What are you doing for Cinco de Mayo?  I am going to be a nerd and learn some cool things.  The second annual Day of .NET is coming again to the Washentaw Community College in Ann Arbor, MI.  It is a full *free* day of .NET speakers.  They were good speakers too.  Mark Miller and Dustin Campbell are back again this year and there are many good speakers this year.  Brian Prince, Josh Holmes, and Drew Robbins are all good speakers whom I have seen before.  I went to it last year and it was a good time and I learned a lot.  I highly recommend attending.

I travel a lot to and from clients.  It is usally an hour drive each way.  This is a lot of time that I could use for getting some things done.  2 hours per day X average of 3 times per week X 52 weeks = 312 hours per the year.  Thats a lot of time to get some solid work done!  If it was the future (which I guess it is right now), I would put my car on autopilot like in I,Robot, and get some work done.  But since we don't have Will Smith to save our human race several times over, I will have to work with the resources I have today.

I am looking for any mass-transit or single transit system to take me where I need to go.  In larger cities such as New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, this would not be a problem.  When I have to go over state lines most of the time to smaller cities, it is.  I am going to look into everything from cab drivers to Greyhound busses.  I know it sounds wierd but it would be awesome if I could get this time back.

Any suggestions (mental ward comments not welcome)?

I mentioned before that I was selling my house.  The good news is that the first person that came through gave us an offer.  That has prompted us to start looking for houses and we went Saturday to go looking.  In order to help us on finding homes, I purchased a Garmin Nuvi 350 GPS unit.  I have been wanting one of these for a while and I finally bit the bullet and bought one because I knew it would help us find houses that we wanted to look at.

I took the new GPS unit, my tablet, and my Sprint EVDO connection card.  While we were driving, I was on my tablet using realtor.com searching for houses that we wanted to look at and then entering the addresses into the GPS unit.  This was easier with the tablet in slate mode because I was using two devices.  It worked out very well.  I think doing this task with the ASUS RH2 which has integrated GPS would of worked out to be a better solution.  My connectivity with Sprint would of had to use the USB EVDO modem with the ASUS since it does not have a PC card slot.

I was unhappy with Verizon's customer service before but now I am unhappy with their technical service.  As many of you know, I got a new tablet this year.  I specifically waited for the Lenovo X60 with the integrated EVDO modem because I use EVDO on a daily basis and it has really helped me be more productive.  I thought it would be really cool to have a laptop with built in EVDO so I would not have to carry around an extra PC card.

I knew that the Lenovo X60 had Verizon's EVDO service and not the Sprint EVDO service that I was currently on.  I mistakenly thought that there services were comparible in terms of speed.  I signed up for Verizon for my new Laptop knowing that I had a 15 day grace period.  After I signed up, I was extremely disappointed.  Here are results from a speed test that I ran.  I ran these tests on the same day from the same laptop from the same position.  One was using the built in Verizon EVDO modem (first one) and the other was using a Sprint EVDO USB modem (second one).

As you can see from the results, the Verizon speeds are craptacular compared to the Sprint speeds.  This is due to the fact that Sprint has EVDO Rev. A in the area I tested at and Verizon did not but Verizon needs to hurry up and play catch up.

So, I dumped Verizon again and I upgraded my Sprint EVDO modem to one that will work on Vista (the Sprint card I tested with was borrowed for the test).  It would still be nice to have an integreated modem and I probably will try out Verizon again once they get Rev. A. in the area.  I also looked into moving my ESN number for the integrated card over to Sprint or replace the card by hand.  Has anybody done either of these things or can point me in the right direction?  I really would like to use Sprint on this tablet instead of Verizon.

Well, my house is officially on the market.  We put it up for sale yesterday and we are asking the cheap price of $129,900.  We have out grown the house with the new baby and it's time to move on.  This was my first house that I purchased back in December of 2001.  I have updated every room except for the kitchen.  It is is move in condition with nothing to be done.  Act now and I will throw in my plasma in the basement for free! :)

If you know of anyone that is interested or you are interested, you can email me at jwright [at] wrightin [dot] gs.  I will put up an MLS link once we get it.

I am excited to move but I am not getting my hopes up because the market is so weak right now.  I can't wait to pimp out a new home office and theater room.

UPDATE:  The MLS number is 4612161.  You can get more information here.

I asked before what happened to the support of TEO.  I was having an issue with TEO and I did not hear back from Josh Einstien on the issue.  I reported that he got back to me soon after that.  We did some debugging and found that the issue was related to having ClearContext installed as well.  It turns out that it was a ClearContext issue and they have released a fix for it.  Thanks Josh and Brad from Clear Context on working that out.  Very much appreciated!

My grandma passed away on Tuesday at about 5:30 PM.  She waited for all her grand kids to be there and the priest to start the last rights before she went.  I was very close to my grandma.  She was a huge influence on my life and my personality.  She taught me the golden rule just through her actions.  Everyone that met her always talked about how kind and sweet she was.

I was very fortunate that she was there when my daughter was born and she even made the trip out to Jamaica for my wedding.

I will miss her very much and I have been dreading this day for a long time,  I know she is in a better place right now.  I love you grandma and I will try to carry on what you have taught me.

It always seems that there is enough time in the day to get the work done that I need to.  I really need to set aside some time to get Morale out the door.  I was planning on having a private beta going by this month and I am not even near that goal.  This is in part because the consulting side of my business is taking so much of my time but it is also in part because I don't set aside enough dedicated time for it.

Here is my new schedule that I am going to try.  It is going to be hard for me because I am such a night owl but I am going to try it anyway.

• 4:00 AM - 7:00 AM:  Work on other client work and Morale (at least one hour per day for Morale)
• 7:00 AM - 8:00 AM: Get ready for onsite client (if any) and get Ava ready for baby sitter.  S**t, Shower, Shave
• 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM: Travel to onsite client (if needed)
• 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM: Onsite or working from home
• 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM: Travel home (if needed)
• 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM: Dinner, help around with house stuff, spend time with family, check email and blogs (if time)
• 10:00 PM - 4:00 AM: Sleep (booo)

Last night was my first try and so far I like.  The trick was to be able to calm down at 10:: PM and try to fall asleep.  We'll see if it lasts.