Mr. T’s Night Elf Mohawk

Well, the LinkedIn profile worked …

Days after putting up my LinkedIn profile, I just got contacted by a headhunter. Surprisingly — or perhaps not — it’s because of my Blizzard and CBR experience and involves doing PR for what I suspect is the next big MMORPG. I won’t say more, other than, if I weren’t intent on staying with journalism as long as journalism will have me, I would be dancing around the study right now, incredibly pumped.

I’m looking forward to this MMO being officially announced, instead of just existing in rumor land. There’s going to be a lot of happy gamers out there in fandom.

My iPod comes into its own

Last night, during the school board meeting, I was able to post the first draft of the school board story to the Star Web site using my iPod touch and the locally available wi-fi network (the photo was added later; initially, I just used the stock image of the HUSD logo). The touchpad keyboard was the biggest issue, as it’s a lot slower than even my Treo’s keyboard.

I’d love to do more mobile computing for my job, but the question is whether I’d be better off just getting a keyboard that worked with my iPod (and I’m not sure one is available yet) or getting a laptop that used Bluetooth and could connect to the Web via my cellphone.

It’s not a super-high priority, and with the clone here, I’ve got other things to spend money on in the near term. Still, it was pretty neat to be able to file a report from the meeting. Maybe the Daily Press would be up for buying a laptop or three for each location that could connect to the Internet via a Bluetooth phone.

I already do a lot of work via my Treo at meetings; before last night’s meeting was out, I had already e-mailed George Landon, Jovy Yankaskas, Jim Pace and Jean Campbell about the new HUSD contracts. George even gets his e-mail on his phone, so he’s always able to discuss them with me at the end of the meeting.

Treo to iPod, part three

OK, Yahoo! can read Palm contacts and calendar files, and iPods can synch with the Yahoo! contacts system. So one new Yahoo! account later, my contacts are now copied onto my iPod, although, wow, what a step backwards.

I’ve got hundreds of contacts, and having no way of putting them in sub-folders so that I can just look through my personal or work contacts is pretty bad. Hopefully Apple will patch in some improvements, since this would be especially galling if I were using an iPhone.

In the meantime, I still can’t input entries into the iPod touch calendar via the iPod itself, and iTunes won’t synch with Yahoo!. Instead, it’s looking for some other calendar application (when the natural thing to do with both the calendar and contacts would be to pull it directly from the Palm directory for my Treo). Hopefully this will be addressed in a patch, because as it stands, the calendar function is worse than useless on my iPod.

Treo to iPod, part two

After looking around at various Mac support sites, I tried this. But it doesn’t seem that the iPod touch has the basic “use this iPod as a disk drive” as a choice under iTunes, and it doesn’t show up as an additional hard drive when connected to my computer, so the plug-in never got a chance to work.