Author: ***Dave

— The calendar application does not have a “snooze” on its alarms.

– The docking cradle seems to be very sensitive — it’s easy to have it seem to be in place just fine, and then notice that it’s still on “battery.”

+++ Mail is working. The mail filter software (defining rules as to which items should be forwarded) is sophisticated — indeed, it may be slicker than what Outlook itself uses.

— Reading formatted stuff is sucky. There’s no such thing as large text, bold text, underlined, text, etc. This may be a serious drawback.

++ The scroll-dial/click-to-enter control is neat (so is the escape button).

— Having to scroll horizontally and vertically to get the pointer to where I want is annoying compared to just pointing with a stylus.

More to come …

Blackberry seems to be up and running, and I’m getting mail to it from the office. The next few days should be interesting, as I “tune” what level of mail forwarding I want with the thing, and as I (hopefully) get involved in how well it handles doing memos, etc. My first impression is that the interface is a bit cruder than the Palm’s, and the relative lack of alternative software to the basic aps is probably going to be annoying. On the other hand, it gets really good signal at both the house and the office (certainly better than my cell phone).

We shall see.

I got my Blackberry this afternoon. Now I just have to figure out how the damned thing ties in with my mail.

Unfortunately, the other fellow in the office who has one is trying to get our network problems resolved. Which means my consultation with him will be, of necessity, limited.

We’ll see. I’d love to have it working for the weekend.

Insanity has been defined as trying the same thing over, expecting the results to be different.

It occurs to me that this speaks directly to IT, since our primary diagnostic methods involve trying the same thing over and over again. “Let’s try rebooting again. Well, let me try unplugging and plugging it in again. Let’s power it off and power it back on again. Let’s try rebooting again.”

The damnable thing is, the reason it’s our primary diagnostic method is that it works.

Either we’re insane, or we operate in an insane world. Or both. Live with the ambiguity.

Internet ads are a bane to my existence. I hate ’em. They are annoying. They are intentionally eye-catching, and advertisers are in an ever-increasing frenzy to get eye-time from surfers like me because — well, that’s why they’re paying for the damned things, right?

The worst I’ve seen (lately) was a pop-under for Orbitz, the new “Hey, we’re the airlines, so we’ll start a travel site, and you can move all your ticket purchases here, putting those other travel sites out of business, but, hell, we won’t ever take advantage of such a monopoly, trust us, we’re the airlines” site. This thing is like 5×8″, and flashes on and off with such a frequency I’m surprised there aren’t folks having epileptic fits triggered by it. You can’t look at it for more than 5 seconds without getting a headache but, more importantly, you can’t not look at it. Every lizard-brain part of your mind says, “Bright flashing lights! Something I must see, or else dinosaur will eat me!”

It is annoying as all hell.

And it’s how the Internet stays relatively free.

Yup. Most content providers out there make use of advertising to at least defray the costs of providing the content. Aside from folks like me who do this sort of thing as a hobby — and I’ve already said I’m a cheapskate. I’m a cheapskate with some concern for my viewers — which is why I bailed from Geocities (and it’s Ad Window of Doom), but also why I won’t purchase more expensive hosting services. At least, not yet.

So, yes, I hate ads, but I also acknowledge that they are a vital part of keeping the Internet from turning into a bunch of fanboy pages and subscription services. Which I suspect will happen in the next ten years, given current trends. But for now, that’s the case.

But while I have accepted the ethical “tragedy of the commons” sort of need for Internet advertising, I’ve decided to draw the line. That line is pop-ups and pop-unders. Not only are they an Abomination Before the Lord, but they raise the annoyance stakes to new levels. Plus, by opeing up new windows, they chew up additional system resources, clutter the screen, etc. They are Evil, Pure Evil from the Eighth Dimension.

So I took the step of downloading PopUp Killer. There are others, but this came recommended, and seems to do the job. PopUp Killer just sits out there and watches each browser window when it opens. If it has a name/domain that is on the PopUp Killer black list (which you can download), then it zaps the window with a little crash of thunder. Very satisfying. It also as a limited AI function to guess (with user-defined sensitivity) what might be a pop-up/under ad, and zaps that, too (this latter function can be set to simply prompt you, which I find to be a better alternative, since it sometimes guesses things wrong).

The Black List is a bit overzealous in places — it wildcards all the Tripod sites, for example — but you can also easily set up an exemption list.

I will not install software (available) that strips out ads from within pages — TANSTAAFL — but I will do this. And do.

Take back the Web. Solidarity Forever. Up the People! Right On, Man!