EverydayOrdinary

So I just noticed that I start off a lot of my blog entries with the word “so.” Weird, huh?

So I installed a 30-day demo of Chatopus on my palm pilot. It is a jabber client for palm OS. There are gateways to allow communication from jabber servers to legacy chat systems, such as AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Which is good, because it would mean I could have connectivity to all my contacts wherever I am if I could get jabber running on my palm pilot.

And it worked … about half way.

I was able to send IMs to my sister and to Richie. I know my sister got them, because she called me. I have no idea if Richie got them. The weird thing is, AIM kept telling my sister I was off-line. I re-did the setup, made sure I accepted the authorization request so my status would be visible, but still nothing. I was able to see myself,and to send myself messages (from my jabber.com account to my aim account) and I got those fine.

Another weird thing is that after I woke my palm up from sleep, I had to re-register with the gateway server I was using.

So I’m giving up, and calling it a wash.

No jabber on my palm just yet. I’ll have to stick to Trillian on my laptop. Unfortunately, the free version of Trillian doesn’t include Jabber connectivity. Which is unfortunate, because a) I don’t want to pay for it, and b) I am very much in favor of open standards, XMPP, and all that, and c) most people I know have never even heard of Jabber or XMPP

Le sigh …

So I just started reading The Coffin Dancer by Jeffrey Deaver (from the “Lincoln Rhyme” series) during my lunch break today. And I think that maybe I want to go read from it for a bit right now. But I also think that maybe I want to organize some of the gajillion photos I have backlogged on my computer and upload them to Flickr. It’s a tough choice for me.

So what do I do? Neither. I blog.

And my topic? The sad and self-contradictory state of technology.

This is 2007. I can carry around a full-length dvd-quality movie on a chip the size of a postage stamp, and play it on a device that fits in my pocket. I can access my computer, via the internet, from anywhere in the world. In two business day, assuming no shipping delays, I will receive a telephone the size of a pack of playing cards that I can plug into my laptop and get a near-broadband-speed connection to the Internet from anywhere in Sprint’s coverage area. A joint research company recently announced a new type of memory “that switched more than 500 times faster than flash while using less than one-half the power to write data into a cell. The device’s cross-section is a minuscule 3 by 20 nanometers in size.” Moore’s law, incredibly, is still holding steady even today.

So why is it that, even in this day and age, nobody can seem to make an answering machine with decent, quality sound that is actually understandable? My mom just recorded a new message on our digital answering machine. Then she played it back, and I swear, the message sounds like it was recorded on an analogue tape. Even the corporate voicemail systems I’ve dealt with have, at times, needed straining in order to be heard clearly. This makes no sense to me.

I just wanted to let you all know that. Again, just to be clear: This makes no sense to me. Okay, thanks for listening [reading?].

I told you this entry was random.

Well, I’m off to go read. Or maybe organize photos.