In my usual blog reading, I came across a comparison between the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) and Amazon’s new MP3 beta service. While they allow single song downloads via web interface (yay non-windows and non-osx people!), the batch downloader is still only Windows/OSX (boooo!)
hoping that this doesn’t break IE again… grrrrr
[flashvideo width="480" height="382" filename="wp-content/uploads/ftp/mov02960.flv" /]
UPDATE: looks like IE played nice — awesome! look for more videos soon (just ordered the cable I need to hook up the camcorder to the laptop.. w00t)
Believe it or not, I am still around, just blogging very infrequently (like you noticed I was gone anyway!). I’ve been busy learning how to teach.. despite having the appropriate education, nothing really preps you for the “all alone” phase, and I find myself working at night, on weekends, etc, just to stay afloat (forget about ever being ahead!). I think I’m making progress, but who knows. I’m sitting here blogging and I just wasted over an hour making some custom mixes for my car that are all cross-faded together and sweet.. 20-25 minutes a piece (translation – the length of the drive from daycare to school).
In any case, despite being busy, I somehow keep up on my usual blog reading (wp, moz, celeb gossip), and noticed that WP2.3 went gold yesterday. If you haven’t been following the changes from the 2.0/2.1/2.2 branches, I think you’ll like the new features and new direction certain aspects have taken (UTW is almost a think of the past now — shocking!). So, in my usual state of transitive thought (why ever stop when you can go one step further?!?!), I am starting to think about the upgrade I will make soon. I’ve really done nothing to promote this blog, nor have I kept it online in any particular place for any noteworthy length of time.. so taking it down would just be, well.. expected of me?
I await the long-anticipated “new logos” for my domains, and that will probably decide my next course of action. I have been holding on to a couple domains with the intention of using them for my blos for over a year now, and despite being horribly busy, am actually making forward progress on some kind of “put it out there and get readers” model 
AMAZING.
No news on when… or how.. need to find a host as my current hosting situation is.. I can’t say unstable because I think it is stable.. now.. but it’s a case of “reinventing the wheel” and forgetting that the wheel was in fact round the first time.. need some sandpaper!!!
Before you start, understand this is a long-winded, rambling, and somewhat historical post on my love/hate relationship with PDA’s — read on if this suits you!
At various points in my life, I find myself in need of hard core organization. This is a life skill that I either didn’t learn, or am choosing to ignore. The end result is I lack a very crucial component to an organized life. Often you can find me forgetting things, remembering obscure facts with little meaning in context, or pondering how my life might be if I knew what the f*** was going on.
I’m at one of those moments now: I need some vehicle of organization that I can both use and maintain. I could step back in time and start the ole paper-and-pen agenda method, but with a constantly evolving to-do list and the desire to change things without white-out or an eraser, I find that the antiquated methods of time management to be, well, antiquated.
So, as is typical of my quests for organization, I think back to the one successful bout of organization I had: my Palm IIIx (it actually is a 3Com PalmPilot IIIx, yea, dated.. fear it!). Busting out with 4mb of memory I think, and that horribly green indiglo-ish backlight, it was the best bang for the buck on the market. That li’l technological marvel singl-handedly got me through the last two years of college (specifically, electrical engineering). After graduating, I decided to upgrade to the Palm m130 (baseline, but color), and then eventually bought a Sony Clie (which was a bad-ass device). My usage began to decline and eventually stopped. I had a stack of old palm devices that weren’t being used!
Since then, I’ve tried to resurrect the Clie (bad cable adapter thing) and the m130 (dead cradle, IR sync with my laptop works 10% of the time), and am frustrated because I think that I might actually break the cycle of planning to use some kind of organizational device, AND, continue using it beyond a week (which is about the duration of the last 5 or so attempts). The problem this time around is I don’t have an old device to play with (yea, I didn’t mention the IIIx, but do I really have to? I don’t feel like making an old school RS232 device working with my less-old-school laptop without a serial port!).
So, I’m now living in 2007 where the PDA market is dying a quick and quiet death, and the remaining companies in that field are struggling to adapt. I like the direction that Palm has gone with their smart-phones and with the addition of that neat companion/laptop-looking-thing/whatever that costs entirely too much money for me (meaning, I don’t have a $600 smart phone to accompany the $400 companion — for $1000, I’ll buy a small laptop thanks!). Perhaps this is a dated mentality, but I enjoy separate devices for separate tasks. It’s the same reason I won’t ever buy a TV/DVD Player combo.. I like that if one part breaks, you just replace the one part!
All that is left in the realm of what I want in a device for organization are the Palm products (z22, E2, TX), any kind of Windows Mobile PDA (hp, asus, etc), and recently the advent of the iPhone and iPod Touch from Apple. Cross off the Windows Mobile devices and iPhone right away. I don’t like being bound to one operating system (WM Devices) nor do I want to pay out the ass for a crappy data network on a cell carrier that I am not a part of (iPhone + AT&T). So, I’m left with the palm handhelds and the new iPod Touch.
I think about what I might use these devices for in addition to calendaring, to-do lists, and contacts, and the iPod has an obvious shining advantage. I may have written about it in the past, but my history with music/media players is hit-or-miss at best, in some part due to a strong sentiment against the iPod (why get what everyone else already has?!). I’ve since left my anti-iPod rhetoric behind and am looking for the best device for the job.
My long commute (1:10 each way, no traffic, both in the sense that it takes that long with no traffic and that there is in fact never any traffic) is made easier by my 16 month old son in the back seat for most of the commute, my satellite radio, and whatever media device happens to be working on that particular day (i’m down to my mp3-cd capable portable panasonic thing). I’d love to have my PDA double as a music device so that it can tell me what to do, and also make me enjoy my commute. The iPod Touch “appears” to do both. I have yet to see any kind of documentation one way or the other on calendar/to-do/contact support in pc-land (which sadly is where I currently reside). I’ll let the Linux and OSS communities hack this all up and come up with a solution soon, and I have no doubt that a *nix solution to this problem will arrive sometime soon. As for the media, well, iTunes works, as does my trusty Winamp with the iPod plugin.
The palm devices are strong at the calendaring, and not as strong with the media. This is obviously by design as they aren’t necessarily competing in the same market as the iPod’s. But, at similar price points (the 8GB iP Touch and the palm TX both at $299), it’s hard to really decide one way or the other. The palm devices are “cross-platform” (I hate this term, as I really mean Windows, Mac, and anything with gpilot/kpilot, so name your flave of *nix for that) and with the rampant availability of outlook sync conduits, you really can just pick your OS and run with it (I’m a huge Evolution fan, and will be using it some day!! I found the win32 builds for it, but I’m not sure if it does everything I need without living in side of gnone or with the gnome libraries). It has memory and expansion (which I haven’t seen for or against the iP Touch either), and I imagine there is some kind of addon for headphone out, media players, etc etc (it may have this already, I just haven’t looked — i don’t consider palm at the forefront of the portable media wave).
So, what do I go with? I’m still pondering the question. The biggest item tipping the balance is stability and reliability. The iPhone/iPod Touch are new to the market and are a first generation technology. palm has been doing this since the dark ages. Is the question “what is the coolest?”, or “What will keep all my crap organized?”.
Hopefully I’ll know the answer soon enough! Until then, my wallet dictates that neither is a solution.. for now!