Here’s the fun part – I’m not going to be here to recieve it. HA!

I’m getting married this Saturday, and we are immediately jetting off to Tahiti for two weeks. So needless to say I won’t be posting for a little while.

I’m not going to miss my tablet – but it better miss me. Serves it right for taking so long to get here.

Me: Uh, hold on a sec.
Rep: Oh, okay.
rattling
Me: Yup, it’s a quake.
Rep: What?
Me: An earthquake. Hold on I need to go outside.
Rep: Are you serious?
sounds of coworkers scrambling for door frames, exits, umbrellas
Me: Just a second.
wind noise
Me: Okay, that was an earthquake. Where were we, oh yeah, the 60gb hard drive.
Rep: Yeah, earthquakes…no big deal. Are you okay?
Me: Yeah, it was only a 2 or a 3.

So I was off a little – it was a 5.3. But here in L.A. you get used to such things. I moved out here in December of 1993, just in time for the 6.7 Northridge quake in January. Since that rude awakening, I’ve experienced around 100 smaller quakes, so this was no big deal to me. To my rep sitting in his office in Toronto, it had a decidedly different effect. He thinks his customer in L.A. cares more about 60gb hard drives than his life. I don’t think I helped break-down stereotypes much today.

Well, the net-sum is that my order was in fact for the wrong base system. I was going to get a 40gb HD instead of 60gb, and a 802.11b/g wireless card instead of a a/b/g one. I also decided to forget the 4-cell battery and upgrade to a second 8-cell for $49. I no longer see the point of carrying a second battery if it’s only going to get me 2.5 extra hours. I thought I’d like the lighter weight thing, but I decided if I’m going to carry ANYTHING extra, it’ll be for the extra 6.3 hours the 8-cell provides.

So now I have to ask the obligatory question: Did anyone else feel the quake?

For the last year and a half I have been drawn into the world of HTPCs. I got bit by the bug hard and after only about 2 weeks of planning (which you’ll find is not very much time for me) I built my dedicated HTPC around a program called SageTV. SageTV is an amazing fit for my living room, rock-solid operation, and a huge WAF – Wife Acceptance Factor. If any of you are considering bringing a HTPC into your house, and you have a significant other, you have to take the WAF into account. If you don’t, the HTPC will never graduate from a side-hobby that lives in your office to a fixture in your living-room.

Admittedly, I’ve always been a gadget-freak, but I won’t buy a gadget unless it’s exactly what I need. The last time I was looking for a cell-phone, I put it off for 6 months waiting for the Treo 600, and used an old flip phone with a broken screen because I decided that a keyboard was an essential feature in a smartphone and the Samsung SPH-i500 didn’t cut it (I’m a sprintPCS subscriber BTW), and I’m so glad I did.

The Treo 600 has been my primary computing device since I got it in November of ‘03, and it is amazing. Do I wish I had a 650? Of course! But to me, the 650 would be an incremental upgade. I’m waiting to see if PalmOne can put one of those 4gb hard drives in there and add EV-DO – Then I’ll be tossing the 600. In the mean time, I’ve found some amazing things that are possible with the 600: I can control my HTPC from anywhere using PalmVNC, get all my email with SnapperMail, watch re-encoded TV shows I’ve recorded with MMPlayer, go online with the built-in browser, and even get my RSS fix with QuickNews.

My most recent interest is in TabletPCs. I’m a film and television editor and a large part of my job is taking notes from producers, directors, executives or whoever and working them into a show. My current system involves my chicken-scratch handwriting in a spiral notebook and highlighters. I highlight the notes as I address them, when the page is day-glow, I move on. This works to a certain extent, but it becomes overwhelming very quickly when dealing with notes about notes and who made them, when they were addressed, what I actually changed to ‘fix’ it, the list goes on and on.

I originally thought I could use my Treo for this purpose, but I found that it is much less acceptable to be punching away on a tiny keyboard than it is to write in a notebook. The same goes for typing into a laptop – they just look at you wierd and say, “Can’t you just write it down?”. They believe it’s overkill, even though I don’t.

So anyways, the object of my gadget-lust is the semi-leaked IBM X41 TabletPC. My current primary computer is a Dell Latitude LS – ancient, I know (There’s a story behind why I’m stuck working on a 400mhz Pentium III, but I won’t bore you with it) but it “works” for me, or at least it has been working for me. It’s time for an upgrade, and I believe that TabletPCs have matured enough for them to handle all I can throw at them.

As for what to expect from my blog, I hope to write about the ways I make my technology work for me, and not against me. I believe that technology should mold to the way we work, and not the other way around, which is why the TabletPC seems like such a great thing to me – at least in theory. There will be commentaries on what I think should be changed, major news postings and what implications I think they might have, my ideas about the future, tips for those who are interested in any of the technology I use, and a light sprinkling of my ‘real-life’ just for good measure. This site will also be filled out with some of the software projects I’m starting work on, some of which I can’t talk about yet, so keep an eye out as I have big things planned for both my favorite HTPC programs.

So I think that’ll do it for now. I went a little longer than I planned, so if you made it through – Thanks for sticking with me.

Vince