Give Our Abilities Time

I recognize the shocking amount of time that has passed since I last blogged. Cut me some slack, we have a 2-month-old baby named Oscar now. Anyway, here are some little short rants to get out of the blogging standstill:

Palm sucks:

• Why does my dad's Verizon phone that he got for free have a pretty cool and useful GPS function using the built-in locator, but we Treo owners have to spend hundreds for external GPS? He paid nothing, and I (actually, my company) paid $585 for my phone (upgrade from 650 to 700p out of contract), so why am I the one who has no GPS function? Palm deserves a beating.
  
• I installed the 1.10 update so that my Treo wouldn't freeze up searching for a signal when I was on the subway. And now it's even worse. Palm, you suck. I'm switching to Blackberry as soon as I possibly can. Your platform is dead.
  
• Speaking of Palm sucking, that Foleo thing is the most useless thing that they could possibly have done. Apple has an new convergence device coming out with a radical new user interface? How can we compete? Oh, I know, a little toy laptop thing that has to be connected to a Treo to work. Guess what? I have a $2200 laptop that has to go with me when I leave the office, so I can use Microsoft Outlook and Office, Interwoven document management, DTE time entry, and a browser. I can also take notes on it because it's a TabletPC. I don't need another slightly smaller and lighter laptop that runs half-assed versions of those apps on Linux.
  

Computers suck:

• I am still plagued with OneNote sync problems with SharePoint ("This section contains changes that cannot be synced because access to the section file is denied. Correct the file permissions or save your copy of this section elsewhere."). Apparently this is a known issue, and you can only find out about it by reading the microsoft.public.onenote newsgroup.
  
• McAfee SecurityCenter came bundled with my Dell and it is really annoying. Most annoying is when it downloads an update requiring a restart, which causes a loud bell sound and popup what seems like every 20 minutes. Can't they take a cue from Windows Updates, which pops up a balloon with a gentle "pop" sound? This throws me out of all-important Unreal Tournament 2004 games and makes me wonder why I have the program in the first place. I've already turned off the firewall (it didn't usually ask what to block, it just blocked, and the rules are too deeply hidden in the shitty user interface). And, yeah, I turned off the firewall of my own free will, so stop giving me grief about it every time I start my computer. Also, the virus scan finds the same two virii from some 8-year-old backups that it can't clean, plus a dozen cookies, so how much protection do I need and can this thing even give it to me? Verdict: McAfee SecurityCenter sucks.
  
• I grow weary of Vista on my ThinkPad X60 Tablet. The laptop is awesomely fast and 1400x1050 on a crystal-clear 12" screen is the best thing ever, but at least once a week I have to hard-power it off because it crapped out while hibernating, or refuses to come out of sleep mode. Also, could the stupid bastard remember for once that I like to extend my desktop to the left, onto the other display? When docked, additional display on left; when not docked, normal screen. There. Was that so hard? Then why do I have a little screen adventure every time I put the laptop in the dock? Perhaps both of these issues are related to Lenovo drivers and not Vista. Regardless, it annoys me as a person that docks and undocks the laptop and takes it places. Did XP Tablet suck that badly? Why do I use Vista, anyway? These are things I shouldn't be thinking as someone Microsoft thinks will be driving Vista and Office 2007 upgrades in my vertical market.
  

I cannot promise I will blog again soon, but I will try.

--sbreck

technorati: Palm, Treo 700p, Foleo, OneNote 2007, SharePoint, McAfee SecurityCenter, Vista, TabletPC, ThinkPad X60