Month: September 2005

My Last Palm PDA?

As the semester has started to pick up steam, my calender has started to fill up with classes and study group meetings, due dates and reminders, as well as regular non-school stuff. Normally I’d be loading all of this into my trusty Tungsten C, but this semester I’ve been strangely reluctant to do so. In fact, for the first time in about a decade, I found myself yearning for a simple paper calender to write my appointments down in.

Then today, I found out that PalmSource, makers of the PalmOS, has been acquired by a Japanese software company. What exactly that means for people who care about PalmOS-based PDAs is unclear right now, but my guess is it doesn’t bode well.

My Tungsten C is a couple of years old now. It’s still chugging along quite nicely, but eventually it will need to be replaced. What’s going to still be on the market when I go to replace it? And will what’s out there meet my needs?

I’ve pretty effectively reduced my dependence on Microsoft products over the past year. Thunderbird has been working well as my e-mail client, and the Palm Desktop as the PC side of my PIM. In addition, Firefox has replaced Internet Explorer as my browser of choice, and iTunes does a fine job of managing my MP3s, although those apps are not going to be affected by my choice of PDA. If I were to buy a Microsoft-based PDA, I’d have to switch back to Outlook, and I never liked Outlook. I used it because I felt that I had to.

Microsoft’s PDA OS has improved significantly from what I saw when I used it back in 2000, but I’m just not very enthusiastic about the idea. Given the choice of getting an MS-based PDA and going back to Outlook, or going to a paper solution, paper looks like a much better choice.

There are other alternatives. By the time my Tungsten finally rolls over and dies, Apple may well have come out with an iPod capable of being an effective PIM as well as a music storage device. Or other new devices may come out that work for me. We’ll have to see.

UPDATE: Amid a bunch of self-congratulatory “I told you so’s”, David Berlind at ZDNet agrees that this is definitely not good news for the PalmOS.

How Not To Get Blogrolled

So here’s an e-mail I received today:

Hoping you’ll host a link to my blog on your site — and not too proud to beg! 😉

[links redacted]

Lots more original art and commentary that pulls no punches. All a solo effort.

peace,
[name redacted]

After checking the blog in question out, I decided that there was nothing wrong with it, but that I didn’t want to add it to my blogroll. So I sent the following response:

Thanks but no thanks.

Maybe I could have been nicer about it, but hey, it was an unsolicited e-mail. A bit later in the day I get this back:

Wow, nice snotty reply.

I’m sure your “blog” will do well with more nice widdow kitty pix…

LOL

At which point I got annoyed. Talk about being unable to handle rejection!

So here was my response:

You know something? You need to check your attitude.

YOU sent ME an unsolicited e-mail asking for a blogroll link. I could
have just ignored your request but instead I took the time to visit
your blog, read your most recent posts, and decide not to blogroll
you. I then sent you a short and somewhat flip, but not impolite,
e-mail telling you so.

Your response is to call me snotty and make fun of the fact that I
post photos of the work I do for the SF SPCA on my blog. That kind of
response does not incline me to change my mind. It makes me think I
made the right decision in the first place.

One of us has a problem, but somehow I don’t think it is me.

It takes a lot of nerve to turn around and insult someone that you’d just asked for a favor.

This Explains a Few Things

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.

And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.

The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA.

Source: the Boston Herald. I’m sitting here shaking my head. That’s just … wow. I mean, WOW. Exactly how is this man even remotely qualified to run FEMA?

It gets better.

Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders’ and horse-show organization based in Colorado.

“We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,” explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner’s office. “This was his full-time job . . . for 11 years,” she added.

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.

Now, the calibre of the political appointees to a government agency do not necessarily reflect on the calibre of the agency’s staff, but it does have an impact in terms of the ability to keep key members of that staff, as well as in policies, priorities, and planning. We’re seeing that impact played out in excruciating detail this week on the Gulf Coast.

This guy need to be fired.

Bravo Ezra

There’s a lot being said in the blogosphere right now. There’s a lot of anger, frustration, grief, and pain. But Ezra wrote something this morning that I particularly like. I’m quoting the majority of it here:

George W. Bush is not up to the task of leadership. That’s not said as a criticism, actually — I am not up to the task of dancing, or running marathons. We all have failings, and Bush’s essential flaw is an inability to project himself, an inability to grow in dimension during a crisis, an inability to sense that catastrophes serve as opportunities for strengthening the American community. I dislike Bush for mean-spiritedness, for his incompetence, for his smugness. But I deplore him for his smallness. That the 2004 election was a 51-49 affair is shocking. Had John McCain won in 2000, his response to 9/11 would have toasted the Democratic party for the next 20 years. Had Al Gore been in office, his leadership in the moments after would’ve changed the world, or at least the international community. Both of them would have brought Americans together. But Bush simply invited us to malls, wedged us apart, snookered us into a disastrous war that didn’t need to be fought. For a President to hold office during a crisis of that magnitude and do as little, both socially and politically, as Bush did is almost unprecedented.

I don’t blame Bush for Katrina — he does not control the weather. And I don’t blame him for the levees — even with full-funding, they weren’t scheduled to be completed for years, the levee that broke was actually one of the renovated ones, and so on; his funding decisions were criminal, but they would only have been causal five years from now. I blame him for the national guard being absent, but that’s a secondary problem. What I blame him for, what I hate him for, is for not stepping up to the job of President right now. For being a small man when a big one is required. For offering a laundry list of supplies-on-the-way when his job is uniting the American people and helping them give aid and comfort to their countrymen. A President can’t stop a disaster, but he can coalesce the citizenry to ease its aftermath, he can take catastrophe and use it to reknit the nation’s community.

Bush didn’t. He didn’t do it here and he didn’t do it on 9/11. In America, great things can come out of great calamity. Bush has had two opportunities to create something lasting, he has failed both times. For most else, I forgive him. For that, I never will.