New laptop and getting organized

I finally convinced my boss that I needed a new laptop for work. It arrived this last week and is wonderful. The new laptop is a Lenovo and has a keyboard where all of the keys actually work. My previous laptop was a Toshiba that I inherited from a co-worker that was fired. So by the time I received it, it was already pretty worn in. At the time it was a great improvement from my Compaq brick. I got some good use out of the Toshiba for about 3 years. But it had started to become so sluggish and I was starting to get regular BSD's (blue screen of death). I was becoming concerned that the hard drive was getting ready to die. In the tech world they say it's not a matter of if a hard drive will crash but when. From the first time I opened the Lenovo I was quite impressed as to how fast it booted up and how fast applications would open up. Not wanting to clutter up this new laptop, I decided I need to work on my computer organization. I'm really bad at managing electronic files, programs, and e-mail. My computer desktop looks as messy as my real desktop, which goes hand in hand with my messy office and car trunk. So to help me with my organization, I downloaded an audio book from audible.com called Getting Things Done. We'll see if this finally helps me.

Palm Pre and Itunes

Last week Apple released a new version of Itunes that blocks direct access from the Palm Pre. This is such a stupid thing for Apple to do. I guess Apple feels the need to discriminate what platform is used to buy music from their store. What is next, is Apple going to block Windows users from Itunes? I guess Steve Jobs is back in full force. He must still be pretty bent about the Iphone team leaving Apple to go work for Palm and develop the Pre. It's things like this that make me want to go out and purchase a Palm Pre just to stick it to Apple.

Wifi on the open road

On my way to work the other day I ended up behind a bus in traffic. There was a sign on the bus that said it had Wifi access. This is the second time I ended up behind a bus advertising this. Both times I felt compelled to pull out my Ipod touch to see if I could get a connection. I know, probably not the brightest thing I could be doing while driving. The first time I was not able to pick up a signal, the second time I did. Unfortunatly they had enabled security on the router and I did not have the password. It's probably a good thing that I was not able to connect. I can already picture the senario now of me explaining to the police officer that the reason that I was tailgating the bus was to get internet access. Of course then I would become a case study for Californians to pass another law to ban the use of Wifi on buses.

Video calls on your TV

In the Mercury News today there is an article that talks about How Cisco is heavily investing in developing a way to video conference through your TV. It appears by their projections that they expect this technology to be used in the home as commonly as a phone. It makes me wonder, are we ready for a world where we're seen by whoever we are talking to? It's estimated that 60% of communication is non verbal, but through body language. What will I do now when a telemarketer calls me and sees that I'm not the mean person I pretend to be when I typically say "not interested" and quickly hang up? As a caution, if you end up adopting video calls into your home, please disable the auto answer feature.

Two things that drive me crazy

Today I had to deal with two different electronic manufacturers that had major flaws in their firmware. The first was an audio conference product that has been on the market for about a year. The product has an interface built into it that I Incorporated into one of my designs. When I went to program the device, the interface was disabled in the software. I called the manufacturer and they informed me that this feature will not be available until the end of the year. The second was a video conferencing unit that has been around for about 3 years. The most recent firmware that they released managed to disable the main control port on the device. This left one of our clients with a system that no longer works. I know that everyone has bugs in their software, but if your going to manufacture professional equipment vital to corporate communications you should be a little more cautious in releasing software ready for implementation.