Author: Paul Tomblin

Six hours with a Palm Pre

Vicki and I have been discussing smart phones for a while now. I wanted an iPhone, for a number of reasons regarding the phone itself and the Apps Store, and also because I have severe reservations about Sprint’s ability to provide signal, based on my experience about eight years ago when I was a Sprint customer. But Vicki utterly hated the idea of talking into a flat panel for reasons I don’t entirely understand, and she seemed to feel much more strongly about it than I did. So we decided to go with the Palm Pre. We picked ours up today. Here’s a few preliminary impressions, in no particular order:

  • I find the keyboard very cramped. The Treo keyboard was better.
  • The screen is small compared to the iPhone/Touch but just as bright and readable.
  • There are almost no apps in the App Store.
  • As I feared from my previous experience as a Sprint customer, signal strength inside the house sucks.
  • The OS is very slick in many ways. I’m hoping there is a faster way to dismiss a page than to swipe up to go into the multi card view, then swipe it up to throw it away, but otherwise it’s really nice. Very much the equal or better than the iPhone OS.
  • Even though the web browser is supposedly based in WebKit, same as the iPhone, it doesn’t do GMail right – you press the “Archive” button and it doesn’t take you back to the Inbox screen – although refreshing the screen shows that the message was archived, and sometimes it cuts off the bottom of mail and you can’t scroll down.
  • The built in mailer is better but it doesn’t thread or group by subject (much like SnapperMail or Apple Mail) and when you hit the delete button it somehow really deletes the message instead of
    archiving it like SnapperMail does.
  • The battery life seems pretty poor compared to the Treo, but of course I’m using it more right now, and I haven’t charged it overnight yet. But an hour or so of constant web browsing seems to use about 50% of the battery.
  • The Sprint GPS app seems extremely good – as good or better than my Garmin nuvi, although I wish it were louder.
  • The bastards used yet another incompatible connector instead of a standard mini-USB so you have to use their cable to charge it.
  • The iTunes integration seems to be working fine, although I can’t tell if it synced contacts.
  • The ability to merge contacts is great, although I kind of wish it hadn’t dragged in every person I’ve ever sent email to on Google.
  • Same with the calendar integration – it brought in every calendar I share, even the ones I normally turn off. You can either view only one calendar, or all of them. There is no way to turn off “Vicki’s Work Calendar” and “Ubuntu Local Community” and keep all the rest on.
  • Tasks seem to have no ability to make repeating entries. Funny how Palm OS used to do that so well, but WebOS can’t. But then again, neither can Google Calendar tasks.

All in all, I think the Pre is going to be a good phone, but I wish it got better reception in the house.

Surf Skis again

Dan and I went for a paddle today, and because it was such a hot day and the water was so warm, afterwards he suggested I give his Epic V10 surf ski a try. I wrote before that I’d tried out a V10 Sport a few times and liked it a lot. A V10 is longer and narrower than a V10 Sport – it’s basically got the same lack of initial stability, but it doesn’t flare out as much so it has a lot less secondary stability. Dan said that it would be a better boat for me because of my size, and I have to say that paddling in the shallow water just off shore at the beach it sure seemed less prone to “suck water” in the shallows.

The lack of stability meant that I dumped about four times before I got to take my first paddle stroke. After a while (and a lot more swimming), I got comfortable enough to take ten or twenty paddle strokes before dumping, but I was still going from gunwale to gunwale (assuming you can call those things on surf skis “gunwales”). But that was just my first half hour in the boat – I’m sure in another 10 hours I’ll be much better – and have a lot more beach sand in my ears.

I’m not denying that the V10 would be a faster boat once I got used to it, but on the other hand, the learning curve would be a lot higher – I wonder if I’d be able to race it in the first season I bought it. On the other hand, most of the rest of the team is in V10 Sports now, and I can just imagine what some of the more competitive (but who claim not to be competitive) types would think if I were to leap frog them and get a faster boat than them.

On the other hand, Mike thinks he’s got this all worked out. He owns a “blue stripe” V10 Sport. On Epic surf skis, there are are four different layups, each one more expensive and lighter than the last, each denoted by a different colour stripe on the cheat line. The “blue stripe” (Value) ones are the cheapest and heaviest. The “black stripe” (Performance) ones are about $500 more, and about 4 pounds lighter. The “red stripe” (Ultra) are $1000 more than Performance, and 8 pounds lighter than them. (Note the constant $125/pound ratio there.) And the mythical “black boat” (Elite) ones are another $1000 more than Ultra, and only 4 pounds lighter – so due to the drop off in price/performance, I’ve never seen one of these, and nobody is likely to see once not in the hands of pros. But anyway, Mike’s theory is this: next year, I should buy his “blue stripe” V10 Sport, and he’ll buy Steve’s “red stripe” V10 Sport. Then Steve will buy something even better, probably a V12 or V10 L. It’s a great theory, providing Steve cooperates by buying another boat and selling his V10 Sport for a price that Mike can afford. And that I actually want his “blue stripe” V10 Sport. But that might work – a year in a V10 Sport might be a good way to develop some core strength and balance before moving to a V10.

Upcoming races

I’m trying to decide what kayak races to go for the rest of the season. I definitely want to go to Long Lake on September 26th (oh, should book a motel room now, shouldn’t I?). That’s pretty much the “capper” for the season. It’s 10 miles, and that race was my target when I set myself the goal this year of completing a 10 mile race (although I already achieved that in July at the Armond Bassett race).

But other than that, I’m looking at “Remington II” on September the 5th in Rensselaer Falls. It’s “only” 6 miles, and down river. The course description mentions a couple of easy rapids, and on Google Maps they look like they might require dragging through depending on how high the river is. It also doesn’t look like they have a huge turn-out, so it would probably be a battle between the Baycreek Team. They don’t have separate categories for Touring and Unlimited kayak, so I’d be up against Dan and the rest of the surf skis.

Dan forwarded some brief information on a race on September the 19th somewhere near Ottawa. It’s called “Small Swells”, and so far I’ve been able to find out next to nothing about it, except it has 5km and 14km courses and it’s run by the Ottawa River Canoe Club. (And the ORCC web site lists the race as being on September the 16th, which would mean I definitely won’t go.)

So those are my options. I think I’d like to do all of them, but it would depend on time and money.

Oh yeah, /tmp is *temporary*

I was storing some files that were semi-important to the project I’m working on in /tmp. I knew that there is a process on some Unix computers that cleans out the stuff in /tmp either on boot or on a schedule, but I didn’t know if it did that on my Mac. So while I’d sort of had a flag in the back on my head to move that to somewhere less fragile, I never got around to it. And I got to working on another part of the project for a few days and forgot about them. And in the mean time, the files haven’t been touched, and I’ve installed an OS update and rebooted. And now I go back, and they’re gone. “Oh yeah”, I think, “/tmp is temporary”. So then I look to see if Time Machine has a backup, and of course Time Machine excludes /tmp because, oh yeah, /tmp is *temporary*.

I can recreate the files, but it’s a waste of a few hours. This time I’m going to recreate them in ~/data/.