Bill's Favorite Things

Inspired by the "Living By Faith" blog post, here is a list of my five favorite things...

#1 - Reading. I love to read. I am very much like "Mr. Henry Bemis" from the Twilight Zone in that literature is my favorite hobby. Close on the heals of reading I like writing and computer programming -- which is in essence another form of writing. My favorite format for books is the eBook format on my Palm Treo 755P and my favorite book is the Holy Bible.

#2 - My Children. I have a son, a daughter, and a grandchild - Michael, Rachael, and Jacob. The significant others of my children are also important to me - Sarah and Joe. I have been blessed by God to have been able to raise my children from childhood to adulthood without significant problems and now they are self-sufficient with families of their own. Praise the Lord!

#3 - Retirement. With my children being grown adults and independent now, I have been retired from the proverbial "rat race" for about five years with no regrets. Retirement doesn't mean that I don't work -- it just means that I work when I feel like it and do something else when I feel like it. Retirement is the culmination of a plan that is established when young and followed carefully as the years pass. Perhaps more than anything else - retirement means establishing strict self-control of spending habits early in life.

#4 - Rib-Eye Steaks. Yum yum! Along with salmon, rib-eye steaks are my favorite food. Just thinking about a good rib-eye steak along with a fine wine is enough to "perk me up". Recently, my mother, sister, brother, sister-in-law, and I purchased ¾ of a cow that was hand-raised by a man that my brother works with. At a price of close to $3.00 a pound for the most quality meat we've ever had, it was quite a bargain!

#5 - Survivorman! My favorite program on television is the Survivorman series staring Les Stroud. It may seem strange for a guy like me who is primarily an indoor dweller who relishes modern living to enjoy such a back-to-nature show as this, but it always pleases me to watch Les surviving while I sit back on the proberbial "easy chair", drinking cup in hand, thanking God every moment that I'm here and he's out there!

Technology and Time

I never cease to be amazed at how technology can change our lives!

I'm old enough to know what it was like before cell phones, MP3 players, and PDAs existed - times when we dreaded going to places (doctor's offices, license bureaus, busses, metrolinks, etc.) where huge amounts of potentially productive or entertaining time was wasted on the altar of boredom. I used to dread having to go to these places - and now, thanks to technology, I actually look forward to going to them! You see, I love to read eBooks while listening to music. I love to write as well. I love programming. I love talking and SMSing my son and daughter. All of these I can do and do while waiting now.

You might ask, "but Bill, can't you do these things without having to go to the doctor's office or the license bureau?", and you would be correct. It's just that I don't fear these places any more and in fact, it's the technological evangelist in me that desires to SHOW other people who are bored out of their gored a genuine way out of it.

Unless you were a woman and carried a purse, a paperback book just wasn't an option in those bygone days. Paperback books, as great as they are, just didn't fit in a pants pocket like my Treo 755P, for example, does. But now with my Treo, I can and do carry AN ENTIRE LIBRARY of hundreds of books in my pants pocket! Now that's cool for the literati of our times!

The Palm Treo 755P

The Android platform offers great potential, but it has a long was to go to catch up and pass the Palm Treo 755P in functionality. I have no doubts that it will eventually get there since it is a much more open platform, but until then the Treo rules!

On my Treo I have hundreds of eBooks, multiple eBook readers, QuickNews for RSS and Atom feeds, an HP-41CX emulator (my favorite RPN calculator), a fantastic algebraic system called SpaceTime, the best PDA Bible software - the Laradian PocketBible for the Palm (including Finnis Dake's notes), videos from the Google I/O 2008 conference, lectures by Steven Covey and Jeff Hawkins, the entire audio Bible by Alexander Scourby, ten albums of my favorite music, a great little stock market program called Stock Manager, Agendus Pro for advanced PIM functionality, Checklist and Shadow Plan for creating comprehensive outlines and checklists, PsMemo, Googlemaps, Pocket Quicken, etc.

The list is endless of the useful applications, data, and multimedia files that this machine holds, representing a significant investment in time and dollars in creating it. Not to mention the solid hardware of the Palm Treo family, including the very best thumb keyboard I've ever used.

It is my sincere desire that Palm scraps their OS plans and instead ports the Palm tools on top of Android - but their hardware is JUST RIGHT!