I hope that everyone had an awesome holiday.  Being a first year airline pilot, you don’t expect to have Christmas off, but I did and it was great.  Family time and time with the girlfriend, couldn’t be any better. 

My post season holiday commute lengthend by the fact that a certain dry cleaner lost my uniform pants in San Diego.  This caused me to have to head back to the Atlanta crashpad via a redeye flight on AirTran and retrieve a pair.  I ended up flying half way across the country just to deadhead back to Wichita, Kansas.  On approach into the Wichita airport, the ground was completely covered with some white powder stuff.  I think that they call it snow or something.  It’s going to be really cold in the morning from what I can tell!

Now, I’m just chilling here watching Journeyman which is on NBC online but also plays too many commercials, very disruptive by the way.  It’s all the same too.  The one same commercial interrupting my online viewing experience.  I understand that they have to make money but they aren’t sharing the ad-revenue with their writers.  These overnight are going to at least be a little bit more productive now that I don’t have any shows to catch up on. 

After a long week without having a computer and going through some recurrent training, I am back in San Diego reconfiguring the T43 that conked out two weeks ago.  IBM sent it back to me mentioning what they did, but it didn’t say exactly if they changed out any parts, etc.  I’m really disappointed in their summary, but I guess you can’t expect that much from a formally awesome laptop corporation.  Their warranty turn around and service is still top notch, but I can’t help but be disappointed that it’s not as great as Apple’s Customer Support.  I’ve had much better times with my Ti Powerbook than any other PC Laptops.  Well, I’m here till Christmas Day, then I start another four day! 

I should be around for New Year’s Eve so give me a ring.  I don’t think that I’ll be doing anything near spectacular this year, although I’m looking forward to not spending it in Atlanta like last year!  Who knows, maybe that’s where I’ll end up again. 

Well, with Fort Wayne being one of my favorite overnights in the ASA network, I was unable to hit up the 412 Club as we came in rather late.  I really wasn’t that disappointed but I did have work to do such as bid for my January schedule.  I’m now #213 on the CRJ 200 with another 262 first officers behind me.  It’s definitely kind of ridiculous after only being here for just under 1 year.  (Anniversary date = 27 December 2007)  I still won’t necessarily get the choice of a premium line, but I’m hope that it works out.  I might end up heading out to the Gyro place just behind the Fort Wayne Hilton Convention Center Hotel.  It’s close proximity to places that I know of and like make it a premium choice for destination but the biggest draw back of this overnight is the hotel where the Internet registers at 128K speeds.  It’s record slow speeds make it too painful to browse the web sometimes. 

Not much has been done on the side of my other project, but of note comes the introduction of kwiry.com  I just started one today but its features are rather interesting.  First, you send a text to your profile, for instance a reminder of the song that you just heard or the artist, and then it shows up in your kwiry homepage.  You then are introduced to multiple links regarding the txt that you sent to yourself from web searches, favorites and even shopping.  It’s basically an expanded post-it / sticky type deal but online.  It’s quite useful really.  You should check it out and add me to your friend list. [my kwiry page]  

Well, over the last 24 hours, I haven’t been able to constantly watch out for good phone news (even though I really wanted to write about the new Samsung that was released on T-Mobile’s Network last night) due to the fact that my IBM T43 has been in and out of conscienceness.  I’ve been wanting, keyword wanting, a new laptop or desktop and its just been rather crazy dealing with something that isn’t working for me.  Mind you I might have dropped it a few more times than usual because my Purdy Neat Luggage is out of commission as well.  So, I’m left with a Travel Pro bag that isn’t at all nearly as awesome.  It’s almost embarrassing being a pilot and using a cheapy bag.  

So, anyways, I called IBM and the will be sending me out a box where I can overnight my laptop to them and have them take care of the rest.  I really just didn’t feel like dealing with anything, but I’m hoping that it just means that I need a new one and that they’ll cover it all.  I know that once they open it up, they won’t be able to diagnose anything or duplicate my issues, but hey, at least they’ll be the ones tinkering with it.  I’m going to revert back to my trust Apple Titanium Powerbook 667, which by the way, was left out from being able to be upgraded to Leopard.  

I have to say that I spend some good time reading this review and was left with no questions after 5 pages of relentless comparisons, short comings and history.  Almost 1 month after its initial debut, the Amazon Kindle goes through some hurdles in trying to become the king of eBook readers.  Myself being on the fence between the Sony Reader and the Kindle am still forced to wait another generation.  I had a chance to play with Sony’s version but was frustrated at its slow response time and refresh rate.  Being that the Kindle has the identical screen and technology, I can assume that it already will be a disappointment to my petty but unforgiving needs. 

I’ve been reading books on PDF on my Palm Treo 650 via Adobe’s Reader Palm Program and really haven’t found too many short comings besides having to click next quite a few times due to the screen’s size.  I’ve been happy.  I would have never seen the Kindle being compared to Apple’s iPhone or iPod Touch in the task of reading books or webpages, but Mr. Dilger brings up some good facts of 3G vs. AT&T 2.5G.  The fact that viewing web pages on either device is something that I might want to do, it seems like Apple’s Embedded Safari Web Browser has the upper hand in the ability to resize the page and view it in all its glory.  The Kindle was rather limited in a way that would definitely bother me due to the fact that it was horizontally inhibited forcing you to scroll through each page one at a time vertically.  The review almost convinced me to buy an iPod Touch rather than a reader! 

The path to saving trees is going to be quite difficult with having to convince people that they can highlight and take notes electronically, but hey, its just might work out!

AppleInsider | In-depth review: can Amazon’s Kindle light a fire under eBooks?

I’ve never really believed in actually tried any of these “Leave a Comment” and win type deals, but a friend of mine just won, so I thought that I might give it a try.  It’s one of those things that you think could never happen until you know someone that has won.  It’s definitely kind of a cool gig and I wish that I could have some random give aways.  Maybe just sending out my old DVDs or something like that.  =) 

Anyways, head over to http://biglakersfan.blogspot.com/2007/12/great-runs-athletics-shoes-giveaway.html if you want to give it a try.  There are many others out there, but I’ll leave it up to you to find the those ones.  This is just one of the few that I thought was actually worth while. 

I still don’t know if there is any catch to these such as a harvesting bot for emails and adresses, but so far, its been all good.  Go check it out!

I’m not at all bias because I own a PS3, but I’ve always thought of Blu-ray to be a little more triumphant even after all its short comings.  I just hope that the latest news of Warner Brothers choosing sides in the beginning of next year will make Michael Bay and Paramount cry because of their support of the latter.  It’s just ridiculous how much the HD-DVD camp paid to have the exclusive rights.  Now, its Warner Bros. who are playing hooky and are trying to lure as much money as they can from either format.  In the end, its definitely the consumers who lose out buying into one format and just hoping that it’ll prevail.  Wasn’t it nice when we just had DVDs on the shelves and nothing else? 

Until the Blu-ray camp can put out a low cost device, it’ll be a while before more people end up picking up a player.  Thanks to the price drop of the PS3, more and more people have been bought into the idea of a 2 in 1 where the Xbox 360 requires an add-on which by the way is now only $129. 

BusinessWeek released an article yesterday late afternoon concerning the latest in the format wars.  Next-Gen DVDs: Advantage, Sony

image provided by Gizmodo