Paul's Down-Home Page

Not that I plan to watch it, but Bravo is planning a Left West Wing marathon on Sunday, 8/17. You may wish to TiVo accordingly. (hat tip: Gartenberg).

Thanks to a tip from the world-famous Dan Fernandez, I joined the Artima Buzz; in fact, I’m now the only blog in the Windows category, although I don’t expect that to last for long. During my browsing, I found Kimber Staken’s blog, which has a lot of interesting Mac OS X and Tablet PC stuff (here’s my current favorite).

I’ve found the perfect house for us: an old missile silo. Arlene won’t have much gardening room, but think of the food storage possibilities!

That would be, at a minimum, Julie and Mike. After seeing this post on SmartphoneSource, I ordered a headset, travel charger, car charger, and battery for the whopping sum of $62– that’s less than the battery alone from Verizon (if they had any, which they don’t.) Everything except the battery arrived yesterday, but I knew the battery was backordered, so no worries there. Everything I got is genuine Kyocera gear and works like it’s supposed to. I’m delighted, and I highly recommend Dan’s Cellular.

I just found this review of a new SanDisk combination flash memory/wireless card. Must… resist… credit… card….
Actually, resisting isn’t so hard; from the manufacturer’s site, it looks like the card won’t ship until next week, and won’t have Palm OS drivers until the fall sometime.

This guy has an interesting blog, but I’m a little concerned that he named his Tablet “Bonnie”.

Scoble has some comments on tablets. He correctly points out that many customers are waiting for Centrino-based tablets from HP, IBM, and so on, instead of buying lesser-known brands like Acer. My Acer experience so far has been terrific: I bought a 9-month-old demo unit, sent it in for warranty service on Monday, and am expecting it back tomorrow (it’s already shipped) with everything fixed. That’s the same speed and accuracy of service I’ve gotten in the past from Apple and IBM. I do like the idea of a faster Centrino-based tablet, but so far the proc speed of the C102 has been acceptable, especially on a price/performance basis.

I’ve been idly considering buying a Tablet PC for a while. I went to Sams’ yesterday to look for toilet paper and paper towels, and I ended up with an Acer TravelMate C102 tablet. This is one of the original Tablet PCs; it has a Pentium-III 800 CPU, a 20 (or maybe 30, I forget) GB drive, and 256MB of RAM. It also had lots of scratches on the case and a little sign saying “last one– $1168”. At that price, and given Sams’ 6-month return policy, that seemed like a pretty good deal. (It turns out that the listed price of $1499 is actually more than what other Sams’ sell the same unit for $1387). Anyway, once I got it home, I was able to bring it right up, install the 27 security patches that WU recommended, and start tableting.
For now, it’s hard to tell whether I’ll keep it. Microsoft Reader is terrific (especially since MS is giving away three free full-length books each week). I love the size and form factor, realizing that this isn’t a replacement for my trusty ThinkPad. On the other hand… this unit is practically obsolete by tablet standards; for another $500 I could get a newer unit with a much faster CPU and more RAM (the C102 I have is limited to a max of 256MB). The keyboard has a terribly sticky space bar, and the rotating latch on which the screen pivots is very loose. Those should be fixable under warranty, though, so I’m going to keep this one for a month or so and see if I use it enough to justify keeping it. If so, then I’ll decide whether to keep it or buy a more powerful version.