I just got a new Motorola Q9c on Saturday. I’m pretty impressed so far and happy with it’s features. I probably won’t be synching much in terms of calendar, to-do, etc since I still have my Palm T/X and use Palm Desktop. I did, however, setup my Gmail account using iMap so I’ll always have access to my email. I ended up getting a data plan and a text messaging plan since my wife gets a discount on services through her employer.
Additionally, I was hired as an adjunct faculty at a college in New Jersey. I’ll be teaching two classes as long as there are enough people registered for them starting in early September. I’ll be teaching Risk & Financial Management the first session and Financial Planning & Institutions the second session. I’m pretty excited about the opportunity as it’s something I have been thinking about doing for some time now.
It’s been a somewhat busy summer, but fall is going to be much busier it looks like!
We went to the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs game tonight against the Scranton / Wilkes Barre Yankees. It was a full-moon night, it was humid as could be, and the night was bizarre from start from finish.
The Pigs take the field and Blackley, the Iron Pigs starter, is warming up. Our catcher, Jason Jaramillo, throws down to second and the ball goes into center field. They throw the ball back in from center field and the pitcher and catcher both miss it and it goes back behind home plate. Bad sign.
As I mentioned, it was hot and humid and it was bad enough but there were a bunch of drunk, arrogant Yankee fans in attendance who would make Philadelphia Eagle fans seem like the poster children of decency. But then again, I believe they didn’t really know they were Yankees fans until their 8th beer in the 1st inning and realized they were wearing a Yankees T-Shirt. But besides that, the game was just weird. Blackley was a bit wild, but nothing compared to the Home Plate Umpire! His name is Andrew Vincent and he was obscenely HORRIBLE. His strike zone was somewhere between the dirt in front of home plate, the back stop, and the top of the catch fencing. I know what you are saying, I’m just whining because the Pigs lost 6-4. But I’m telling you, this guy was HORRIBLE. In this game, he called late strikes on 3 players on their way to 1st base after taking what they thought was ball 4. He threw out a yankees player for arguing calls. He threw out the Pigs manager. He gave warnings for throwing at batters for ridiculous reasoning. And then the kicker… he ended the game by calling a foul ball into the seats and then deciding he wanted to end the game with “fan interference” for a ball 2 rows back!! Un-fricken-believable.
I hope the Iron Pigs provided security for Mr. Vincent. Or, after watching the way he acted and called this game, they assigned him a designated driver. This guy would have blown strike calls in a T-Ball game. He makes Phil Luckett look like one of the all time great sports officials. Looks like I’m not the only one who thinks this.
UPDATE: Here’s today’s Morning Call Article – I didn’t think the pitch went behind Moranda, but this article says it did. I just thought it was a very high pitch. Hard to tell with Blackley as his pitches were everwhere last night. Oh, and Vincent did not “immediately” call fan interference. He first signaled foul ball – I saw it definitively and only after a few seconds did he call fan interference.
I’ve been looking for better email solutions for awhile now. I have “several” email addresses and although Mozilla Thunderbird does the job for what I need for 90% of the time – it’s nice to have access to your email whenever you’re online and also to have a 1-spot organization method. So instead of just merely using POP and having Gmail leave the messages on the server so I can download them when I get home – I finally ventured into iMap and I wish had done so awhile ago. Having my Thunderbird and Gmail synchronized and organized really was much, much easier than I thought. Sure, it took awhile to upload all my email archives (I have email in Thunderbird dating back to late 2001), but overall the move was painless and now I have access to ALL of my email via Gmail or my Thunderbird client on my PC. If there is any downside to this setup, it’s that Gmail can’t be customized to set the frequency of account updates. So some accounts may only get checked anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour depending on past results. Not a huge issue for me because If I’m expecting an email, you can always go in and click “check now” in the account settings.
This past weekend I decided to take the plunge and install Windows VISTA on a 320gb spare drive I had lying around. I have a removable tray system so I can just slide my OS drive in and out depending on what I want to run. This allows me to “play” with VISTA without hosing my Windows XP Pro installation. BUT, instead of just trying VISTA – I decided to go with the 64-Bit version. Hey, I’m adventurous! 
I must say it went much, much better than I ever anticipated and I only ran into a small amount of rather minor issues:
- Griffin doesn’t make drivers for PowerMate that work with VISTA-64
- My HP ScanJet has drivers, but the software package won’t work with VISTA-64
- My very old Logitech QuickCam (which I’ve never used) doesn’t have drivers for VISTA-64
- Palm Desktop won’t synch with my Palm T/X as HotSync doesn’t work with VISTA-64
Out of the above, only the Palm Desktop is any kind of an ‘issue’ – but I can live without it if necessary. I’ll just have to use the T/X at home instead of syncing and doing everything on the desktop. This is resolved as the VISTA Beta Palm Desktop works just fine and the WiFi hotsync works perfectly.
Overall, VISTA-64 in my limited 3 days of testing has been very impressive. The aero interface is very snappy and all my programs seem to work just fine on it. The few games I installed seem to run better than on my XP Pro install. Perhaps it’s VISTA-64 utilizing my full 4GB of system RAM.
I’ve now moved 95% completely to this as my primary OS. I’ve transferred everything I needed from my XP Pro install and re-installed all the programs I need (And avoided the ones I didn’t really need and probably should have been cleansed from my Pro XP install long ago!). Only further testing and experience will show the full picture, but I know I’ve been impressed and pleasantly surprised by what I’ve experiences so far.
I can’t wait to attend the Grand-Am race at New Jersey Motorsports Park at the end of August.
