I’ve been relatively quiet on the blogging front lately and mentioned that there were no gadgets for me this holiday. The reason why is shown above as we decided to give a good home to a dog this holiday. We hit up our local SPCA and rescued Kelso, the adolescent Labrador Retriever shown above. Needless to say for anyone that’s raised a dog before, we’ve got our hands full. I’ve had to move my home office down to the kitchen table to keep Kelso company. As if it wasn’t bad enough that he almost had no home this holiday, he’s forced to do the “lampshade on the head” routine: he had minor surgery and was chewing at his stitches.In any case, I’ll be getting back online more as Kelso allows. Although there was no new tech here, doing something nice for someone less fortunate is more than good enough this holiday time for me. Actually, the kids had plenty of tech enough to keep me happy anyway; configuring devices is a heck of lot easier to me than putting toys together!

• The Asus Eee PC looks like a nice little lappy and many folks seem excited about it. Is it really that different from the Palm "please don’t remember my name" Foleo? Are they miles apart or actually relatively similar in terms of use cases?
• Some versions of Vista include all of the Tablet PC bits, so there was much talk last year of Vista helping the Tablet PC market. Is it me or have we seen no more or no less new Tablet PCs introduced than in the last few years prior to Vista?
• Speaking of Tablet PCs, why does inking get such a bad rap? All of the folks in the keyboard camp: have you truly given inking a several week trial or did you give up in under a week? (Note: if you tried and it doesn’t work for you, I respect your choice.)
• Related: as nice as it is to have an indicator of textual input speed percentages across multiple input types, i.e.: keyboards of various sizes, speech, ink, etc… when did it become vogue to benchmark humans?
• Did UMPCs fail the concept of a "companion device" or did we fail to grasp the concept when we (myself included) attempted to use them as full time mobile devices?
• Will the fact that Apple is releasing an SDK for third party iPhone apps add further momentum for consumers to buy the device or did Steve have you at "Hello"?
• Related: what are the odds that Apple finds a way to sell the iPhone apps solely through iTunes so they can make a cut off every title?
• Why is it in my Commonwealth that we buy our liquor in a State Store and still try to state our case for Liquor Stores? OK, that’s not mobile tech related, but those archaic laws have been in place since Prohibition and I want to know why.

While I sit back, drink a protein shake and read RSS feeds, talk amongst yourselves in the comments.

• Your computer runs Linux, Windows Vista and Mac OS X. Oh, and said computer is actually a vintage Commodore 64.
• On an absent-minded day, you actually answer your phone with your World Of Warcraft name.
• Your toilet roll holder doubles as an iPod dock.

And my personal favorite because it’s nearly true: the only way you can remember how to write with a pen is to pretend it’s a stylus.

(via Crave)

I don’t know what their names are but these three baby birds are quite the trio. It took me nearly a half-hour to find the source of the incessant singing, which of course was in the bushes right under the bedroom window. This might explain why I’ve needed to visit the coffee-houses so much lately; of course, it also gives you a desktop wallpaper for the heck of it. Enjoy…I know I will when they finally fly away.

OK, so now for the service itself: it’s a non-programmatical way to create widgets for a personalized Google portal. Sounds fine to me and certainly there’s value there. Google has the ability to leverage its powerful search algorithms combined with your personal search data as well as your Google accounts for Gmail, Docs your location setting in Maps and more. Combining all of this personalized information is what Google does best and if you an provide a way to customize the look and feel of it without introducing any programming, I’d say you’ve got something that people will adopt.

As I sit and read though the coverage of iGoogle, a few thoughts come to mind:

• When does it end? Or does it? Will we have a "Google Grid" as some have predicted where Google is the main Internet ecosystem that houses and provides all of your information about you?
• What will the impact be to other personalized portal pages and platforms? Microsoft, Yahoo, Netvibes and many others can’t be too happy right now.
• Keeping with the main theme of mobile technology, what’s the mobile impact? Will Google’s mobile pages be updated to reflect these personalizations? Is this what the Google Phone will do?

I’m not saying that Google is "bad" here, but I think there are some interesting questions and some key observations to watch for over time in this space. What do you think? Are you ready to have a majority of your information from a single platform as it appears we’re headed towards? There’s definitely some key benefits of tying yourself and your data with a single or just a few entities; no question about it. There’s also some risk when everything is off with a service provider and they have an issue; if you don’t think so, just ask a Blackberry user that lost service for 12 hours with the recent outage incident.

"I’ll have a variety of roles here at Sling — the two most visible ones will be my presence on the Sling Community Forum and as the point man for writers/editors in the blogosphere. The communication will be two-way: not only will I be conveying company information, I’ll also be taking everything in to keep the executive team and various internal groups informed. As a blogger, I’m also hopeful you’ll see me heading up something, somewhere, at some point."

Best wishes on the new role, Dave! Hope you can keep slinging swinging by here and continue the frequent commenting…..not on work time, of course.

Apparently, AOL has tweaked the download process to speed things up, so this round will test that and provide feedback to AOL on the overall experience. Anyone using AOL Video on a mobile device that can share the experience?

Mike had "a recurring issue I have been having with my MotoQ. The first one I had after 2-3 months it started acting funky. The second one after 2-3 months started having THE SAME ISSUE. And then the third one I got today I programmed it and set it up on my account and then turned it off and when I turned it back on it just sat at the Verizon Wireless screen for ever."

Mike has contacted Verizon directly and will be getting a new MotoQ and I hope this one works out better. Mike also has more patience than I do as I rely on my computing devices for my work, not just for fun; I’d probably give the Q a shot or two, but not more than that because the downtime is just too much of an impact.

How about you? Any similar issues with your Moto Q? Would you drop a device after the first, second or third strike? Got any device horror stories to share?

[Sidenote: congrats to Mike and his wife as their second baby was just born last night. Best wishes on the new addition...now go get a mobile device for that baby and some sleep for yourself Mike!]

Am I "all work and no play"? How about you: do you really want ports of popular games on your handheld or are you fearful of losing too many productive hours? It probably doesn’t help that I played 3.5 hours of Hexic HD on the 360 just before bed last night….no wonder I’m tired today!