I'm in a mad rush right now to get everything that I'll need packed and ready for the trip. To borrow a Star-Trek expression, the Borg (Amtrak) are about to assimilate me and I know now that resistance is futile.

I have so much to do ... transfer my archives from the main workstation to my HP notebook computer ... make printed copies of everything to do with the trip ... pack the essentials (pills, tickets, electronics, and oh yeah - clean clothes too) ... mentally prepare to be away from my comfort zone for two weeks ... hand off any work to my partners ... and of course, try to get some sleep this evening and late night so I can be ready for the ordeal beginning at 4:00 AM tomorrow morning.

I've been working on setting up RSS/Atom feeds so that my blog can be exported to both Amazon's Author Central and Facebook. Hopefully this post will make it to both sites. It's so nice to be able to work on one site and have the content exported to others automatically. Five copies of the Web Geeks Guide to the Android-Enabled Phone were delivered to my home this morning and I was thrilled. Up until this point it was more like a vaporous entity, but as of today, it's real! :)

I'm almost finished with my packing for the trip to the HHC 2009 in Fort Collins, Colorado. The weather is so fantastic right now I almost regret leaving, but I'm sure that the trip will be worth it. I was visited by my son and daughter this morning as they were passing through. Michael was in Winfield for the weekend and Rachael was giving him a ride back to his home in South County. I am the most blessed of Fathers - I have two GREAT kids! (Who at 27 and 25 aren't quite "kids" anymore.)

It's a lovely Sunday morning in Hillsboro. The sky is clear, the temperature hovers around 60 degrees and the windows are wide open. Nothing beats breathing the fresh air of the rural countryside! Ahhh...

On Wednesday, I'll be leaving for the HP conference that I wrote about earlier and am making the trip a memorable vacation to Fort Collins, Colorado by riding the rails of Amtrak.

My mother, who loves travel and wants to see what Fort Collins is like, will be my traveling partner. She and I are very excited about the scenery that we'll enjoy and having ridden Amtrak before for short trips to Chicago and back, as well as Hermann and back, are sure that this first long trip across the Midwest will be even more rewarding. Amtrak offers some great travel bargains for travelers of all kinds (especially writers!) and I encourage everyone to consider seeing our beautiful country with an Amtrak rail pass!

Wow! I never thought that retirement would be such a busy time - but it is! Between getting my next developerWorks article finished , completing work on my first book, and preparing for the HHC 2009 conference in October, 2009, I simply haven't had much time or thought to record things here. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, I just need to relax a little and blog a little more often.

Jerri Ledford, the main author of the book I was refering to (and not the lady pictured at the left!) has informed me that writing books can be a lot of fun most of the time, but there can be times of maddening delays. We're over those delays now and the printing presses are running all-out now in order to ship copies of our book to the large book-sellers. If you have an interest in Android cell phones or Android technology in general, then feel free to visit one of the book sellers and purchase a copy of our new book, Web Geek's Guide to the Android-Enabled Phone.

A New Laptop Computer!

I purchased a new Laptop / Notebook computer today, a HP DV7-2040US computer powered by a Quad-Core processor, the Intel Core 2 Quad processor Q9000, with 4 GB of RAM and 500 GB SATA hard disk. I'm looking forward to having it delivered by next Tuesday, and plan on making it a tri-boot machine, just like my HP Workstation is. (Windows Vista, Ubuntu Linux 9.04, and my custom OS.) Since this will be my first Quad-core machine, I look forward to getting my custom OS to run on the L2 cache of all four cores, and work on inter-core communication protocols. Yes, I am very much looking forward to getting involved in the multi-core, parallel-processing arena too.

The HP-50G

I've been a HP Calculator fan since 1979 when I purchased my first HP, the HP-41C. No surprise there, eh? Well, 30 years have passed since then and the state of the art in advanced calculators is now the HP-50G. (I've actually owned mine since 2006.)

Powered by the ARM9 processor, and running at a nominal 75 MHz clock speed, this advanced, battery-powered handheld computer offers a number of features that make it very useful. It offers algebraic or RPN entry of mathematical formulas and other object types, a highly advanced computer algebra system (aka "CAS"), ARM and Saturn processor development tools, a huge equation library, and some very powerful applications like the Equation Writer and the Matrix Editor. It can be programmed in UserRPL, SystemRPL, ARM assembler, Saturn assembler, LUA, and in C with the very powerful HPGCC toolkit. I am working on adding ARM zForth to the list as well.

I'm also looking forward to attending the HHC 2009 conference on October 3rd and 4th this year in Vancouver, Washington. I hope to ride Amtrak with my good friend Tom Vogel there and back. (Tom wants to visit his daughter Dawn, who lives in nearby Seattle.)

LINUX - Stand Up and Be Counted!

I've been a Linux user since November, 1996 and am a huge fan of other Open Source software as well. No surprise there, eh? Well, here is an opportunity for Linux users to stand up and be counted. Visit this website and fill out all of the information that you can in order to join up and provide the advocates of Linux useful information on who and where we are...

Linux Counter

Linux is my preferred operating system on many of my computers - Red Hat on my work server, Ubuntu on most of my workstation machines, Android on my cell-phone, etc. As a programmer and a writer, I find that the platform is GREAT because there is so much that can be learned from studying the code that other programmers have written. I encourage anyone who wants to become a better programmer to download, install, modify, and play with the Linux source code - you'll learn a lot and have a boatload of fun doing so!