Sheep Guarding Llama

Eric is up today. Not a lot going on here. We made it out and hit about one hundred balls each at the driving range this afternoon. It was the first time for both of us getting out at all this year. We needed to practice badly today since we are playing in a tournament with Josh tomorrow. We still don’t have a fourth person to play, though, so we need to find one tonight.

Loopy got a chance to play with my new Zaurus yesterday and he was so impressed that he ran out and bought himself one to play with. Look for Loopy to be making some video games on the Zaurus in the near future.

We had a cook out in the driveway with the neighbors today. We fired up the old grill and cooked hot dogs and hamburgers and vegi-burgers for Dominica and I. Dominica is finally admitting that she is a vegetarian now. She has officially been assimmillated {sp}. After the cook out, most of us headed up the fill to set off some fireworks for the coming holiday. We had a small collection of fireworks from a trip to Florida last summer.

I bought a wireless ethernet card for the Zaurus today. It is pretty cool. I have mentioned earlier that we have a wireless ethernet hub in the dining room so that I can use my laptop anywhere in the house or even outside. I check, the laptop works all the way out past the neighbors driveway. Which is pretty cool; it is nice to be able to work outside sometimes. So, now I have a wireless card for the Zaurus which allows me to look at web pages and check my email from anywhere at anytime. Very handy. That may be the feature that I enjoy the most. I was able to get the wireless card at Best Buy. It is a D-Link.

We have been (at work) using a Compaq iPaq handheld Pocket PC for some of our applications. We have discovered, though, that this unit is quite useless since it crashes all of the time (Pocket PC 2002 is a Windows operating system!!) and when it does, the only way to restart the machine is to disconnect the battery which erases all of the programs on the unit. And, there is no way to replace the battery. All in all, we are pretty disappointed in the device. It had a lot of potential but it fell very short. Particially because Compaq decided to build a unit exactly like Casio’s and HP’s and didn’t bother to innovate at all. The only things that they did right was drop the price and install a faster processor. But none of the features are better.

Since the iPaq fiasco, Loopy and I decided to try out the newer Sharp Zaurus PDA since it is based on the same fast hardware as the Compaq iPaq but has some enhancements (like replaceable battery, secondary battery backup, built in keyboard, available camera, etc.) and most importantly, it runs on Linux instead of on Windows! So we got the first one today. So far, we are really impressed. Comparable (if you can call it that) hardware from Compaq is $600 and the Zaurus is only $400. The Zaurus is, thus far, better in every way to the Compaq from the size, ergonomics, cost, features, look and software. The Zaurus is a great buy. We are hooked. Pocket PC can kiss my butt.

What a busy day! I starting the day in Annapolis and had to drive out to DC first thing in the morning to fix a computer that had broken (I hate Pocket PCs!!) Then I had to drive from DC to Frankfort (outside of Utica) to go to Dominica’s cousin’s graduation. So, that made for a nine hour day of driving. Whoo-hoo. I am exhausted.