Anytime I have a promotion hanging in the balance I like to do something that will guarantee I don’t get it (and it worked). This year I decided to weigh in on the current “public-private initiative” for a private company to finance and build improvements to SR 316 to Athens. They would pay for this by charging tolls and it would cost something like $8 to drive from Atlanta to Athens using SR 316. If you want, you can still comment on this proposal (for two more weeks), but only if you agree with me. I wrote, not as a DOT employee, but a guy whose brother and family live in Athens. I sent it to the Commissioner of the DOT but found out later that it was supposed to go to [email protected] who is the Chief Engineer (and my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss). They sent me a nice form letter a few days later. I also cc’d the e-mail to my State Representative. I sent the e-mail on a Saturday (not at work) and within a few hours she had responded by e-mail and said she would bring it up when she met with the DOT board the following week. She also asked if I supported a higher gas tax and I replied “Of course!”
Month: January 2005
Memoparser (cont.)
It’s been one year since I wrote Memoparser and I get an occasional hit on its web page and 187 have downloaded it at Palm Gear. I did a search for “memoparser” and found one guy’s blog entry that said “Memoparser 1.0 sounds interesting”. That’s pretty good, I think. The guy that wrote Palm2iPod still hasn’t come up with a new version that exports memos so I’m glad I wrote the program.
However, I have to admit that I don’t generally use the notes on the iPod since I usually carry my Palm with me.
I still think the perfect MP3 player would be a Palm with a 20 GB hard drive. And it would need some kind of open source community to keep it constantly updated and configurable, unlike the iPod.
Unfortunately, I think Palms and other non-wireless (wireful? it still has no wires) PDA’s are dinosaurs. I was at Best Buy and they had maybe 3′ of shelf space for PDA’s and accessories. I think cell phones are doing more and more but I don’t really want a cell phone. I think eventually people will make fun of me for using an antiquated wireful Palm, like it’s a slide rule or something.