Three-Letter Acronyms & Four-Letter Words

Ok, ok. Bad "Hackers" reference, but one of my favorites lately.

"I hacked your gibson." Has become something I say to Jeremy often.

Well the PDA is pretty badass, I have enjoyed getting it sync'd up.

I found a Pocket PC version of Putty.

I however, am bummed that there is not yet a version of Google Talk that does the speech thing rather than just chat on the Pocket PC.

I am sure it will show up soon.

Well time to get going.

More, Laterz.

So for anyone who read my first posts, I talked about trying to get that discipline of making daily entries. I did good there for a while.

However, as the title says, "Old Habits die hard". The past two weeks have been very work intensive. Which means that when I get home it is time to eat dinner, watch a little TV, maybe play a video game (you know to relax) for an hour or so, then sleep.

Let it be known that I HATE getting up early, so early morning posts are pretty much not on the table for discussion.

For what little adoring public that I have reading this blog regularly, namely my family, I apologize for the radio silence.

I am fully willing to admit that I am not the most organized person in the world. I rely on my memory quite a bit, which unfortunately is very full lately, and occasionally something pushes another thing out of my head.

My boss keeps this very neat and organized "To-Do" list and has suggested that I do the same. My mom had actually gone to training (paid for by the State of Michigan) to learn how to organize using Franklin planner stuff. When that happened, she got me one too. It didn't help.

I like the To-Do list concept. However, while I am a HUGE fan of paper notes and documentation, a paper To-Do list for me keeps being too inefficient and I fall back into my old habits.

In one of the books on Product Management, The Product Manager's Handbook, it talks about time management being very important. And I fully agree. I am currently have at least 3 projects that require my direct involvement to allow others to continue with their bits, I have another project where I am one of the primary contributors. Then there is all the random stuff that happens with being the Product Manager and subsequently the only one trained to do Sales Engineering for my products, I get tied up with customer questions, which for the most part are higher ranking than the other projects.

So while I am not the most organized person and I do not have excellent time management skills, I would argue that I am very proficient in judging what the priority of my ongoing projects are vs incoming randmon stuff, and thus working on the item that is most important first, even if that project just showed up 5 minutes ago.

So I think I have the whole project prioritization down. With that in mind, I have to say I really like dotProject. I did an install for work and another for Jeremy so that he can try to keep things straight on the uRevoo project.

However, it isn't really very portable, in the sense of if I am not connected to the web. Of course, except for vacations in northern Michigan, I am usually within 30 ft of a broadband connection. (Something to be proud of, I hope.)

Now, I am not advocating MS-Project, as that has issues revolving around licensing and being able to share project plans and schedules. But I think that is jumping the gun on a different post, one where I discuss my findings on dotProject vs MS-Project. I have used MS-Project 2000 when I was at Simplified pretty extensively. And I have used dotProject for PrivateTel & uRevoo stuff well enough to find that if you don't edit your php.ini file you can't produce the gantt charts for a project you need a gantt chart for. (You have to increase the maximum memory size allocated to a PHP script.) But again, that is for another post. Maybe one I will write up tomorrow.

So getting back to portable. Paper is portable, however, paper is inefficient from the perspective that it is a passive medium. I have noticed that recently I refer to lots of stuff as passive vs active. Not sure why, seems like the way to refer to some things.

Paper is passive becuase...
1. You have to write on paper, paper cannot write on iteself.
2. You have to remember read the paper, paper doesn't remind you to read it.
3. You have to remember to write on paper, paper can't remind you about something.

While I need something that is more Active...
1. Something that will remind me of meetings.
2. Something that will remind me of deadlines. (remind me a day(s) ahead, vs 5 minutes ahead)
3. Something that can sync with my computer, ie write to itself, sort of.

I had a Palm Pilot Vx, not just a V but a Vx. I just had to have that extra like 4MB of Ram. This was back in like 2000 I think.


(image courtesy of ePinions.)

However, I guess I wasn't geeky enough to truly use it properly. I also had a TMobile Pocket PC 2002, a PDA and a Phone. Thinking that carrying two things was too cumbersome, if I had them all in one, then I would be golden.


(image courtesy of PocketPCMag.)

Well it didn't work out that way. There have been many a smart person who has said "A tool is only as effective/productive as it's owner." I found the Pocket PC useful, I started keeping appointments and stuff in it. And I even paid for the GPRS modem service, so I could download email and what not to it. This actually was pretty useful. I could read some email without having to be at my computer. However, the GPRS service was SLOW, I mean it made 56k dialup seem fast. And then the work email server got changed and was no longer compatible with my pocket pc email client.

So, it got replaced by a smaller, easier to carry phone. Cuz that was kind of the other thing. I was nice not to have to carry a phone and a PDA. However, the Pocket PC 2002 wasn't as convenient to slide into my pants pocket as the various little Nokia phones I have owned.

My current phone is the Nokia 3220. Nice little phone, has a camera on it. And it even has a data port. Way cool, I can load MIDI files as ring tones, sync my contacts, and even my calendar. If I used MS-Outlook.

Well, I don't use MS-Outlook. And honestly, I never WANT to. I have been using Outlook Express since like 1996, quite fond if it actually. I tried MS-Outlook briefly in 1998 and over the years have been forced to help troubleshoot glitches with it. I will say the latest version seems to have lots of things fixed in it. However, I still don't want it. As a matter of fact, I think I have made a point of keeping it off my machine.

I tried Thunderbird briefly about a year ago, again a topic for another post. I didn't like it as much as Outlook Express, but it too has come a long way since my last encounter with it.

My point about mentioning my latest phone is that I have made an effort to enter things into my phone, IMPORTANT meetings and dates. I don't put lots of stuff in it, because obviously using the phone's keypad to enter in the information is inefficient.

That brings us to my next evolutionary step in trying to get myself organized. I have recently ordered a new PDA.

Gina had recently done a LOT of research on PDAs as she has a new job and wants to be very organized. She decided ultimately on the Palm Z22.


(courtesy of Palm)

Part of the decision was that she had previously been successfully organized using a planner (like the ones from Franklin, yet not Franklin). But felt that working for a hi-tech company meant that she should have a digital organizer. I would have to agree, when in geek rome, do as the geeky romans do.

Well the Palm interface has improved, it has color, it works more like windows. But between the Palm Vx and the Pocket PC 2002, I was a bigger fan of the windows based one. Yes, yes. I know "Reistance is futile", Microsoft, blah, blah. I am not saying they do everything better. But for me, I dig the WindowsCE/PocketPC stuff more than I do the PalmOS.

So I decided on going with an iPaq vs a Dell Axim or what not. HP has been making the iPaq a long time, and I think they do it best (make a WindowsCE based PDA that is.)

I shopped around. I decided that I wanted some wireless connectivity. But I didn't want to make this thing my phone. And honestly to get the Tmobile Pocket PC MDA was just out of my price range.

I wanted wifi, not bluetooth. You can connect wifi just about anywhere (even in northern michigan, see my post), but bluetooth is well more device-to-device networking still.

This meant that I was looking for the HP rx 1955.


(courtesy of HP)

I normally buy all this sort of stuff on NewEgg. However, this time around I decided to use Froogle.

And I eventually landed over at Overstock.com. I have never bought from them before, but Sara and Amanda seem to like them. While the unit I bought is a refurb the price was very right $189.00. NewEgg is like $275. On top of the Overstock has 2 year replacement/protection plan for $29.99.

So the grand total (including $2.95 shipping) was $221.94. I have bought refurb before, usually telecom hardware mind you, but usually prefer brand new toys. However, at an overall price lower than NewEgg and with a 2 year replacement (NewEgg's 2 year replacement plan is $59.99, so grand NewEgg total would have been $340.97, $4.99 shipping included).

So with my ass covered if the unit dies in 30 days and the price being well below new, I bought it. Unfortunately, I will have to wait until probably next Friday to start using it. I am headed to Dallas next week and it appears that I leave out before it arrives.

An MSU faculty member once told me that "If you do something consistently for 7 days it will become habit." I forget exactly how this came up, but it has stuck with me to this day. Only thing is that "Old habits die hard."

So I will keep you posted on how I like the rx1955 and how I am using it. I look forward to working some mojo with dotProject to get the data exportable into the rx1955, and at the very least, with the wifi on the PDA, I can access dotProject from just about every where.

All for now, lunch is over, back to work.