Paul's Blog

On an episode of the Geek News Central Podcast, Mr Hawaii, Todd Cochrane annouced his latest venture in Podcasting. Long past the episode of "I bought $1000.00 worth of equipment" Todd has moved onto the print media to teach us a little about the craft of the 'cast.

You can buy Todd's book at: Amazon.com.

Via: [Shack!] Thanks, man!

In the true meaning of everyone getting into the act, HP and AMD have combined thier collective concious to build a special edition notebook, (which is an L2000 series) with the “LIVESTRONG” yellow logo, and a reproduction of Lance Armstrong’s signature.

If you were taking a trip to Walt Disney World, what kind of tech would you bring? I always bring some kind of PDA, music listening device, and the obligatory cameras. But, what if you were a kid? What would YOU want while at Disney World? Well, here are a couple of suggestions, that my little guy has and uses, and your little ones might not want to be without!

"Pal Mickey not only knows where he is in the parks, he knows where he's been, so he doesn't keep repeating the same information," says Linda Conrad, one of the Imagineers who worked on the toy. "He has 700 pieces of information to share on everything from the parade times to attraction wait times."

I'll keep this short:

The Revenge of the Sith premieres tonight at midnight. I would love to go, but why bother when the crowds must be just nuts! I figure, if all of the theaters just stop running every other film, and run only RotS on ALL screens, then the crazies will have seen it at least twice in a week, and then I can go see it and not have to be in a packed theater and wait 45 minutes just to get a bucket of popcorn.

Star Wars:
Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
PG13, Science Fiction, 2hrs 20min
Opens on May 19, 2005
Hayden Christensen, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman ...more

In this final installment of the prequel trilogy, the Clone Wars have raged for two years. The galaxy is divided between Count Dooku's Confederacy of Independent Systems and the Republic, which is led by Chancellor Palpatine. In the political unrest, Palpatine schemes to end the Jedi order, dissolve the Republic and declare himself Emperor of the Galactic Empire, using his clone army and Sith Warriors to do so. Lured by the power offered by Palpatine, Anakin draws closer to the Dark Side. To complicate matters, he and Padme are parents to twins -- Luke and Leia. Fearful of Anakin's turn to the Dark Side, ... Read more In this final installment of the prequel trilogy, the Clone Wars have raged for two years. The galaxy is divided between Count Dooku's Confederacy of Independent Systems and the Republic, which is led by Chancellor Palpatine. In the political unrest, Palpatine schemes to end the Jedi order, dissolve the Republic and declare himself Emperor of the Galactic Empire, using his clone army and Sith Warriors to do so. Lured by the power offered by Palpatine, Anakin draws closer to the Dark Side. To complicate matters, he and Padme are parents to twins -- Luke and Leia. Fearful of Anakin's turn to the Dark Side, Obi-Wan confronts his former student, trying to dissuade him from joining ranks with the Sith. Obi-Wan and Anakin face each other in a duel -- leaving Anakin wounded and presumed dead. Palpatine seizes the opportunity and takes the injured Jedi under his wing. Using technology to heal Anakin, Palpatine creates a new and powerful Sith warrior -- Darth Vader. With Vader at his side, Palpatine lays waste to the Jedis and Dooku's army and creates the new Empire. Now, Obi-Wan and the last remaining Jedis must rally to save Princess Padme and the twins (who have been separated to be raised unaware of each other's existence) in hopes that someday the next generation will lead a revolution to unseat Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine.

Today, Frank Gorshin lost his bout with cancer and pneumonia. The actor, best known for his role as The Riddler in the TV hit "Batman" died, today at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center; as was reported by MSN News.

"He put up a valiant fight with lung cancer, emphysema and pneumonia," Mrs. Gorshin said in a statement.

Despite dozens of TV and movie credits, Gorshin will be forever remembered for his role as the Riddler, Adam West's villainous foil in the question mark-pocked green suit and bowler hat on "Batman" from 1966 to '69.

"It really was a catalyst for me," Gorshin recalled in a 2002 Associated Press interview. "I was nobody. I had done some guest shots here and there. But after I did that, I became a headliner in Vegas, so I can't put it down."

West said the death of his longtime friend was a big loss.

"Frank will be missed," West said in a statement. "He was a friend and fascinating character."

Gorshin earned another Emmy nomination for one for a guest shot on "Star Trek," a 1969 episode called "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield."

In 2002, Gorshin portrayed George Burns on Broadway in the one-man show "Say Goodnight Gracie." He used only a little makeup and no prosthetics.

"I don't know how to explain it. It just comes," he said. "I wish I could say, `This is step A, B and C.' But I can't do that. I do it, you know. The ironic thing is I've done impressions all my life — I never did George Burns."

Gorshin's final performance will be broadcast on Thursday's CBS series "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."

Born in Pittsburgh, Gorshin broke into show business in New York. He did more than 40 impressions, including Al Jolson, Kirk Douglas, Bobby Darin, Dean Martin and James Cagney.

Being the owner of an iPod, I obviously have a requirement to move my music library to iTunes so I can listen to all of my stuff. iPods are beautiful, really. You have a very nice, simplistic user interface, lots of space, and a ton of fun wherever you are. It's definitely a cool thing to be able to take all of my pictures, my CD collection, my calendar, contacts, notes, and a bunch of my programs along with me.

On that, is Uncle Bill (Gates) right about his new Mobile 5.0 on SmartPhones taking over the iPod space? Who knows... Nintendo, and Sony are trying to do the same thing with their game devices; along with a million other companies. Windows and Palm still win with the PDA area, and Apple seems to be in the lead with the portable music device. We'll see. But, I digress...

Back to my DRM rant: So, I'm ripping some new CDs to my PC. I grab one of them and notice that they say that it's protected. I shove it in, and iTunes goes out to CDDB and picks up the tracks. I thought, "cool, this might work!" ... and then it happens. I click IMPORT and then the drive spins... and spins... and I don't have to say it 400 times for you to realize what happens next. It totally hung my machine. It would have been nice to be able to CANCEL!

Look guys, I'm a musician. I know what it's like to have my stuff stolen; I don't like it either. But, I'm legit. I bought the CD. I prefer it on my iPod so I can keep stuff together, referenced and usable through my uPnP devices in my home. ... and don't even get my started with why I can't play music I've purchased from the iTunes store on my uPnP device!

So, as musicians (more like record companies) try to protect their music, the restrictions on purchasers (consumers) of music become more stringent. How do I get what I want, and what they want at the same time?

Note to DRM vendors, and companies providing this service: Find a way to let those of us who are honest, use the license to the music as we have always been allowed, and don't come out with new BIOS and software application upgrades which make things even more restrictive.

So, today at GigaWorld, we started off with a pretty boring Keynote, and then it moved onto what turned out to be a pretty lame approach at showing off what these guys thought was "emerging technology." My person opionion of this "display" was that they looked at technologies that weren't emerging (and my definition of emerging is something that's up and coming in the future, not something I can necessarily use now), but technologies that were more than readily available for consumption. In fact, many of which have been in production for quite some time. The only cool things, and this is pretty lame in all aspects of new technologies, were Citrix's "new" GotoMeeting web conferencing tool (they had a really good demo, and it was amusing on top of that), which is just like PlaceWare (LiveMeeting) or WebEx, just cheaper in cost and is based on their GotoMyPC architecture. The other interesting technology was from RF Code, who used RFID technology to track people who were skiing at a resort, and families in an amusement park. One of the demos showed, on a PDA, the proximity of a kid to his dad and mom, who was closer, and what the optimal path was between them. That was neat.

Then, I got accosted by some dude from Autonomy. He was yapping my ear off about how great their product is and why my company should use it. Well, they do have a cool product, we've looked at it before, but that was a long time ago. Maybe they deserve another look, but as of today, I'm annoyed. He did, however, give me a cool link you should check out - that I've heard of but never visited - which is BlinkX.com, and BlinkXTV.com. Autonomy's technology is the underlying tool for how the search is done and for what they deliver.

More later, I hope!

The first session, this morning, was with Robert Carter, the Executive VP and CIO of FedEx. With FedEx Kinkos becoming such a global company placing their fingers in the pie of office services and the web, they definitely have a great approach to business.

If you were a shipping company, wouldn't you look at your customers and see what they were shipping? If they were sending a zillion documents, presentations, and other office services supplies, wouldn't you go after that business? Integration of that type of stuff in your shipping business would be the perfect marriage. Well, that's what FedEx did when they bought Kinkos. What else they did was a neat ability to integrate their services into technology that people use every day.

FedEx Kinkos create a WebService called " File, Print FedEx Kinkos" OK, yeah, the name is a little lengthy and awkward, but they chose it, I didn't. What it does is something that someone should have done a while ago. It lets you install a little tool into your MS Office (Windows Operating System, really) that gives you a printer application so you can send your documents directly to Kinkos and have them printed, bounded, tabbed, and all of those other insane things that printing people do. The tool even finds the closest Kinkos to your zipcode. The other neat little tidbit is that you can click one little checkbox that says: "Ship via FedEx." How great is that?

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that FedEx Kinkos is how you should go - maybe you've had horrible experiences with them (I haven't) - but, my opinion here is that they are offering technology with their very basic shipping and printing services. The beauty is they have created a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) WebService tool that does this. What does that mean to the developer geek? It means that, as a developer, they have exposed to you the ability to grab that service and write your own interface. In fact, check out the ExpiditeShip Blog to see what's up with this kind of cool stuff.

Robert Carter also talked about how FedEx not only uses, but is seriously proud of the fact, OpenSource products such as RedHat Linux. Innovative as always.

Via: [GigaWorld Conference - Dallas, Texas]

Tekkeon, who is a pretty small company in the gigantic market of electronics, has a good solution for a Bluetooth headset. It's not only compact, it FITS!

So, if you're like me, you would love to have one of those cool Bluetooth headsets for your wireless phone. But, also if you're like me, your phone doesn't support Bluetooth! So, what do you do? Well, the folks at Jabra have one solution, and I think it's a pretty decent one.

Jabra created a little device that basically just takes the in/out of any 2.5mm wireless phone jack and sends it through a tiny rechargable battery-powered Bluetooth transceiver; The Jabra A210. It's pretty slick and really small.

While sitting, bored at the airport, I decided I needed to upgrade my phone stuff. First of all, my phone holster was falling apart, so I decided to upgrade that to one that wouldn't let me phone fall out of it. I have a LG VX6100 series phone, so I was in search of something that would fit it nicely. I found a BodyGlove case which is really well designed.

So, here I am, at the GigaWorld IT conference in Dallas, Texas. I'm staying at the beautiful Gaylord Texan resort and conference center. It's a HUGE hotel and conference center, living up to the reputation of Texas; everything is bigger in Texas! I'm thoroughly impressed by the hotel staff. Their professionalism, kindness, and hospitality is amazing.

The conference hasn't quite begun yet, but I'm already registered and have my swag from Forrester.

Since it's been so long since I've blogged, I figured I would wait until today to start again so that I can sort of get back on the horse in the same way I started my blog back in October; with conference highlights, pictures, and maybe a few cool technology details.

Stay tuned from today until Thursday May 5th, for details from the conference. I was going to do a PodCast from here, but I forgot my good mic. Oh well! Maybe I'll try with the laptop mic - yuck!

Keep your browsers and RSS readers here for further stuff! Thanks for not totally abandoning me!