I Splurged

This past Saturday, I went out to a nearby Verizon Wireless store to get this:

I'm now the owner of a Blackberry Storm.

Yes, the initial reviews were not favourable but recent software upgrades have fixed most of the original complaints. I used a demo model in-house to test the major features and decided it met my needs. And if I discovered it didn't, Verizon Wireless has a 30 day return policy.

The machine plus the car adapter and belt clip & pouch cost $202, not counting the $50 rebate yet to be submitted.

Blackberry's sync app includes a conduit for importing my old Palm data but it's not quite as good as one might hope. By design the device doesn't retain past one-off events prior to 90 days or so: my past six years of Palm data is ignored. All contacts and tasks however were ported cleanly.

I've installed the Facebook app and added LiveJournal to the browser favourites. I've also imported all of my music MP3 files but I've yet to sort them into usable playlists.

Configuring the device to suck up all my email from various accounts has been interesting: while my personal accounts have light traffic, I have to devise some rules to manage my office email better so I'm not being buzzed with announcements of new messages every 30 seconds for the rest of my life.

So far, so good!

I Splurged

This past Saturday, I went out to a nearby Verizon Wireless store to get this:

I'm now the owner of a Blackberry Storm.

Yes, the initial reviews were not favourable but recent software upgrades have fixed most of the original complaints. I used a demo model in-house to test the major features and decided it met my needs. And if I discovered it didn't, Verizon Wireless has a 30 day return policy.

The machine plus the car adapter and belt clip & pouch cost $202, not counting the $50 rebate yet to be submitted.

Blackberry's sync app includes a conduit for importing my old Palm data but it's not quite as good as one might hope. By design the device doesn't retain past one-off events prior to 90 days or so: my past six years of Palm data is ignored. All contacts and tasks however were ported cleanly.

I've installed the Facebook app and added LiveJournal to the browser favourites. I've also imported all of my music MP3 files but I've yet to sort them into usable playlists.

Configuring the device to suck up all my email from various accounts has been interesting: while my personal accounts have light traffic, I have to devise some rules to manage my office email better so I'm not being buzzed with announcements of new messages every 30 seconds for the rest of my life.

So far, so good!

Latest Hotel Stats

We must be creeping closer to the convention dates: our host hotel is sending room block updates much more frequently.

As of this afternoon, our room block was 2,470 room-nights, of which 2,216 are now booked. That's 89.7%, essentially unchanged even though our overall room block was enlarged recently. This means folks are still booking rooms and this warms my heart immensely.

Now I have to contact a handful of folks who couldn't book post-convention nights recently when those dates filled.

( So, what's available on which nights? )

Latest Hotel Stats

We must be creeping closer to the convention dates: our host hotel is sending room block updates much more frequently.

As of this afternoon, our room block was 2,470 room-nights, of which 2,216 are now booked. That's 89.7%, essentially unchanged even though our overall room block was enlarged recently. This means folks are still booking rooms and this warms my heart immensely.

Now I have to contact a handful of folks who couldn't book post-convention nights recently when those dates filled.

( So, what's available on which nights? )