So far, the hunt for the elusive Palm Tungsten E pda has come up empty. Called all the local stores and everyone is cluesless. I still hope something will materialize by next Wednesday's official launch.

My couple of days of roving Wi-Fi was a success. I did try to find the free Wi-Fi in the Bethesda Ave area but there was nothing that I could find.

Due to the Isabel blackout this week, I've been testing the waters of roaming Wi-Fi. Yesterday, still without power since 9/18, I bit the bullet and bought a t-mobile day pass ($10) which is good for 24 hours. While I believe t-mobile's pricing is too high for the casual user I thought this as good a time as any to try it. Even though I got power back at 1 am today (9/24), I didn't have any food in house so I thought I'd keep up my wi-fi test and travel to another Starbucks for breakfast this morning and use some more of my day pass. After I leave my present location (Starbucks, Chevy Chase Lakes), I am headed to Bethesda Ave to try out the rumored free Wi-Fi at that location. My day pass runs out at 2 pm today.

As usual, the marketers have missed an opportunity. Business news reports have said the t-mobile subscriber rates have been very slow for their hotspots. This says that they have a poor pricing model. I already pay $60 a month to Comcast for cable internet and have a wi-fi rig in my house. I'm not going to pay another premium for the occasional starbucks wi-fi connection. Starbucks should offer a deal with a latte purchase of maybe $2 or $3 dollars extra for some wi-fi access. The $6 minimum for one hour of access is just not compelling unless you are desperate.

I'm also on the hunt for a new PDA. Palm is releasing a couple of hot new pda's on 10/1. I'm interested in the Tungsten E which will retail for $199. I went to Office Depot and CompUSA and both were clueless. I am anxious to nail this one down since I expect to sell out quickly. We'll see.

Got my new Dell 19" LCD for my upstairs pc rig on Monday. Of course no power, but I set it up and it looks real nice. I'll get a chance to use it this afternoon when I get home.

Been a while since I blogged.

I visited my brand new Starbucks that just opened last Saturday. I've been anticipating this for over a year. Yay!

I'll be walking to the Starbucks which should do wonders for my exercise.

I will also be checking out the free Wireless day sponsored by Intel. It will be fun to check this out with my new Dell Centrino laptop next Thursday.

Ordered the new Sonar 3 Producer today. Should ship in October. The new interface looks slick.

Hurricane Isabel dominates the news. My Mom has been calling me daily with things I should do to prepare. I am kind of indifferent. I think the MEDIA has overhyped this one. We'll see.

Received the Kensington LCD desktop monitor arm. Small issues with install but it works great and frees up my desk space. I can now also rotate my monitor 90 degrees and work in portrait mode. I set up some hotkeys in the Nvidia desktop manager to toggle between portrait and landscape. Very cool.

Ordered a new Dell 19 inch LCD for my den PC. Got a very good price - $490. This will replace the now 10 year old NEC tube monitor that is showing it's age. I may upgrade my video in this PC from the built in motherboard to an Nvidia or ATI.

Gad the weather is crappy today. We've been in this funk for weeks with awful humidity and overcast skies. I wish for a snow storm to clear this stuff away.

Today is my day to bitch at people. First Comcrap was down for the second time in a week. Tech support clueless as usual. If it's too hard why bother? Then I bugged the Mall people about when they are going to come and trim their trees that hang over my house and threaten to cause great harm! It's only been a month since they first promised they would take care of it.

One redeeming thing I'm doing today is checking out two new music artists I have recently learned about.

First up is Kaki King, a cute 23 year old girl who plays guitar like Michael Hedges and Stanley Jordan. Oh to be young again.

Second is a cool band from NYC called Fuller. Sort of an American Philharmonie. I sent a link to my record friend Steve who probably already knows them? But, I will be interested in what he says.

This article about a former fellow Softie showed up in my inbox today. In fact, we were in MS101 together. I dare say he always viewed me with a bit of suspicion. I always seem to be on the outside looking in. MSFT is not a place for contrary thinkers. You have to drink the coolaid regularly to keep in sync. Interesting how now he's the MS Linux point man. I could take a few potshots but I'll refrain for now. All I will say is MSFT certainly resembles the government in Orwell's 1984 - constantly shifting who the enemies and friendlies are. It would appear things are quite a bit different now that Options are history.

Recently finished reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I very much enjoyed this book. I've collected a bunch of his books but this was the first that I have gotten around to reading. I think I was particularly intrigued with the book because it takes place in part in London very near to where I lived (Notting Hill) when I was very young. In addition, I liked the very contemporary Net allusions and references to interesting artists such as Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Speaking of London. Here's a fun picture I recently received:

Chris - Age 3 (1963) - London

Vortex Art

Ok, here's another variation created by running the picture through the Dreamy Photo plugin. I may like this better?

Vortex Art

Playing with Photoshop today and some shapes I downloaded. Came up with this rather "spacey" or "sci-fi" looking picture. Makes a nice wallpaper. Maybe I'll post on Deskmod. I'll have to play with this some more. Fun!

On Wednesday, I attended another great and free concert at the Kennedy Center Millenium Stage. On tap was a return performance by the fabulous Irish band Lunasa. This has to be one of the best Celtic bands working today. I snagged front row seats and had a blast! Read a review here (scroll to bottom of page).

Interesting article about how Microsoft should bite the bullet and just build antivirus software into Windows. I think the article makes very good points. I've always felt that antivirus was a tax on the enduser that was poorly implemented in most cases. I've looked at many of these packages and they all have fatal flaws that make the cure worse than the problem. I actually do not run an antivirus package in realtime as the impact on performance is far too high - not to mention other glitches. For example, I recently installed a free copy of Platinum 7 from Panda Software which came with a free year of signature updates. After going through the faulty and laborious registration process I proceeded to test drive the realtime Mail and File monitoring features. Well, immediately I noticed I was having problems downloading my POP3 mail. It became obvious that the Panda Software was the culprit and I disabled all realtime features. I'm sure Panda Software has some excuse but in my book this is ridiculous! As with all other antivirus software, it also noticeably dragged down the performance of my system.

I've been computing on PCs for approximately 20 years and have never been infected by a virus. I do periodically run an on demand virus check but my main defences are common sense, my hardware firewall (NAT), and keeping all systems up to date with Windows security updates. One good feature is the free online antivirus test that Panda Software offers at their web site. For many people that practice sensible computing this is probably all that is needed. Essentially, antivirus software is a joke.