http://www.darrylramm.com musings on technology, marketing and personal interests Tue, 25 Mar 2008 06:39:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I have wanted to try flying a large wingspan open class glider for a while and now that the Williams Soaring Center has an ASH-25 "25H" available for rent I had to try it out. ASH-25s can have different wing tip/winglet options, and 25H as I flew it has ... http://www.darrylramm.com/2008/03/21/flying-the-big-one/ I had a great early season soaring flight out of Williams Soaring Center on March 1st, with an over 4 hour, 460km flight along foothills on the eastern edge of the Mendocino Mountain range. This was a chance to try out my SPOT Satellite Messenger again. The SPOT ... http://www.darrylramm.com/2008/03/02/spot-satellite-messenger-2/ This year's Soaring Society of America (SSA) Convention is in Albuquerque, NM, with main sessions running Thursday February 14th to Saturday February 17th. I was working on what I wanted to see at the convention and arranging some side meetings and I ended up taking the convention schedule from the SSA ... http://www.darrylramm.com/2008/02/10/ssa-convention-schedule-in-usable-formats/ I'll write up some more comprehensive comments on the SPOT satellite messenger soon, but in the meantime I wanted to provide some screen shots of the SPOT web site showing what is available from the optional SPOT Track Progress service from SPOT. Overall I'm impressed by the SPOT messenger ... http://www.darrylramm.com/2008/01/03/spot-satellite-messenger/ So one of the neatest things Yahoo owns is Flickr. But I'm at a loss to understand the snails pace of innovation at Flickr. There is tons of stuff the could be doing with new features, tools and integration. But anyhow instead of wasting space on that I'll just whine ... http://www.darrylramm.com/2008/01/02/flickr-uploader-30-broken-crap/ Santa wears a black turtleneck and he is giving his usual keynote at the MacWorld conference on January 15th. I decided to hold off on a Macbook Pro purchase hoping to see an upgraded model coming. I need a high end machine for multimedia work, overall desktop PC replacement, including ... http://www.darrylramm.com/2007/12/29/santa-wears-a-black-turtleneck/ I stopped using a deskside PC about two years ago and like having my whole computing life in one place on a laptop. I've been thinking over what to do with my current ThinkPad T42 laptop which is just too underpowered for what I need. High on the list is ... http://www.darrylramm.com/2007/12/19/computer-upgrade-time-back-to-the-macintosh/ I love it when companies do creative "in your face" marketing, particuarly when it is creative enough to spread by word of mouth and hey if you can also have fun tweaking the competition then all the better. Having done my share of things like this I really found the ... http://www.darrylramm.com/2007/11/05/tweaking-the-competition-the-new-schleicher-dg-1000s/ The Palm Foleo has to be one of the most lame-brained product ideas in decades. Foleo is supposed to be a simple "companion" for a smart phone, essentially providing a keyboard and larger screen and ability to browse the Web, check email etc. Palm is claiming the Foleo will ... http://www.darrylramm.com/2007/08/25/palm-foleo-badly-in-need-of-a-mercy-killing/ Sorry TiVO. I have two older Hughes HR10-250 DirecTV HD TiVO recorders and both of them are running over 1,000 days without dialing into TiVo. These were the state of the art when they came out, I grabbed them off the very first shipments to BestBuy. Except for their really ... http://www.darrylramm.com/2007/08/03/1088-days-without-a-tivo-daily-call-and-proud-of-it/