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.

Okay, on to work...

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.