Archive for category Work
Sometimes I really enjoy my day job
I received a call last night that a 225 meter bulk carrier fully loaded with coal ran aground in Maryland and I was being asked to use my salvage engineering skills to develop a salvage plan to help refloat her. Check out one news article about the situation. Groundings are kind of my speciality and I have been very successful in performing calculations and coming up with ways to refloat vessels in the past 10 years. There is a possibility I will have to fly out to Maryland and if my wife wasn’t out of town in Texas for a Party Lite leader training conference then I would most likely already be there. It has been a crazy day trying to balance taking care of the girls and respond to calls from the salvage team while running calcs and coming up with a plan to offload coal and refloat the vessel.
I LOVE this type of engineering though where you perform calcs and see almost immediate results. Oftentimes when an engineer performs calcs you don’t see results or you see results years down the road. Salvage can be stressful, but I am pretty experienced and have some incredible tools at my disposal so I personally have a great time with it and if I wasn’t a father of three young daughters I may even want to do it full time.
Off to London today, football match on Wednesday!
I just finished checking in online and choosing my seat for the week long business/pleasure trip to London. I am attending the International Salvage and Wreck Removal conference for a couple of days and then have a couple more to see the sights. I also just bought tickets to the Chelsea FC vs. Newcastle United football (soccer in the U.S.) match on Wednesday night and am probably most excited about attending that event. Football is HUGE in Europe and everytime I watch it on TV I am blown away by the sounds of the crowd. Chelsea is fighting it out with Manchester United for 1st place and if they win on Wednesday then they should be in first in the standings. I plan to take video with the Nokia N93 I am reviewing and will post links to my YouTube or Google videos here.
Speaking of Nokia devices, I called T-Mobile USA to find out the cost of using my cell in the UK and found out that I can add the T-Mobile Hotspot service for only $10 more and then use Hotspots at Starbucks, etc. for a 18 cents a minute. I also found free WiFi spots and will try to use them so I can record a podcast with James and Kevin too. I can also use my mobile phone with T-Mobile UK for 99 cents per minute, but have our computers at home setup with Skype so I can hopefully use free WiFi and Skype to call home. I also may look into prepaid SIM cards, but using my own mobile on the road may be about the same price. I also am supposed to receive an unlock code for my T-Mobile Dash soon in case I want to use a prepaid SIM card.
I was chatting with my pastor on Sunday and found out about the Westminster Chapel that I now plan to attend on Sunday.
I am getting promoted at work
I had my annual review yesterday and was told that I would be promoted to Senior Associates on 1 January. I am pretty excited about this as I have only been with The Glosten Associates now for 5 and a half years and this is one of the top management levels in the company. The work I did this year with two major projects I managed and several other smaller ones was the same type of work expected out of Senior Associates so the transition will be minor from my point of view. I get a nice pay raise with this promotion and will continue to be busy as a bee at my normal day job.
You may have seen me slacking just a bit at ZDNet as I just can’t keep up too blistering of a pace there all the time with a wife and three daughters who I want to spend my free time with and it is very tough to strike the right balance. I find if I go down to the rec room and work on mobile tech after everyone is in bed I can catch up a bit, but then again I am only getting about 4-5 hours of sleep a night and should be getting more.
On the road with the Q1 again
I am down in Houma, Louisiana for a couple days and brought along my Samsung Q1 and a couple of smartphones to use for writing reviews and judging software at night. It is pretty hot and humid down here, but at least the ac in the room and car works well 
Mobile devices taken on the road to Duluth
Posted by palmsolo in Series 60, Smartphone, UMPC, Work on June 28, 2006
I dropped my trailer and family off on Saturday at one of our camping resorts and then headed out to Duluth, Minnesota for a couple days for business. I packed along the Q1 UMPC, Nokia E61, Nokia N91 (I just received one to test out), and Sony UX50 Micro PC.
I actually used the Q1 to conduct the stability test and plot the curves using the beta Office Pro 2007. I did have some issues with getting the Think Outside Bluetooth keyboard to pair correctly consistently and also no longer have the ability to change screen resolutions. When I tried to reinstall everything after buying the Q1 (wanted to get rid of reviewer’s junk) I didn’t have an external DVD drive and tried to make it work with the CF slot. I think there were things missing though and am in the process of bidding on a Targus external DVD/CD right now and will reinstall and start from scratch again.
I brought the UX50 and after using it for a couple days I am happy I bought the Samsung unit. The UX50 display is just too small for Windows, the keyboard is a bit too wide, and there is no Tablet PC OS installed. Also Sony loaded lots of junk on the device, whereas the Samsung Q1 has a very minimal amount of 3rd party and proprietary apps loaded on it. The UX50 is definitely a piece of quality hardware, but it is not for me personally.
The E61 worked well, of course, but I couldn’t get any T-Mobile data to work. A couple of times it seemed to work and my email got through, but it was sporadic and mysterious as to why that worked.
The N91 was awesome for listening to podcasts on the airplane and I’ll chat a bit more about that later.
Movie comparing Windows with Apple Boot Camp and Parallels Workstation
I created a short video using a Nokia N90 running Windows in both a rebooted mode and in Parallels Workstation virtual environment. I ran HECSALV, my naval architecture/salvage engineering application, and Sling Player to compare the two and as you can see the virtual environment runs like a champ and is my preferred method.
I am having lots of problems trying to embed the Quicktime video into my blog format and have it be acceptable in multiple browsers so the easiest way to view the video is to just follow this dedicated link and check it out. Sorry for the minor inconvenience and if you have any tips for making this work please let me know.
Update: Peter just informed me that the QuickTime movie may have issues playing on PCs too. One option is to get a Mac like me and watch it with no problems:) I’ll try to make a WMV file out of it tonight and see if there is another format that works more reliably. Sorry.
On the road again
I am in Virginia right now and unfortunately it looks like it was a wasted trip for the most part. I was coming out here to conduct an inclining test on a research vessel in the shipyard, but the vessel is too far from being complete to actually conduct the test so it look like I’ll be back here in a couple weeks. I also have a week planned in March for Alaska so March is looking busy. April is about the same with a trip to Alaska and maybe Savannah. In May my wife and I are going to Aruba on an all-expense paid trip thanks to her Party Lite candle sales efforts. It is a true blessing to get an all-expense paid honeymoon trip once a year through her business.
