I’m home from my trip to Italy last week and except for missing a connection in Chicago, all went well. Even the connection problem was not a major issue except that it was a Friday night and I got home over 3 1/2 hours late. I really wanted to be back with my family and start the weekend, so it was frustrating.
As an experiment I used Twitter quite a bit with moderate success. It can be a bit addicting. It had some downtime and the connection to FaceBook was broken for a couple of days, so I really didn’t feel it was a service that was fully available or reliable. One time when I thought it would be fun to use it was when I was walking around the Roman Forum, but I couldn’t get through to the network on my BlackBerry.
At that point it occurred to me that a voice-based flavor of Twitter might be interesting. That is, each message burst would be, say, no more than 5 seconds in length. You could use cheap or free VOIP to input and on the receiving end your “followers” could either listen to the recording or opt for viewing a voice-to-text translation. In the world of lol, rofl, brb, g2g, etc., it would not have to be perfect. Now that could be really distracting! If there’s money in this idea, you heard it here first.
My Linux setup on my Thinkpad performed well. I could access any available access point and it worked as expected within the IBM environments. That means I’m closer than ever to completely deleting the Windows partition on the machine. I don’t really need the hard disk room or anything, but it would be satisfying.
The third partition on the laptop is Ubuntu 8.04. This is quite nice, though I don’t yet have all the IBM apps on it that would allow me to be on it full time. The wifi support is not as dependable as what I have on Red Hat, so that would also have to be taken care of before I moved to it as my primary laptop environment. It’s something to play with in my spare time, though a colleague said that 8.10 will be much improved in the wifi area.
I put the new OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta on my home iMac this morning. Speaking personally and with very limited experience, I’m impressed! As I’ve said before, it’s nice to see this area of software active again after years of stagnation and controlled development.