Hardly Harley

As my friends well know, I'm a big fan of the webOS operating system developed by Palm for their smart phones. On top of it looking good, it's just easy to use and powerful. It offers true multi-tasking, Synergy (the grabbing and combining of contacts across various cloud services), Universal Search (just start typing and it'll either find the app/contact you're looking for, or offer to search Google, Twitter, and Wikipedia for you), useful, not annoying notification system, all tied into a package that is primarily written using familiar web standards. Palm literally bet the farm on the Pre (then the Pixi) and webOS. Sadly their hardware didn't live up to their software, and with Palm having so little market share and resources available to them, they weren't able to leverage webOS into something that could turn the company around. But, it did pique the interest of a number of other players in the tech industry and a bidding, I don't want to say war, but …

It's mid-July now, and not TV's best time of year. The main channels are sporting re-runs (at best) or shows that (I think) are marginally good at best. There are only so many "America's Got Talent/Dance Moves/Jokes" I can take. So I thought I'd take refuge in watching re-runs of House, and NCIS on USA. I have to admit, I thought the USA channel was primarily for watching re-runs of either currently showing, or recently aired shows. It's how I caught up on House, after finding it in Season 3. But then I actually saw some commercials... Did you know they have their own shows? And I think they're pretty good. Granted, they don't have much in the way of competition, but I think some of them might just do well if they were to air during fall or winter. The ones I've seen certainly fit the station's tag line, "Characters wanted". They are character driven shows that are all a bit off, which makes for fun TV. They aren't flat out c…

Let me just say off the bat that I love my Apple Mac and iPod products. I own a MacBook Pro, a Magic Mouse, a cordless keyboard, an iPod Touch (First generation!), and the nearly microscopic iPod Shuffle. I use iTunes, the iLife suite of really useful programs pre-loaded on Macs (that beat the junk pre-loaded on Windows machines), and really enjoy OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard). I've seen my mom go from someone who hardly touched her Windows computer to someone who loves using her iMac. But when you buy into the Apple way of computing there are some complications, some bigger than others.

After what was a busy couple weeks with family stuff, I got some time to enjoy. Took along my SX10 is for some fun outdoors on the North Coast.

Well, my website moved anyway.  In looking at my website usage over the past year I decided that it really wasn't worth the ~$100/year investment for my own domain name and hosting. I could have gone cheaper and used a different website development piece of software, but that wouldn't be useful as I use Drupal for making websites. Instead I elected to use Drupal Gardens. Drupal Gardens, by Acquia, is similar to Blogger or Wordpress hosted sites where you have a given area to have your blog, but it expands on it and allows to have a full fledged site. Drupal Gardens is also neat for me as it gives me a taste of what Drupal 7 will look and feel like when it gets released, which could be pretty soon from what I hear. There are of course some drawbacks for having my site hosted here; I'm limited to using only the modules that Acquia has allowed, and other customizations are limited. A strong point, for me, is there theming tools are very useful. It's encouraging to hear tha…

This will probably be my last hockey related posting until the 2010/2011 season gets ready to start. As most will know the Sharks battled their way into the playoffs and did a decent job of not embarrassing themselves (or their fans) this year by losing in the conference semi-finals to the eventual Cup winners the Chicago Blackhawks. With the end of the season started the questions as to what would happen to some big names within the organization who's contracts were up as of July 1. The two big names were Patrick Marleau, the one time captain and leading goal scorer for the team, and Evgeni Nabokov the teams goalie for the last 10 seasons. Basic math proved it would be near impossible to keep both players, and sign some of the other key pieces of the Sharks; names like Pavelski, Setoguchi, and Malhotra. Management decided to (and I tend to agree) to sign Marleau and let Nabokov go. I've been a huge Marleau fan since he started with the Sharks back in 1997. We also got Pavelsk…