June 8, 2007: Traveling to Frankfort for the Weekend

Before going to bed last night I managed to get Jabber/XMPP instant messaging working on the Treo 700p which is very exciting. That was the last major thing that I really needed in order to have full functionality on it. I can do just about anything from my handheld now. It is devices like these that will really play a major role in issuing in an era of persistent communications. You can see where we are headed when you use a device like this – several significant forms of communications (legacy telephony, SMS (i.e. paging), email, VoIP, instant messaging, Internet radio, web, subscription audio, etc.) all bundled into a single, portable, easy to use package.

Just for Raymond Chen at Microsoft, shopautodotca seocontest.

While I was in bed I was playing with the Treo and figured out that there was Internet Radio from RadioIO already ready to go on the phone and so I checked that out. That was incredibly easy and I discovered that I really like RadioIO. I really like the idea of portable Internet radio. Internet radio on my desktop is nice and I appreciate that a lot of people like that as an alternative to traditional radio but I don’t like to listen to either when I am sitting at my desk except for extremely rare occasions. But when driving, walking, resting, traveling, etc. I do like to listen to the radio sometimes but I don’t really like traditional radio much because the selection is awful, the DJs are annoying and when traveling either you can’t get any radio or it keeps going in and out. But with Internet radio on my Verizon powered Treo I get the best of everything. Very cool. It is like satellite radio except cheaper (free) and with a gigantic selection instead of just a few hundred channels each playing the same ten songs over and over again.

What I don’t have working yet but hope to have soon is an RSS/Podcast aggregator so that I can easily pull down podcasts that I want to listen to like the Daily Breakfast, InfoWorld and IT Conversations. One thing at a time. Having Audible and Internet Radio will get me through the weekend, I guess. Having RSS for reading the news would be handy too but that isn’t nearly as important for me. I spend very little time reading the news (whether Google/Yahoo News, OSNews, eWeek or LinuxToday) when I am away from the office because their isn’t enough to keep me occupied there.

It occurred to me today that I have been online for thirteen years (my first real Internet connection was at university in 1994.) I got my first home Internet access (other than logging into SUNY Geneseo’s VMS server a few times in 1996) which was dial-up through MSN in 1997. I got persistent “always-on” dial-up through AltaVista in 1998 and occasionally used an AOL dial-up line from Nicklin Associates in 2000 or so. I got my first real “broadband” connection from Time-Warner in 2000 and have been on high speed ever since then having used everything you can imagine from wireless to ADSL and SDSL to Cable.

Today was a moderately busy day at work. Like most Fridays the morning is slow and there is late work to be done once the market has closed. Nothing unusual.

I left work just after five thirty and raced home to do some late work before Dominica and I will be leaving for Frankfort.  There is a big storm coming tonight and we want to get out of Newark as early as possible in the hopes of hitting it as little as possible.  We will be in Frankfort all weekend.  We are taking the BMW as Francesca and the girls have not seen it yet.

Weight Lost So Far: 18lbs

Leave a comment