Well, I shot out to the East Coast for a quickie weekend visit — starting with an eeearrrrrlllly flight on Friday morning. Which is why you haven’t been hearing from me for a couple of days. While on my trip, I was dismayed to find that TreoBlogging — posting to the blog using my Treo 600 Smartphone — did NOT work as I’d hoped it would. Quite surprising, actually — I had successfully tested out TreoBlogging a couple of times before The Golden Gate went live just under five weeks ago. (Aside: hey! We’ve been doing this for a whole month, now!)

Anyhow, on my trip, I found to my great dismay that the text I’d enter would get inexplicably cut off or munged with garbage characters as it was published out to the site. Attempts to clean up or extend such posts after the fact were frustratingly unsucessful. What happened? Well, I’m not sure. But what’s become annoyingly clear is that for posts of less than 80 characters or so (like my test posts), it works fine — the problem crops up in posts which are longer than ~80 characters! Dang! So, that’s why there was no TreoBlogging from me over the weekend. I’ll continue to work on this. I’d love to have totally 24/7 mobile blogging ability that’s as close as my mobile phone and not dependent on WiFi acess and all that entails.

So, this post is partly a report and partly a request for help. In short: does anybody out there have any experience posting to a blog via their Treo? Please shoot me a personal communication. TreoBlogging will be a very cool functionality, once I can get it to work correctly.

As for the trip itself, it involved family and, yes, baseball. And it was GREAT — apart from the technical snafu already described.

UPDATE: I found a couple of other mentions of TreoBlogging on Google. Interestingly, these all seem to be test posts!

April 19th, 2005 | Baseball, Personal Stuff, Politics, Technology | No comments

Slugger Pushed Him Over the Edge, Baseball Journalist Says

A journalist who has covered baseball for his entire career called it quits today, blaming San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds.

Reporter Herb McCaugh, 52, who has written about the sport for the past twenty-three years, said that Bonds’ persistent refusal to answer his questions had finally pushed him over the edge.

In an angry, expletive-laden press conference, McCaugh took a parting shot at Bonds, whom he called “the sole reason” for his decision to exit journalism.

“Barry, you wanted me to jump off the bridge, I finally have jumped,” he said. “You wanted to bring me down, you’ve finally brought me and my family down. So now go pick a different person.”

Read the whole thing, for the Borowitz Report is always good.

March 25th, 2005 | Baseball, Satire and Humor, Uncategorized | No comments