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ThinkDB!

ThinkDB was an application for the Palm PDA from a company called Thinking Bytes Technology. It was a small database program for the Palm, and I've used it to store all sorts of information. For example, I store a lot of my Internet passwords and accounts in ThinkDB. So, if I lose this database, I will be unable to access most of my accounts including frequent flyer miles, 401K plans, etc. Sort of important to me...

Well, with the death of my previous Palm, I bought a new one. The trouble is that ThinkDB no longer runs on the new PalmOS. Gotta get the update. Except, Thinking Bytes Technology is no more. The latest references to Thinking Bytes and to ThinkDB date back to 2002. Oops.

Okay... Gotta take a breath. ThinkDB had over 100,000 users. You simply don't abandon a product with that many users. A bit more searching found a press release mentioning that DataViz bought the rights to the ThinkDB product. Good news is that DataViz is in business. Bad news is that they don't sell a "ThinkDB".

Okay, look for the author of ThinkDB. Maybe he might have some suggestions, if he's nice and hasn't sign any agreements with DataViz. "Thinkingbytes.com" isn't up and running, and a check of the registrar information shows some outfit in Ohio called "New Millenium Marketing" (and a gmail address) as the owner. Drats.

Found a ThinkDB bulletin board with the last comments around September of 2002. And, it looks like a discussion of DataViz buying ThinkDB. And, it looks like DataViz renamed ThinkDB to Smart Lists to Go. What a dorky name! However, going to DataViz and to the "Smart List to Go" page, I finally see reassuring news that ThinkDB does live as Smart Lists to Go. There's a mention of an upgrade path, and a thirty day free trial. What's this? They recommend that I backup my ThinkDB databases because Smart Lists to Go will change the format. That's music to my ears!

I downloaded the 30 day demo, and my databases are once again accessible. Yes! I once again have access to my 401K plan! I can retire.

Apple's store on Fifth Avenue opened over the weekend, and it's open 24/7. It's a big 32 foot clear glass cube. I imagine their Windex bills will be in the millions of dollars. Anyway, they have free Internet access, so I am typing this in on my Palm while I sit by the plaza.

Anyway, I've made it back from Dallas in one piece, and ready or not, here are some impressions.

Thank you for your patronage. That will be $8.95.
The whole shindig was held in the Westin Gallaria. The whole experience can be summed in the famous phrase What a bunch of cheap bastards!.

I've been to hotels, and I know in the last few years, they have sunk to new lows in charging for service. I guess it's our fault. They use to make a lot of money on local phone calls, but now people use their cell phones, they must find other revenue. A lot of Hotels now give you a complementary bottle of water (and charge you $5.00 if you dare to drink it). This hotel put a whole snack bar right under the TV set. Nuts, jelly beans, granola bars. Here, take one. Don't they look good. Enjoy. We'll bill you later. Underneath that, they had a fridge full of candy bars, juices, and bottle water. All billable (plus a 20% gratuity fee).

What really got me was this hotel charged for Internet access at $12/day. And they charged $9/hour for access to their Business Center. In most hotels, these are free. They did provide a coffee maker and a two packets of Starbucks coffee (one decaf, one regular), and those were free. However, they also had a few extra packets which they would charge for if you used them.

Dallas: We're a whole lot hotter than Kansas!
Imagine Kansas. Now imagine it at 100 degrees. Oh yes, take all them corn fields and replace them with the biggest, ugliest strip malls, office parks, warehouses, and condo communities, and you get an idea of North Dallas. Not only is Dallas flat and ugly, but it is sprawled out over the prairie. You drive miles and miles down these commercial strips covered with look alike strip malls trying to get to your destination.

What surprising is that my wife's sister want to move from New York back to Dallas.

The Internet in Your Palm
My Palm T|X proved to be very valuable on this trip. Not only did it allow me to play Freecell on hours on end while stuck at the airport, but it allowed me to reach my email when needed. For example, I used it to get my return ticket information. There are two problems with the Palm. One fixable, and the other... Not so fixable:

• First the fixable thing. Graffiti II stinks. Between my last PDA and the new one, Palm switched from Graffiti to Graffiti II. The original alm_Graffiti_gestures.png">Graffiti concentrated on all one stroke characters. Some of the characters were pretty close to their regular counter parts. The N is drawn like a capital N, the H is drawn like a lowercase H. A few of the characters (four or so -- depending how you draw them) are a bit different. The T looks like a capital L turned 180 degrees. The F is a mirror image of that.

  However, once you memorize which letters look like their capital letter, which look like their lowercase cousins, and which four or five are a bit strange, you can write pretty fast with few mistakes.

  Graffiti II changes all of that. Graffiti II letters are all lower case standard letters. The problem is that many of them are now two or more strokes. Try writing a T is almost impossible since it can easily be mistaken for the letter L if you don't draw the crossbar fast enough. Punctuation is another problem. In the old Graffiti, you made a dot and drew the symbol. For example, an at sign was a dot and a circle. An ampersand was a dot and a figure eight. Easy to remember, easy to draw. Now, to write an at sign, I draw a small cursive a and (without lifting the stylus) draw a counter clockwise circle around the A.

  All over the Internet, people are screaming over this change. It makes what was a quick, easy to use input method almost impossible to do. The error rate is ridiculous. Fortunately, you can buy TealScript which reverts your Palm back to the original Graffiti.

  Why did Palm do this? Because Xerox claims that the one stroke letters violated their patent. To get around this issue, Palm redesigned Graffiti to mimic natural letters.

• Thing which cannot be fixed: No Printer. I can download my information, but it stayed on my Palm. Rental car agreements, boarding passes, etc. reduced to a few hundred pixels by a few hundred pixels.

Anyway, next week is the Boy Scout Kinus, and I've got to start getting ready for that. I'm suppose to give a class on personal fitness since I'm the merit badge counselor. Plus, we gets to go on a bike ride (if I only can figure out how to get my bike up there).

Yep, I've put a different default skin for my Blog? Why?

Oh, several reasons. The links show up better, it's a brighter interface, it's easier to read, and now that I have a Palm TX, I can now sit in Starbucks and post entries into my blog. Because of the small size of the Palm screen, this skin is easier to work with.

I actually bought the Palm for its BlueTooth compatibility. BlueTooth is a wireless machine-to-machine connectivity. This is different from WiFi which is a wireless network protocol. Basically, WiFi connects to a bunch of systems on a network while BlueTooth connects to a single network.

My address book and calendar are stored on my Mac, and my Mac has BlueTooth connectivity. For example, I sync my Mac's address book and calendar to the address book and calendar on my phone via Bluetooth. I also sync my calendar and address book to my Palm PDA.

Before I had an old Palm that required me to physically plug it into my Mac in order to sync it. Well, we all know that Things Just Work With a Mac, so I figured if I get a BlueTooth Palm, I could also sync that wirelessly too. NOT!

It turns out that Palm hasn't quite released the upgrade needed to get BlueTooth working for the Palm Desktop for Apple OS X. Maybe next week. Meanwhile, I'll just watch some videos at Yahoo.

Oh wait. Those don't work on a Mac either!

Pimpfants,com

For parents who want their children to be both hip and comfortable

Yes, nothing says hip and comfortable like associating your child with prostitution, violent crime, and sexual exploitation. What's next? "L'il Ho" onesies?

Just the thing for that private preschool, or cruising in the hood.

Here's a story about a man who was fired from a charity for having sex with a woman on his desk at work (among other issues). When he filed for unemployment, well... Read the rest for yourself:

At a hearing dealing with Coppinger's request for unemployment benefits, Coppinger admitted to drinking and having sex with a woman on his desk, but he testified that many other members of the organization had engaged in sex on that same desk.

So, how does it work? Do you get a particular time to have sex on that desk? Maybe its like reserving a room, and you book the desk with the secretary. And, what's wrong with the other desks? If I was the guy who had that desk, I would tell others to have sex on their own desks.

I never get to work in places like that. Maybe all the computer equipment takes up too much room on the desktop.

ABC news reported that the Government which first was occasionally monitoring international phone calls
without a warrant, but never domestic calls, then admitted it was monitoring domestic phone calls, but only watching the numbers being dialed, now is listening in on reporters' phone calls to find their sources.

You'd think people might be a bit nervous about this, but several comments are rather supportive of our President.

Excellent the Media needs looking after, Traitors most of them.......

I hope the information they gain allows them to catch the scum that leak information, and helps them arrest the communist scum who publish it.

And my favorite from Chris. He has a rather interesting perspective on all of this spying:

Personally, as I don't call anyone associated with Al Qaeda, I don't CARE if the Government tracks me, listens to me or records me. Only the guilty should be nervous. Is ABC and the NYT Guilty of aiding terroism or are they/you simply guilty of undermingin our security by letting the terrorists know what we are trying to do to stop them? In either case, you should be ashamed.

No? You didn't do anything wrong, Chris? Are you sure?

We know you frequent a convenience store that has hired several Moslems who are members of a mosque that gets a newsletter from an organization that has ties with another organization that has written anti-American articles about the war in Iraq.

Maybe you'd like to tell us about it, or name some names. You know, so we can go to them and ask them about their connections to these terrorist groups. Otherwise, we have no choice but to tell your boss about how you are possibly a security risk. You don't want to force us to ask your neighbors about you. Do you? You wouldn't want them to know about this.

Don't worry. We'll let you off easy if you tattle on your neighbors first. Or, maybe some body you know at work. You know, the ones who have said something against the President. Just pick up the phone and talk to us. You don't even have to dial a number.

There, don't you feel so much safer already?

In my last post, I mentioned that Jared Guinther, a moderately autistic 18 year old had signed up for a 4 year commitment to be an cavalry scout -- probably the most dangerous job the army has to offer.

According to the Oregonian, the army has released Jared from his commitment.

I found this of interest:

Officials are examining whether recruiters at the U.S. Army Recruiting Station in Southeast Portland improperly concealed Jared's disability, which should have made him ineligible for service.

The problem is that recruiters are experiencing a lot of pressure to keep up enlistments. For the last few months, enlistments have fallen way behind their goals.

As this article points out, being autistic is not a reason to keep you out of the military.

From the sounds of things, Jared Guinther is probably moderately autistic. It sounds like he made friends with a recruiter who was able to talk him into signing up for the military, and as a cavalry scout yet -- probably the most dangerous job in the military. Poor kid didn't even know there was a war going on when he signed up. Probably slipped the recruiter's mind.

Apparently the military is so desperate for recruits, they are also taking in the mentally ill. A student in Colorado pretended to be a high school dropout with a drug arrest. The recruiter told him "no problem!".

So, if you're a drugged addicted, autistic, high school dropout with a rap sheet, Uncle Sam still wants you -- as long as you're not gay. After all, Uncle Sam has to draw the line somewhere.

Here's a product someone sent me. It's called a Beer Belly and it really is a belly full of beer. If you are going to a ball park and not want to pay $5 per cup for beer, you fill the bladder up with beer (it apparently can hold a six pack), strap it to your belly, and wham! -- you've got yourself a beer belly.

There's a hose that allows you to get the beer out of the beer belly. You can use it as a straw or as a dispensing hose. I don't know how well this product will work. If you already have a beer belly, you probably can't use this product. And, if you're one of those with six pack abs and not a six pack sized gut, I'm assuming: 1). That you don't drink enough beer to make this worth while, and 2). You've worked so hard to be in such good shape that you'll be embarrassed to be seen with one of these things on.

CNN has a video with this product.

I hate flying. It is like being a cow waiting for her turn in the slaughterhouse corral -- except a cow probably has more dignity and room. Even worse, I'm apparently on every single terrorist watch list, probably because I am a member of certain radical group bent on overthrowing everything America believes in. Or, maybe its because I have family members associated with certain fringe religious groups.

Whatever it is, I am always pulled out of line for special attention. Well, apparently I'm in good company. According to this Wired News report, the Federal TSA is great at catching federal employees. So far, they've captured:

• A State Department diplomat
• An 82-year-old veteran
• A contractor who works with Pentagon on chemical and biological weapons defense, and has top secret clearance
• A retired U.S. Army officer and antiterrorism/force-protection officer
• a Continental Airlines flight-crew member

Now, I don't feel so bad.

Stephen Colbert did the closing number on the White House correspondents' dinner, and the reviews were in:

Main Stream Press: A BOMB
Right Wing Conspiracy: CROSSED THE LINE
Left Wing Media Holywood Conspiracy: Was fantastic. Right on!

Colbert's speech did not go over very well with the local crowd at the dinner. Maybe it hit a bit too close to home. Because he didn't get the laughs he normally gets, it seems pretty darn slow. For those who watch his show on a regular basis, many of the bits were repeats.

However, he was as sharp as ever, and most of the people I know -- the Hollywood elite, pot smoking, enemy comforting, Eastside liberal types (who happen to live in suburban New Jersey) found it hilarious -- especially President Bush's reaction to the whole thing. It seems strange that people are surprised by Stephen's bit because he does the exact same bit Monday through Thursday.

For those who didn't get a chance to see it, Milk and Cookies has it in three parts. The Daily KOS also has a transcript.

And, if you really liked the bit, you can personally thank Stephen Colbert. You know he's going to personally read and respond to each and every one of you.