became easier to write blog entries about things related to the dogs, the Estonians (surprisingly popular), and all my gadgets like the iPod (unsurprisingly unpopular). I do find myself going back to some old entries for information that I have stored there. The search tool is great.
Anyway, on this momentous occasion I would like to thank Blog Master Jeb for all his hard work in putting together blogs for everyone and keeping them lively. And it’s not like I write everything on my blog. The comments have really been enjoyable and are a major part of the whole thing, especially with the Estonian series. So thanks to everyone who posts comments and reads these things too.
Here’s a question: The blog shows all the months I have posted entries, but is there a way to make a page (maybe a separate page) that lists all of the entries and links to them? That way I could use AvantGo to download my whole blog to my Palm.
Lastly, I really like the new Christmas colors!