Week of 04/26/2008 - 20:00 to 05/03/2008 - 19:59

Well, I finally took the plunge this weekend and drove 45 minutes to a bike shop. I picked up a 21 speed Trek Urban 1.0 for myself:

And a 21 speed Jamis Citizen 1.0 for my wife so we could bike together. When it's not raining (like it is today) I plan to ride mine to work. I also picked up a four position bike rack that will connect to the tow package on my F-150 so we can take them camping without having to take up bed space.

Carla and I rode about 5 miles yesterday. I'm surprised I'm not sore today.

Today I took the plunge. US Cellular finally stepped up to the plate and apologized for pissing me off, so I went ahead and replaced my crappy RAZR with a Blackberry 8830.

I then promptly installed the Funambol Sync Client on it, and configured it to sync my calendar and contacts with my eGroupware server. Amazingly, it was very easy to do.

The Blackberry is definitely a different experience. It's going to take some getting used to. Too bad my Nokia n800 refuses to transfer files to it. I guess I'll need to get my ringtones over another way.

Everything worked great at first, but now I'm having e-mail issues with my Blackberry.

Now whenever I compose and send an e-mail I get "invalid message from server" but if I select the same e-mail and hit resend, it goes fine.

I'm using the Internet service. It checks mail on my imap server just fine and pushes it down to me.

This week I'm at a conference for one of our largest customers. About 120 medical records directors from hospitals all across the nation gather together for a few days for workshops and to meet with vendors like me.

We look forward to this meeting every year because we know most of those directors and deal with them on a daily basis. It helps to keep a face with the voice over the phone.

Watching the other vendors is very interesting to me. Some come, throw a few brochures on a table and sit in a chair behind the table all day. Those are also the first people to leave when it's over. Given that it's not cheap to attend this event, it seems a huge waste of money to me.

Others come with huge pop-up backdrops and have very polished people staffing the booth. You can tell those people don't actually do any of the things they are there to sell. They are just hired booth bait. They are also normally one of the first to break down their booth and leave.

Just picked up a new Blackberry 8830 World Edition with GPS and unlimited data plan.

Very nice...

But the mapping software doesn't ever find the GPS satellites.

I just spent 20 minutes on hold with USCellular to be told "Sorry, but that's a known problem. We've already told RIM. It's not a problem with the device but a software problem. Hopefully they can fix it soon."

Talk about passing the buck and being noncommittal...

Computerworld reports that Microsoft's Internet Explorer is the only browser gaining market share, while Firefox and Safari lose.

Personally, I don't buy it. First of all the percentages are so small to be possibly just noise in the sampling method.

But, as someone who controls a large corporate network, I can say that keeping Internet Explorer from popping back up on computers has been a task. Microsoft uses every underhanded method possible to force users to Internet Explorer 8, even though I've already standardized on Firefox. I've had it reappear on Microsoft Update, already downloaded and ready to install, on several workstations I know had previously been told never to offer the update.

How can you not gain market share when you control the OS and can trick average-joe users into installing it?