Another Try

You would think that after that failure at his attempt at mobile blogging last night would slow Base10 down. But no! Base10 decided to go out, have another beer and try to do it again. Several geekish coments. Base10 is used to carrying his laptop eveywhere. This does have drawbacks. Pocket PC tools for blogging are pretty limited. PocketBlog is what I'm using. for an internet connection, I use a T-Mobile GPRS connection via bluetooth. (Are your eyes glazing over yet?) A few hardware and software comments are in order:

• I'm using a Targus universal keyboard. It's okay, but I have to say the keyboard layout is hard to get used to. The obvious thing it is missing is arrow keys to move the cursor. There is a way to use the cursor but it is sort of kludgy. Also the upper number keys are set off to the the right making them unuseable to touch typists. The spacebar keys take some getting used to as well.
  
• The T-Mobile connection is pretty good. It costs about $20/month and is a little slower than dialup. The bluetooth is what makes it worthwhile. When I bought the plan, the salesman had no idea what I could do with it. T-Mobile is however sometimes spotty in NYC so you pay for it with somewhat less reliable phone service. The phone--a Nokia 3650 is very useable and has browsers of its own from Opera and Netfront.
  
• The Pocket PC is still not ready for prime time as anything more than a toy. It's good to take notes I suppose, but using it for business purposes is not promising. Just using PocketBlog was very difficult. It's written in embedded Visual Basic (which is version 6.0) amd requires a runtime. After Base10 issued some bitches and moans about that, he realized there was no easy way to install this right on to the PPC. (This was the cause of Base10's retirement from the attempt last night). Even this morning, since Microsoft decided to "upgrade' Visual Basic to .NET, the current version of the runtime did not work. One extensive serach for the old one later, and Base10 was finally in the groove.
  
• Last, it's difficult but not impossible to surf and blog. I use PIE+ for my browser and it delivers pretty good small page rendering. Switching between apps is not easy however.
  

Well, Base10 is currently watching the USC- Cal game. USC is leading 16-10 going into the second half. Pretty good game. Base10 also enjoyed the earlier Texas Oklahoma game, but was rooting for the Longhorns who were ultimately shut out after a long defensive struggle. Texas had not been shut out in 282 games.

In addition to football, the fourth game in the ALDS is going on right now pitting the Yankees with the Twins. The teams are currently tied as of this writing.

UPDATE USC just scored making it 23-10. Let the spanking begin!

Note on Formatting. Base10 is experimenting with different templates as all astute readers have probably noticed. It's about time Base10 did some maintenance on the page. First, Base10 has installed send by email links and switched from Haloscan to Blogger for comments. Second, the blog rolls
are in sore need of updating. This is unfortunately for some unpleasant reasons. Donald Sensing and Steven den Beste have quit blogging, at least for now. Base10 will retire those links shortly.

UPDATE. The Twins just scored putting them up 2-1 at the top of the fourth.

Finally, in the "one last thing" department, those whacky guys over at Jib-Jab have done another video on the Bush-Kerry campaigns. It's pretty funny but not as good as the first one.

Well, that's it for now.

UPDATE. Okay, that's just weird. First, great difficulty in actually posting with Pocket Blog and for some reason it posts two copies of the entry.
- posted by Base10 @ 6:10 PM