Had a very nice blogstroll today and found some interesting sites.

Begin Rori Bitch Has *Word*: An interesting entry regarding family values? Prometheus6: An interesting articvle about Gay Marriage Overreaction. The Last Nerve: An excellent blog by Cherryl Aldave. Added to my blog roll. Negro Please: has a series on 52 books in 52 weeks. I may go back to follow that thread. Monkeyinabox.net: Very, very nice design. Kitta.net: What's That is a nice and worthwhile read.

Well, I've been meaning to publish some of my blogstrolls...so here goes:

Begin Rori Dooce Contains an amazing article about some narrow minded attitudes about the WWII Japanese internment. No links here to back to Rori
CERTIFIED NONTOXIC A teaser about a new theme??? Super-Special Questions Really nice photos. Quite an interesting site. No links here back to CERTIFIED NONTOXIC. Raspberry Latte Didn't linger here. collision detection interesting blog. Added to my blog roll. textually.org All about text messaging - nice. Downside is that there are the Gooooooogle adds at the top. End

Mike is a true friend. The kind of friend everyone wants but few people ever have. I 'm blessed to have Mike as my friend. He is here with his wife Sue. Mike and Sue have been our friends for many years. Mike is a pretty cool guy. Mr. meticulous I call him. He does things in excruciating detail sometimes, and then he thinks he hasn't done enough. Mike knows a lot too. He is a wealth of information about jazz music. He loves some sports. I'm not sure which ones but I think basketball, and fooball. Sports hold very little interest for me so I never pay attention. He and Alice have some great conversations about sports. He and I really hit it off when we realized we both liked jazz though. We have been on some great vacations together. Mike is a person you want to go on vacation with. He researches in great detail any place he visits - before he gets there. I suspect he knows more about a place when he gets there than most locals. Me, I just go to places and find out things as I go along. I like going places with Mike.

Mike recently found out he has a tumor on one of his adrenal glands. He will soon have surgery to have it removed. He is dealing with it well. I'm not. No one has said yet whether it is malignant. Most of the time these things are not. I will pray for my friend Mike. To add to that most of the time stat.

I never understood how someone you know can walk past you almost brushing your shoulder and not acknowledge you. I'm not talking about when you are in a crowd on when it is otherwise not appropriate. Here is a scenario: you are walking down the corridor of a building. Some you know (well) is approaching and just as you meet they turn away so as not to have to speak. Or maybe they drop their eyes to the floor so as not to engage yours. But on other days, given the same scenario, they may say hello or give a nod of acknowledgement.

All of my life I have never understood this phenomenon. A simple greeting is not dfficult and does not commit you to anything. I can remember as a child walking down the street in a small city in upstate New York and passing someone and trying my hardest to say hello. I was always baffled why some people chose not to respond or act like you are not even there. Very weird - and it hurts.

Then there is the inevitable self examination: Do I look funny?; are they afraid of me?; are my pants unzipped?; maybe I'm walking funny; did I do something wrong?; maybe they don't like black people; maybe they are from the south and speaking to someone black is taboo; maybe I'm imagining that I was just snubbed; maybe it isn't normal to want to say hello to everyone you pass just because you are both members of the human race; maybe they don't like one of my brothers and they know I'm related to him; maybe I said something I shouldn't have; maybe I'm just not worthy; maybe they can't talk; maybe they can't nod; maybe they can't smile; maybe there is something preoccupying their thoughts; maybe they didn't notice my efforts to exchange a friendly greeting; maybe I'm weird; maybe I'm ugly and they don't greet ugly people; maybe it's just me!

But I'll keep trying to just be friendly, human, and real. :|

It is 11:10 a.m. and I finally got caught up on my email from the weekend. What a chore. I was thinking about what I did before email (yes, I'm that old). I remember that reading interoffice correspondence was the task for Monday mornings - and every morning. In fact, if I needed to communicate to someone who wasn't in the office next door I would likely:

1. pick up the phone or
2. put any 'cya' communication to paper and distribute it via interoffice mail, and, depending on its importance I may have even made a phone call to tell the intended recipient to expect the memo or
3. walk down the hall to talk in person or
4. not communicate the little things.

Email has changed all of that. Now there is no excuse for not communicating even the most trivial things.

I am not one for small talk so most of my email messages tend to be short and direct. Some think I am far too serious but I think I am pretty light hearted :). I used to think I spent too much time with email but a careful analysis confirms what the experts have been saying - email is an essential tool (suprise!!). Now, if only I could get some work done...

I have a new pastime that has proven to be interesting. I start at someone's blog and pick a random site on their blogroll to visit. From the new site I pick another random location and etc., and etc. I tend to get stuck reading each blog I visit to get a flavor for what they are all about so that so far I have visited a maximum of 7 blogs in one "stroll". I have found very interesting blogs and people on every stroll. Since I don't have many links on my blogroll I usually start at Rori's or Matt's blog both of which have a wealth of paths to start on. Maybe I'll publish some of my future strolls. Anyway, it helps pass the time between work, studying, writing, playing Myst IV, going to the movies, remodeling our bedroom, and anything else I need a diversion from.

I would like to be there right now...

Sonnenberg Gardens in Canadaigua New York is a treasure to discover. Although the mansion is somewhat run down the gardens are just beautiful. A nice excursion is to go to Belhurst Castle in Geneva NY for Sunday brunch and then on to Sonnenberg for a wonderful day in the gardens.

I haven't seem my brother in over 30 years. He is my older brother and I always admired him. After my mother died he kind of just disappeared from our lives. I heard rumers of people seeing him. I always knew he was in Washington state. I believed he was in Seattle. That is where I found him, in Seattle. It was a simple entry:

Deceased: DENBY, Charles M. Jr
56 of Seattle Sept 25 (2003)

I found him.

I will miss my brother very very much.

It must be me, but this is getting frustrating. Today I had no signal all day long. My Treo kept saying the service was not available. So, about 1/2 hour ago I decided to do the ever reliable device reboot. Moments later voila! I even had a voice message!! It must be me. I guess I just don't know how to use this thing. Give me my Blackberry back!

This is a response I posted on the ABA-LAWTECH listserv. Thought I would commit it to blog too... This is only my experience and I don't claim it is representative of what your experience might be.

I have used Blackberry's for a couple of years now and like them very much. I recently switched to a Treo 650 so I could test the device. Some of the users here have commented that Treos are "better" than Blackberrys (for whatever reason is important to whoever is saying it) so I decided I needed some empirical proof. My experience is below. Keep in mind that we do not use a dedicated server in-house for managing the PDA mail. Blackberry has the Blackberry Enterprise Server and Treo can be managed with something like JPMobile. We are just using the service offered by the service provider. We use Cingular for both devices.

Blackberry: IMO probably the best device currently on the market for handling email . Research in Motion (RIM) really pioneered the technology of getting email anywhere at any time on a handheld device. We use GroupWise and forward email through a gateway (strips away the forwarding header) to the Blackberry web client. The web client delivers the email to the device immediately upon receipt. The Blackberry web client is the work horse here. It is configurable for POP3 or you can (as we do) forward mail to it. Mail delivery from receipt in an in-box to delivery to the device is under 1 minute. The PDA functionality (calender, to-do and etc) isn't as slick as the Palm or Windows CE based products. It is more than adequate for me but some point to this as a negative with the Blackberry devices. Attachments don't work very well though.

Treo: Well, my experience with the Treo 650 has been poor so far. I am on my third device - the previous 2 devices were defective. The email service used with the Treo only allows for a POP3 configuration and only allows you to check your email a maximum of once each hour. This for me is a major inconvenience. If I am in an email conversation with someone the Treo requires me to manually check for my mail if I'm expecting a reply within the hour. This can be burdensome if the information has any sense of urgency at all - and we know all email in important. The PDA (Palm) functionality is very good. Attachments are very readable - although I'm not sure I want to read a long document on a small PDA screen. I still don't seem to be getting all of the messages from my in-box and sometimes it seems messages are not retrieved for several hours until I manually retrieve them. I'm going to try to trade this in for a Blackberry - or pawn it off, um, i mean, offer it (yeah that's it - offer it) to another user so I can get a Blackberry again.

Experience may very from carrier to carrier and person to person. My company has used Cingular and Nextel for the Blackbery service and only Cingular for the Treo service.

Update 3/30/2005: Our Cingular representative was kind enough to let me trade the Treo for a Blackberry. I'm happy again. The Treo had some nice PDA features but for me the Blackberry does everything I need.