new tech
first, gmail. blogger, which is owned by google, offered beta gmail accounts to its users for a few days. so i figured i'd take them up on it. i'm still trying to figure out the best way to test it out...i think i might figure out a way to dump my email from either my work, school, or personal account into gmail, and use gmail to handle that email account for a while. supposedly they'll support email exporting after a short while, so i can switch back after a time. i'm sure i'll have plenty to say later about gmail, so for now i'll just recommend reading the gmail saga.

oh yeah, i got myself a brand new handspring treo 600 smartphone for work. some folks from work and i went to the sprint store this afternoon to play around with one, and damn was i impressed. palm os 5, a very usable blackberry-style keyboard, dramatic ui improvements over our current samsung i330 smartphones, support for downloading .prc and .pdb palm programs and databases directly off the web, and ssh2 support. not to mention full-fledged sms (short-mail service, i.e., text messaging) and mms (picturephone mail something, i.e., sending photos) support, which the i330 doesn't have. and a secure digital card slot for memory expansion above the built-in 32 mb. and a 133 mhz arm processor. we were already drooling over the thing after playing around with it for about a half hour in the sprint store, when i decided to try downloading pssh, a free ssh2 client, off of the palm open source web site. the 250 kb program downloaded in a relatively short time at varying speeds, et voila, there it was in the applications window, ready to run. and run it did. we ssh'd in to one of our solaris boxes back at work, poked around a bit, and were duly impressed.
so impressed, in fact, that now i have one. and soon, so will a bunch of other folks in my lab.