Automation slowing things down

On Sunday, I went to SeaWorld with my family to celebrate my niece's 5th birthday. My wife had mentioned SeaWorld's entrance system as she has a pass and takes our son pretty often. It wasn't until I went and saw the system that I understood how messed up it is. The line to get in wasn't all that long, but took far too long to get through. The problem is that SeaWorld uses an optical scanner to scan in the pass and then a fingerprint to verify that it is your pass.

The optical scanner lets people put the pass under it in any direction and then reads the bar code. This takes about 30-45 seconds for each pass; so instead of using a standard bar code scanner that is faster, SeaWorld has to go high tech with very expensive pieces of junk. The fingerprint thingy is there to keep the honest, honest; it is just like software piracy that I've written about before where everyone is punished to combat a small number of cheaters. SeaWorld doesn't want people to share the passes which I can understand, but their approach is flawed. We goto the San Diego Zoo all the time and the zoo uses a standard barcode scanner to scan in the pass and then briefly checks your ID. This process is much faster and accomplishes the same thing. Whether or not they're actually checking the ID against the name and/or picture, it doesn't matter; it is a deterrent that maybe SeaWorld should adopt.

My first week with the Palm Pre

I've had a long history with smartphones dating back to 1997 when I worked on the Qualcomm pDQ, the first Palm OS based smartphone. Later down the line, I used a Samsung i330, Palm Tungsten W, Treo 180, VisorPhone, Treo 300, BlackBerry Pearl, BlackBerry 8300 (something like that), BlackBerry 8830, Treo 755p, Treo 700W, iPhone, iPhone 3G, and now a Palm Pre. For me, the Treo 180 was a huge step forward in phones despite the black and white screen and cheap construction. When I started using an iPhone almost 2 years ago, I was blown away with how well it worked, but couldn't make it my main phone that I carried with me all the time. It simply was too big to fit in my pocket and was on a network with mediocre voice and data service. My opinion of the iPhone hasn't changed much since then; it runs an amazing operating system and can do amazing things, but it isn't the phone for me. In addition to the network issues, I wasn't a big fan of the on-screen keyboard.

Last week I got a Palm Pre and within hours, I was a convert and was ready to ditch the iPhone. So what made me so enamored with the Pre? A number of things including better voice quality, lightning fast data network, physical keyboard, small size, very easy to use multitasking (more on this later), and the integration of the multiple email, messaging, calendars, and contacts.

When the iPhone SDK came out and said it didn't support background tasks, I said, who cares about background tasks? The Pre's implementation of multitasking is simply amazing; being able to see everything running via cards is a great way to handle multitasking (messaging, calendar, and email still runs, however). In addition, last year I said that navigation on a phone was just awful; Sprint Navigation on the Pre has changed my mind (at least made me re-consider it). I used navigation today and the spoken voice was clear, had great pronunciation, routed quickly, and got me there on the first try. OK, I didn't make a mistake, so I didn't test how quickly it re-routed.

So having used the Pre for about a week, here's my summary.

Pros:

• Compact size fits in my front pocket.
• Excellent voice quality.
• Fast data network.
• Multitasking with cards is easy to use and clear. (I listened to Pandora at the same time I had Sprint Navigation running on a drive today; something I couldn't do on an iPhone.)
• Physical keyboard is ease to use.
• Connects to iTunes to sync music.
• No desktop sync for calendars/contacts needed. (Direct Google and Exchange syncing.)
• Multiple Exchange account support (iPhone does 1 Exchange account).

Cons:

• No voice control.
• Battery life could be improved.
• Device is a little sluggish at times.
• Some bugs with the software such as turning off GPS required a restart to get it going again and it is only syncing 1 calendar off our Zimbra server.
• Charging connector is a little tough to use (I need to get a Touchstone charger).
• No VPN support.
• No generic jabber client support (the messaging client is based on libpurple and supports jabber as Google Talk is jabber, but you can't use a generic jabber account).

Is this the perfect phone? Of course not, there is no such thing as a perfect phone. Right now I'm down from 3 phones to 2 (I had my personal Motorola RAZR, a Sanyo Pro 700, and an iPhone; now I've the Pre and my RAZR). I know that there aren't a lot of applications for the Pre, but I'm sure they'll be coming along. The iPhone and Pre will be head to head for awhile. Everyone has a different opinion on phones; for now, I think that the Pre will be a good phone for me. What will next year bring? I have no idea.

Reluctantly Upgraded

After a few years of delaying upgrading Quicken 2005 to Quicken 2007, I finally had to do it. I've been using Quicken since 1991 and have skipped a number of updates because I didn't need the new features which probably didn't help Intuit's on and off again relationship with the Macintosh (my father used to upgrade Quicken every year on Windows whether he needed it or not; I suspect this is the thinking of many Windows users).

Unfortunately, Quicken 2005 has some problems with Leopard and I couldn't edit some categories. In addition, an engineer that works on Quicken told me last year that I should upgrade because there were some potential data losses with Quicken 2005. Quicken 2007 still isn't Intel native and will require me to install Rosetta when I get Snow Leopard. The next version of Quicken for Mac won't have investment tracking, so I'll have to run Quicken 2007 for a bit longer. If I didn't almost 20 years of data in it and there was something that could reasonably replace Quicken, I'd jump on it.

Forecasting the weather in San Diego

Last night, we were watching the news and the weather forecaster said that there was going to be drizzle today. I thought I was going to have to bring a rain coat as I knew I was going to be walking a bit today. I completely forgot about it when I left the house and was quite happy that I did. It was a beautiful day in San Diego! If you want to forecast the weather in San Diego, just say that tomorrow will be like today. Not very scientific, but more accurate than the computer models.