Technology

Mobile Technology

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I tell everyone I used to hate traveling for work. That is partially true. In the end I dreaded the trips, the waits in the airport, getting lost in po-dunk towns in rental cars, etc. In the beginning I loved traveling. I think I did too much too quick. Also I did this during a period of the worst air traffic delays in the history of US air travel. I also flew out of the most delayed airport in the US. An airport that the FAA said accounted for 25-30% of all delays at the time, Laguardia airport (LGA).

This entry is not about my love or dislike of travel, that I can save for many entries later. What I am thinking about is the cool technology you can use or rely on when traveling.

Studies are coming out now saying more and more people are “cutting the cord” or becoming wireless phone only households. I have been using my cell as my primary (or only) home phone since 1998. Earlier than that I lived at home with my parents and they did have an extra line, even though I never used it.

When traveling you can use the coolest tools that keep you in touch or working. The stuff out now is even better than what I was able to use when I traveled regularly 3 years ago. Wow, it has been 3 years since I did that.

When I was on the road I relied on a laptop (Compaq Presario 1875 or something with an AMD K6-2 180mhz processor, then a number of Micron 15″ TFT laptops, and eventually a Dell latitude CPx). The laptops I have now kick the ass of the ones I had then. My thinkpad T-40 I use for work is literally half the thickness of the micron’s I used and 3-4 times more powerful. The battery lasts like 4 hours. If I got 90 minutes on the micron or 60+ on the Compaq I was happy. Even my tiny Powerbook gets better battery life than the old desktop replacements.

My cell phone back then was several flavors of the Nokia 6160, Motorola Timeport, or later on a Nokia 8890. The service actually was as good as it is now. T-Mobile’s coverage has gotten better, but I used to go everywhere with my AT&T Tri-mode TDMA Nokia’s. The phone was big but worked all over. From Canada, to Portland Oregon, to Portland Maine. The difference is I am paying about half the price I paid back in 1999 for about the same amount of minutes or even more minutes now.

The other difference with cell phones are that my Treo 600 is a handheld and a phone. I also get wireless internet access on it. For me between 1998 and 2001 that was impossible for me. now I can get email on my phone or use another phone with bluetooth to get mail on my laptop. I didn’t even have a blackberry then. I would have killed for a blackberry when I traveled. I take it for granted now.

The WiFi hotspots would be awesome to have had when I traveled. I used to use Laptop Lane at some airports back then, but they weren’t everywhere.

VPN software and Exchange 2003 with RDP over HTTPS would have been awesome. Either would have been awesome. At Datastream we had to use outlook from outside the firewall using AT&T Global net dial up. It was so slow. Now it would be trivial and fast to use, especially with high speed internet in some hotels now. When I went to vegas last winter I plugged my Powerbook (then a 15″ TiPowerbook) into the network jack in the hotel and I was able to VPN back to work. It came in handy when Keith needed something when I was out. That is the coolness I am talking about. Technology that just works when you are on the road.

If I was still traveling I would probably look at the bluetooth GPS receivers they have out now. Connect it to my iPack 1945 and know where I am. It would be killer.

What is also funny is that more and more people are using gadgets on the road. Besides the pain in the ass people on cell phones everywhere (writing this as someone’s phone goes off on the train). I mean laptops PDA’s, and other neat stuff. Around me right now on the train is 4 ladies with huge laptops doing work. One has to be my mom’s age. 4 years ago that wouldn’t be going on. When I am on the train to kingston I always see several people with blackberry’s or Pocket PC’s & Palms of several varieties. Then there are the iPods. They are everywhere. Note to self need new iPod for train trips like this. must replace sold one ASAP.

I just find these observations amusing. Why, because all this stuff that I see I have been doing for years. That is no big deal, but I always used to get made fun of by some of my friends about doing it. Then like clock work 6 months later they would be doing the same thing. I don’t consider myself a trendsetter but some technology stuff I get right away because I think it will work for me. I was that way with the first bluetooth phones. I got it and used it to connect to my PC and use a bluetooth headset. Turns out that it didn’t work very well, but it worked and I used it for months.

Enough of my observations. I am off to stretch my legs on the train for a while and maybe take some pictures with my Treo and post them to my MoBlog!!!

This blog entry was written while listening to Higher from the album “Human Clay” by Creed And Superman from the album “America Town” by Five for Fighting

I Got Rid Of Verizon Wireless

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Finally after months of waiting and/or plain old laziness I have gotten rid of my Verizon Wireless account. I have had 2 wireless accounts for years. I have had T-Mobile (Voicestream) and Verizon Wireless since September 2001. I have been using my T-Mobile phone exclusively since December 1. I am always concerned about good reception and didn’t want to get rid of my Verizon account without being comfortable that T-Mobile worked everywhere I needed it to. I haven’t needed to use my Verizon phone since December so it is a good sign that I can get rid of the extra expense. Since by now it was almost the same price to leave the account active and let the contract run out vs. canceling it and paying the termination fee, I just canceled the account so I don’t have the recurring payment.

What I did was port my old verizon number over to T-Mobile. I setup a family share plan so I can have my 2 numbers. I am truly a tech geek because of my reasoning for this. I want my PalmOne Treo 600 for my primary phone. I love that phone. But I want a bluetooth phone that I can use as a wireless modem for my laptop, and I also want some other bluetooth accessories such as the wireless headset. With a family plan I can share minutes between two phones. The price between this new plan and the plan I had was only like $10. To me it was worth the charge to have the flexibility to play around with the second phone.

Today is a good test of the new phone also. I am off to Kingston. it is north of NYC and phone signal isn’t always that good everywhere.

Ebay Sale’s

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My 10 Gig iPod has been sold on eBay. I am taking it to work today to ship to its new owner. I wanted to get a new one with a bigger drive, but I didn’t realize they don’t sell the 30 gig one’s anymore. 40 Gig is more than I need, and it costs more than I want to pay. I may just hold onto the money and wait and see what comes out next.

I also sold my Treo 270. That went out at the beginning of the week. I go through cycles of selling things on eBay. Looks like I am in one now. I am going through my apartment looking for stuff I don’t use or want to upgrade. So far I am happy with most of my stuff and don’t want to part with it. Of course I really didn’t want to part with my iPod but I kept running out of space on it.

Planning

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Yesterday we began to enact our departments 3 month project plan. All development projects for the next few months are out on the table so everyone knows what is going on.

Yesterday was another one of those days where half the day was spent in meetings. I did a lot of break fix stuff yesterday. I was not able to move along any major projects (that I can remember now).

It was busy. I didn’t even get to work on my new desktop machine. My HP Evo 330 that I use as my desktop computer at work was having hard drive issues. It keep rebooting and saying it can’t find one. I would have to play with the cables and it would start to work again. I didn’t have time to deal with that so I took a HP Evo 310 something and fixed it up. On tuesday I put a 200 gig drive in it, along with the 80 gig one that was there I now have plenty of space to put VMWare virtual machines. I also pulled out the burner from my 330 and put that in it too. The 510 is a decent machine now. I use this desktop mainly as a VMWare machine. I load it up with ton’s of virtual machines and I can switch between them when needed. I also sometimes use it as a backup box to my laptop. Mainly it is for VMWare. And you know how much I like VMWare:)

Palm And Expansion Cards

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I don’t like the way Palm handles expansion cards. I took some pictures with my Treo camera and by accident saved them to the SD card. I cannot send the pictures via email while they are on the SD card. No problem I think, I can just copy them to the main memory and I am off. no problem. Wrong! the camera software doesn’t have a copy utility. Filez the file browsing software that I have just lets you see where stuff is. It doesn’t let me copy or move stuff. So I know exactly where the pictures are, but I cannot do anything with them on my Treo. I need to offload them to a PC and then move them to the Palm. how stupid is that?

Pocket PC’s handle expansion cards like another drive. Why can’t Palm???

Pocket PC WiFi

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I received my Sandisk SD/IO WiFi Card yesterday. I ordered an 802.11b card for my Compaq iPaq 1945 Pocket PC. My goal is to be able to sync wirelessly my iPaq with Avantgo when my laptop is not at home. Also to be able to browse the web via wireless on the iPaq.

The setup was almost painless. The drivers installed fine. Getting the Wifi key to work was another story. Who knew that even if you don’t use a HEX code for your wifi the windows pocket pc needs you to convert it to HEX. once that was done and a reset later I got an IP address. things looked good from there. My problem is when I sync or use IE with the network card, my Pocket PC slows to a crawl. A soft reset fix’s things but then the card doesn’t find the network. I was too busy yesterday to troubleshoot the problem further, but it was frustrating.

I hope to look at the problem more today if I don’t go home and go right to sleep.

Missing Sync Update

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This program is awesome. The only problem I am having is when I do a bluetooth sync. My iPaq slows way down and IE on the iPaq cannot be stopped until I soft reset it. I don’t think it is the Missing Sync software, but the Bluetooth software on the iPaq. that is my theory right now. I want to try a bluetooth sync on my PC and see what happens but so far I have been unable to get active sync to work at all with bluetooth. Plug n Play my ass. I will tell you Apple has the right idea with owning the OS and the hardware. Stuff just works.

I may actually go out and buy a WIFI card for my iPaq and sync that way over the network. That would be really cool. I am still working out the details for that. The WIFI SD/IO card is like $110.

More Treo 600 Updates

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I am using the camera more for my MoBlog. It is really cool. The Moblog not the camera. The camera sucks, but for a camera on a phone it works ok. It is not a replacement to a real digital camera.

The internet connection still works most of the time. Snapper mail is a killer app. I cannot wait for IMAP enabled version later this year. I am checking out a few DB sync programs for the Palm that will sync access db’s to my palm. that would be cool too, but so far no opinion on them yet.

I had to reinstall all my apps this weekend. I had some new piece of software kill my Treo. it kept rebooting in a loop. The backup on my PC didn’t seem to help, so I had to do a hard reset and start from scratch. Not happy about that, but I got everything back online in a few hours.

Missing Sync

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I just bought Mark / Space’s the missing sync for the pocket PC. I am now using it to sync my HP iPaq 1945 with my iMac. It works as advertised. I like that I can sync avantgo now without having my work laptop at home. It also does bluetooth syncing. I love that. It was kind of pricey at $40 something, but it is really cool.

I also have their palm sync product. It is good, but I am having problems with the avantgo sync with my Treo and the iMac. I need to find time to work on that issue.

So far high marks for Mark / Space and their products. Makes owning a Mac less stressful knowing you can use more hardware with it, (i.e. my pocket pc and palm) without less features than I would on a PC.

Hot Chocolate Or A Frapachino

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My throat hurts today so I am debating if I want hot chocolate or a starbucks frapichino? The frap will wake me up from my drug induced sleep from last night, but the hot chocolate will ease my throat a bit. I will have to hit starbucks and find out.

Its funny, I hit the starbucks in Union Square. There are two of them, but I always goto the same one. That place is like a starbucks commercial. There is always one or two people with the laptops (one always a big powerbook) on the T-Mobile Wifi, sipping some concoction of coffee. I always find it amusing. I can’t believe that the majority of starbucks across the country people do that, but they are making there money back at the one by my office.

I will admit I have never done the coffee house wifi experience. Actually don’t think I have ever used a hot spot anywhere. I have used high speed internet at hotels, and at Laptop Lane in airports but never a wifi hotspot. Maybe I am not as big a geek as everyone thinks I am:)