Can You Hear Me.... Hello?

The past week in Boston has been great for all the reasons I've enumerated elsewhere, but one continuing annoyance has been the troubles I've experienced with cellular reception - both for the phone and for my broadband card.

FYI: I'm a Sprint customer, and perhaps I should do some research on user comments about Sprint reception downtown and Back Bay. (Probably won't get to that soon.) I had trouble all week with dropped calls, and a broadband card that wouldn't ramp up to EVDO. This is on the 33rd floor of a hotel, so I wasn't exactly buried in the weeds, even though it felt like it. The conference floors had somewhat stronger reception but it was still fringe reception - dropping in and out of EVDO continually.

It makes me flinch because I spend $60 a month to access Sprint Wireless Broadband, and most of the time it's fast, reliable, and it saves me lots of connection charges at places like airports, Starbucks, hotels, etc. I tried my cell card for a day in the Powerbook, then gave up and spent $10 a day to get Marriott's ethernet connection. Kind of defeats the purpose to pay the equivalent of one month's access to Sprint broadband to get 6 days of hotel internet, especially when the Sprint card is in my bag.

Well, that's as close as I've come to a rant on a blog since 2001. I'll go no closer.

But let me give a shout-out to the DLink personal wireless router I bought a couple years ago for $60 or thereabouts. No more dragging along a 25 foot ethernet cable so you can sit on your bed and surf the web. Even with cellular wireless and wireless in hotel rooms more common, I still get great value out of this.

You know I never think to take that kit with me to meetings and stuff... it would be an excellent wireless solution for everyone. hmmm.... now what should I charge for that? :)

CBC Google Maps Tuna: It ain't pretty

via Amber Mac: CBC has used the Google Maps API in this interactive map showing high concentrations of mercury in canned tuna.

Boston: Jacket Required

I'm off to Boston for a week beginning tomorrow. I expect some really great things to come out of a couple of conferences I'll be attending, and I'm also looking forward to seeing good friends of mine who are coming to Boston for a day so we can go to dinner on Tuesday night. We're going to Excelsior, which by all accounts is a great restaurant, although I'm always a little put off when the fine print says "Jacket suggested." I don't plan to wear a jacket anywhere else - certainly not to the conference sessions - so I haven't decided if I'm going to pack something that will get one use that week, or go without and feel a little out of place while dining.

Yes, I did that thing

On my regular Friday evening blogcrawl... came across this sad example of parking in the snow. I'd display the picture here, but it's "All Rights Reserved" on Flickr, so go here to see it in all its glory. No, this isn't me, but it might as well have been tonight when I dropped by the house for a few minutes and inadvertently parked about 2 feet away from the curb. Blaming the snow ain't gonna cut it. I was only there 25 minutes, long enough to make and consume really tasty panini with rapini, parmigiano reggiano, and olive oil. But every time a car drove by, I was sure I could hear someone cursing my car. It didn't diminish my enjoyment of the sandwich one bit.

GTD Tool of the Day

So, today it's Thinking Rock, my friends. It's part 11 of my never-ending quest to find the best possible GTD software solution, and perhaps waste more time than anyone thought possible doing it.

One must not succumb to the belief that the perfect GTD system exists, but I have to say, I want a system that effectively offers an "inbox" to collect stray thoughts. Later, I can come back through and categorize and contextualize to my heart's content. Midnight Inbox offers one - well, of course it does, it's in the name. So does TR. Like most of the Mac-based GTD assemblage, I eagerly await OmniOutliner's entry - OmniFocus. Is nirvana just around the corner? Not sure, but dinner is.

The Return

I started blogging in a rather haphazard, infrequent way back in 1997, but REAL blogging began with my migration to the Blogger platform in early 2001. So 6 years later, it feels kind of cool to be coming back to a much-improved Blogger platform. For now, I'm keeping my domain and other blog, and this platform is for blogging about things I feel like talking about - surprisingly, some of those things aren't work-related.