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Thursday, August 23, 2001
Yes, Virginia, there really is a Linux hardware business 
| | When I got an email with the subject "Check Out Freedom PC Inc.!", I almost trashed it as spam. But it's an apparently real letter signed "Greg Ketchum, President/CEO/Ski Bum." He's a bit breathless about his pitch (reminds me of those DAK come-ons from years ago), but hey. Lemme know what you think. The site is here. |
Jabber on
| | Most of the presentations made at Jabbercon, including my own, are on this page (datum: mine is about 3 megs). |
Way to Wi-Fly
| | I just got off the plane here in San Jose sat down in a seat near Gate 7, opened the laptop, saw a strong signal (it pegged at five little green dots), opened the control strip, saw the network was "Wayport_Access," clicked on it to see what was there, and found that any attempt to use the browser redirected me to a Wayport sign-up page. The price was $6.95/day. Since it's only 7:45 right now and I won't be leaving for another two hours — and I'll probably be here in time to use the service this afternoon before I fly home, I went ahead and signed up. The user interface is about as perfect as you're going to get in a browser. I especially like the pop-up windows for the expiration date, since there doesn't seem to be a data entry convention for date formats. Some are mmyy, some mmyyyy, some mm/yy, some mm/yyyy.... Do we really need yyyy when the Millennium turned eighteen months ago? |
| | So now I gotta work. I'd like to check out more about Wayport, but their .php3 pages come up blank when I hit the buttons in the left frame. Let's try Mozilla... |
| | Whoa. Doesn't go to the page at all. Not sure why, because it seems to go everywhere else. |
| | Anyway, it's too bad that Wayport doesn't make using their site as easy as it is to sign on for their service. If they want to attract members rather than just one-day customers, they need to make it easy for potential members to look at simple lists of locations, with sorts by airport, hotels, schools, restaurants, and geographical areas. |
Fat air
| | I'm off to San Jose for an all-day meeting. But I might check in if I can find some wi-fi at the San Jose Airport. I'm told it's there somewhere. |
Biting the MiniDV
| | I'm in an extreme rush, so I'm going for the Sony DCR-PC110. Upside: Zeiss optics, size, versatility. Reviews are positive. Downside: only one CCD, memory stick (which I don't much care about since I'll be shooting to tape and getting it on the computer by firewire), complexity, Sony's tentacular site. Good price too: $1155. Hope the dealer — All Star Camera — is okay. |
| | Interesting: I searched for "Sony DCR-PC110 $" (sans quotes) on Yahoo, so I'd get pages with U.S. prices. As I went through the pages, the prices kept going down... to a point. Interesting how many places wanted my email address but wouldn't give me a price. Very old school, like those ads in the back of photo magazines that always say "CALL" instead of publishing a price. Too bad: they lose. |
| | To my pals with all the good advice recommending Canon, Fuji, et. al., I wish I had time to talk first; but I have to make an impulse choice here. And if it sucks, well... there's always eBay. |
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