What a concept!

It took over two years to accomplish, and as you can see from the picture

it is quite a tight fit, but we finally made enough room in the garage to allow us to actually park a vehicle in it.

It is so tight that at least for the near term, parking will be a two person job.  The tolerances are just too tight for one person to do it by himself.  Jeanie is a better parker than I am, so she will eventually be able to do it on her own.  I'm not sure if I will be able to until we get some of the remaining furniture refinished, allowing us to make some more room to give some more clearance all around.

Jeanie and I had gotten close a couple of months ago, but hadn't quite made it.  We decided that since we needed to take the Christmas stuff back to the storage unit, it would be a good day to decide what we could also take from the garage to make enough room.  We also filled the garbage bin with empty boxes we had been hanging on to.  Between moving some stuff to the storage unit, getting ride of the boxes, and doing some consolidation on the other side of the garage, we made just enough room.

It sure does make me miss our old house in Cary with our giant attic storage area and three car garage.  Even with all the throwing away and giving away we did before we moved, this house just isn't large enough to hold all of our stuff.

The other side of the garage is now packed and stacked, and the storage unit is so full that you have to take stuff out of it to actually be able to walk in, but, I feel like this was a big accomplishment nonetheless.

The company changed its policy on cell phone reimbursement.

Used to be, you selected your carrier, plan and device.  You were personally liable for the monthly payment, and you had to pay for the device yourself.   On a monthly basis, you submitted a request for reimbursement for the actual business use charges up to the amount of the monthly cap that was set by each individual business unit. 

The new policy is that in order to not have to pay for the monthly service out of your pocket totally, you must participate in the company's corporate managed wireless plan.  The good news is that you don't have to pay for the charges out of your pocket and then submit an expense each month, you don't have to pay for the cellular device, and you are protected from being directly personally liable for charges - of course you are still liable to the company for any charges that are not consistent with policy.  The bad news is that the company decides which carrier to assign you to, and severely limits which devices you may select.  There is no provision, even as an exception, for someone to purchase their own device and then have it added as an authorized device to the company selected carrier / plan.

In my case, Sprint was selected as my carrier.  I have been a Verizon customer for years.  Long ago, I had convinced my entire family to switch to Verizon so we could enjoy in-network free calls.  Oh well.

And what of my Kyocera 7135 and all of the Palm applications I have come to depend on?  Sorry.  There were no Palm based devices offered as one of the devices I could select.  In fact, there were only three options offered to me when I went to the site to sign up - a low end Samsung phone with no camera (for those clients who do not allow phones on their sites), the Samsung Katana II, and the Motorola MotoRazr v9.

Long story short(er)... I whined to my manager, and he asked why I hadn't ordered a Blackberry.  I replied that it wasn't offered as an option.  My manager suggested I see if I could get on the Blackberry list.  After many emails and calls, the corporate program manager approved me having a Blackberry.  I ordered the one available option, the Blackberry 8830 World Edition.

On the plus side, having instant access to my email and calendar without having to do anything special is pretty cool.  My corporate plan has over four times as many monthly minutes as my old plan did and nights and weekend free minutes start at 6:00 pm; plus I have unlimited data.  The 8830 is pretty sexy - the 7135 was definitely old school dork.  I really like the trackball situated in the center of the device.  The fact that it lights up along with the rest of the keys is way cool.  I was able to configure the sync so that rather than syncing to my Notes Journal and Address Book, I sync (via usb) to my personal Outlook Notes and Address Book, just as I did with the Kyocera.  I elected to let the Blackberry wireless sync to my Notes task list, rather than to Outlook, as when I really assessed the situation, I acknowledged that I really didn't use my personal to-do list effectively on the PDA.  Having a fully featured mobile web browser is pretty neat too.  Although not as sweet as Jeanie's new Garmin Nuvi 650, the free (for the time being) Nav4All GPS application should be very helpful to me as I travel.  And if I don't like it, I can always use either the Blackberry Maps/GPS application, Google Maps Mobile or I can sign up for the Sprint Navigator for $9.95 per month.  Voice dialing, without having to do any training, while far from perfect, works better than I would have expected; my guess is it will do even better once I get accustomed to using it.  The level of customizability of the notifications (phone, reminders, mail, etc.) is quite amazing.  The leather holster, with it's hidden magnetic sensor, is quite nice.  Being able to charge the Blackberry from my laptop's USB port will eliminate one travel charger from my suitcase.

On the minus side, the size and proximity of the keys are just barely large enough to be usable with my short fat thumbs.  I find that I can't effectively type with the pads of my fingers - instead, I end up using the edges of my nails.  The screen seems smaller than the Kyocera - technically it is wider and shorter, but it "feels" smaller (5mm wide x 3.7mm high vs. 4.6mm x 4.7mm) The distance between the speaker and the microphone is much shorter than on my clamshell Kyocera, so I am concerned about how well callers will be able to hear me - although this may be less of an issue once the bluetooth headset that I ordered on Woot for $6.95 arrives.  No stylus support - although the keypad obviates the need for handwriting recognition (which I always struggled with) and the trackball handles cursor movement, there were some applications - especially some games - that worked really well with a stylus.  Plus, I could scroll a lot faster with the stylus than I can with the trackball.  I will have to purchase a new automobile adapter to power the Blackberry when I will be on extended trips in a car.  Limited memory - although I can (and have) added a micro-SD card (1GB) to the Blackberry, it can only be used to store files, not programs (unlike a Palm device), so I may find myself running into a memory limitation at some point.

And then of course, there are the applications on my Kyocera 7135 that don't have direct corollaries on the Blackberry:

• Co-Pilot
• Tide Tool
• Date Calculator
• AvantGo - see update below
• Support for Microsoft Office documents - you can view them as email attachments, but can't edit them
• Freeware in general

Co-Pilot

Search as I might, I have not been able to find anything even close.  Not for love or even money.  This one omission will force me to continue to have to keep the 7135 in the charger so I can throw it in my flight bag as I get ready to go out to the airport.  Fortunately, with the telephone portion turned off, the battery life on the 7135 goes from a day to a week.

Tides

I searched quite a bit, but could not find a tide prediction program for the Blackberry.  Many of the web sites that provide tide information on a PC based browser (such as www.accuweather.com) don't provide this functionality from a mobile browser, or don't provide the data in a format that is usable on the blackberry (such as www.noaa.gov).  I did finally find something that will allow me to make due:

Tide information for Fernandina: http://www.mobilegeographics.com:81/locations/6122.html

Eastern US: http://www.mobilegeographics.com:81/zones/:America/New_York

or alternatively: http://www02.coconet.com:8080/locations/5474.html which seems a bit faster.

Both appear to be XTide servers.

As an aside, I found a good compendium of tide information and prediction tools: http://ocean.peterbrueggeman.com/tidepredict.html

Date Calculator

I don't use it very often - usually only after I donate blood and want to figure out what date is 56 days hence - but I do find the date calculator handy every now and then (it's also good for calculating when my passenger carrying night  currency will expire 90 days from my last three night landings).  There are a few date calculators that I have found, but I just can't justify spending $9.95 for such a little used specialized application.

AvantoGo

The browser on the Blackberry is pretty good, so much of the content that was available via AvantGo can be accessed by going directly to the appropriate web site.  An application that appears to have similar functionality is http://plusmo.com/homepage/home.shtml

Update: Turns out that AvantGo IS available for the Blackberry.  For more information, go to http://my.avantgo.com/rim/

Support for Microsoft Office Documents

My guess is that if I searched hard enough, and was willing to spend some money, I could find an application to address this issue, but it's not a big deal yet.

Freeware

There just doesn't seem to be nearly as much freeware available for the Blackberry as there was for the Palm.  This seems especially so for little utilities and games.  I guess folks figure if someone has a Blackberry, most likely it is being provided by the person's company, so they can afford to pony up some bucks to purchase these things.

Other Miscellaneous Thoughts

One other thought that surprised me... I never would have thought that I would have seen any value in having a camera built into a cell phone.  That is, not until my recent trip to The Netherlands (LINK).  It was really nice having a phone with a camera.  For the trip, had I not had one, I wouldn't have had any pictures of the trip, as I didn't take my regular camera which is bulky and somewhat broken.  In general though, the idea of having a camera at hand all of the time for impromptu picture taking is cool.  Too bad the Blackberry doesn't have one.

It seems like Wi-Fi capability would have been nice too, but with the EV-DO network speeds and unlimited data, and the relative scarcity of free access points, maybe that isn't such a big deal.

There's other stuff I might get around to playing with to enhance the functionality of the 8830 including:

• Beyond411. Info link.  Install link.
• Java Midlets.  http://midlet.org and http://www.javamobiles.com/midlets/  Depending on how well these work, they may somewhat mitigate the dearth of freeware.

Were I looking for a device to purchase myself, and I had to stay with Sprint, I'd consider the Treo™ 755p by Palm if I were intent on retaining my existing Palm apps, or if I was willing to consider switching over to Windows Mobile, either the IP-830W by Samsung® or the Mogul™ by HTC.

Of course, if I were in Europe, I'd have a huge array of choices.  While I was there earlier this month, I was amazed at the number of options available - especially if you were willing to pay full boat for an unlocked device.

Summary

While not perfect, the Blackberry 8830WE is pretty cool and I am having fun playing with it.  Throw in that the company is providing me with the device at no cost to me, giving me a boat load of minutes each month, and providing me with unlimited data access, and I am left with the thought that I am quite fortunate.

As I was working on the recap of my recent trip to The Netherlands, I discovered that the text of our 2001 trip to St. Thomas and Puerto Rico had vanished from Witsdom.  The index page was still there, as were the photographs, video and music; just the text page was missing.  I looked everywhere I could think of to recover it, but it was nowhere to be found.  This was a bit surprising since I actually had an archived backup of the entire web content of the server from 2003.

Fortunately, I still had the hard copy notes I had written while we were on the trip, so I re-typed them and recreated the page.

Not being one to be able to leave well enough alone, the fact that the audio controls on the page weren't working was more than I could bear.  The fact that I spent quite a bit of time reworking them so they would operate correctly on Internet Explorer or Firefox or Safari is silly since probably no one will ever view the page, but, at least I know it is right now.

Even though I kludged / brute forced the solution, I am pretty proud of it, as I wasn't able to find another reference that provided a solution for playing a randomly selected music file on a web page, in the background, that provided functioning controls in multiple browsers.

In case you're interested, here's the code:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
   1:  
   2: <!------------HIDING
   3:  
   4: /*Script by Scott R Harrod  
   5:                 7/18/1997
   6:  http://members.aol.com/kirrak9/cyberbase.html
   7:  modified by David Sanders 11/21/1999 and 12/27/2007 with snippets from F. Permandi
   8:  http://www.permadi.com/tutorial/flashVars/
   9: */
  10:  
  11:    Play=new Array                                                                               
  12:    Play[0]="music/feelhi2.mid"         
  13:    Play[1]="music/hothothot.mid"
  14:    Play[2]="music/jama2.mid"
  15:    Play[3]="music/redredSD.mid"
  16:    var now=new Date()
  17:    var music=now.getSeconds()%4                                                
  18: // DONE HIDING-------->
  19:  
  20: document.write(
  21: '<OBJECT ID=Crescendo CLASSID="clsid:0FC6BF2B-E16A-11CF-AB2E-0080AD08A326" WIDTH="200" HEIGHT="55">\n'+
  22: '    <PARAM name="src"        VALUE="' + Play[music] + '">\n'+
  23: '    <PARAM name="autoplay"   VALUE="true">\n'+
  24: '    <PARAM name="controller" VALUE="true">\n'+
  25: '    <PARAM NAME="volume"     VALUE="100">\n'+
  26: '    <PARAM NAME="type"       VALUE="audio/x-mid">\n'+
  27: '<EMBED SRC="' + Play[music] + '"\n'+
  28: '    TYPE="audio/x-mid"\n'+
  29: '    WIDTH="200"\n'+
  30: '    HEIGHT="55"\n'+
  31: '    VOLUME="100"\n'+
  32: '    AUTOPLAY="true"\n'+ 
  33: '    CONTROLLER="true"\n'+
  34: '    ></EMBED>\n'+
  35: '</OBJECT>\n');
  36:  
</SCRIPT>

The first section (above the DONE HIDING) creates the array of possible selections, then chooses one.  The second section creates the code to generate an HTML object and an Embed statement using the selected file from above to activate the player, play the selected song, and display a small control console.  Both the Object and Embed are needed to provide cross-browser functionality.  Since a variable is being used in the Object and Embed statements, both statements must be generated using the javascript document.write function.

Wow, over a month with no posts.

Why?

Well, for the second half of November, I don't have an excuse.

For the first half of December, I have a decent excuse - I was away on business in The Netherlands.  Atypically for me, I did manage to to weave some personal time into the trip.  You can read about my trip at Witsdom.  Here's a direct link to the page.