·:[ Jason On A Shtick ]:·
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There’s a running joke at our house about the Charmin Bears, they being the ones on the commercials that discuss the quality of the T.P. and then go off behind a tree with a smile.  So, imagine our delight when we came upon this jewel at the Procter & Gamble weekend at King’s Island:

I made a quick trip into downtown Louisville today and received a parking ticket.  I put change in the meter, but it was broken.  Their website says that a broken meter is not a valid reason for an appeal.  So, I mailed in a check for the citation and included this note:

I hope someone gets a giggle out of it.  Of course in today’s litigious society, they will probably charge me with terroristic threatening and send me to Gitmo because the envelope says “do not enclose appeals or correspondence”…

Lexington throws a mean Fourth of July bash downtown and puts on a decent parade.  There were some spacing issues during the parade at times (blame should be laid squarely on the parade marshal – he was riding back and forth in a golf cart, so there was no excuse) and there were some groups that I’m not sure who they were (again, the marshal should make sure that everyone has a banner, flag or some other means of identifying who they are), but the big disappointment was the lack of a proper marching band.

Yes, there was the pipes and drums squad up front and they were great, and yes they had that crazy March Madness Marching Band that dresses in wild costumes and puts on a good show.  But every respectable Fourth of July parade needs a fully uniformed, military style marching band bringing up the rear.

I was a percussionist in my high school days.  We all took marching band very seriously and we lived for parades!  We were outfitted in full, old school military style uniforms with cross belts, tails, etc and we loved it!  There is just something regal about a uniformed band marching in crisp lines, bringing up the end of the parade and stopping at attention to close it out right with a Sousa march.

I’d suggest any of the John Philip Sousa classics such as Semper Fidelis (listen), Stars and Stripes Forever (listen) or my personal favorite The Washington Post (listen).  Follow the links and listen to one of these right now and I guarantee that it will get your patriotic juices flowing!

I now shamelessly direct you to the link under the “Pages” section of this blog titled “YouTube Channel” so that you can get a Jasonesque dose of video tomfoolery.  That is all.

I am an unabashed BlackBerry junkie.  I’m carrying my third BlackBerry phone these days: the Bold 9700 on T-Mobile.  All I can say is that I love having keys that I can feel and press (I can type really fast on the thing) and I love having UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) via TMo that allows me to make and receive calls over wi-fi when I’m somewhere without cellular coverage, such as my basement office at work.  I could go into a whole other diatribe here about why AT&T, with its overly congested network, is stupid for not allowing UMA to get some of that traffic off of their cellular grid and onto broadband, but I digress… and I fear what may come of UMA if and when AT&T absorbs T-Mobile…

When RIM announced the BlackBerry PlayBook, I was very worried.  RIM has quickly fallen from being the leading smartphone maker to lagging in third behind the iPhone and Androids.  As advanced as BlackBerrys were five or six years ago, RIM simply missed the boat when it came to a touch screen interface.  I wondered if they could come anywhere close to the success of the iPad and what a tablet would mean for the future of their phones.  But, I decided that I would have to give one a try and see it for myself.

The PlayBook in its first incarnation is all about the “bridge” to your BlackBerry phone – it does not have a native e-mail client, address book or calendar app – it simply pairs via Bluetooth with your phone and gives you an interface to the data there.  Many a reviewer took big, cheap swipes at the PlayBook for this perceived lack of functionality, but there are a lot of BlackBerry owners out there and clearly RIM targeted them first, so get over it.  Native apps will surely come soon enough to appease even the biggest Apple fanboys.

The first version of the software build that shipped on the thing was rough around the edges.  One of the best things about a BlackBerry (and worst about an iPhone or iPad) is easy file access.  The PlayBook ships with a really nice set of apps from DataViz that are well done mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.  Sadly, I could open files from my phone but not edit or save them anywhere.  An update to the PlayBook arrived within a week or so, and most of those file issues were fixed.  The PlayBook does allow wireless access to its file system via a Samba/share interface which is a welcome treat.

When I started out with the PlayBook, I had BBOS 5 on my Bold.  I had several issues in keeping the PlayBook paired with my phone, but eventually upgraded to BBOS 6 which cured that problem.  There is a bridge app that you install on the phone and it certainly looks like more work went into making it go smoothly for BBOS 6.  That may be an issue for older BlackBerry owners that don’t have an upgrade path available from version 5.

The PlayBook’s operating system, QNX, is quite frankly stunning.  Multitasking on the device is very smooth and the use of gestures to switch between running applications is a big plus over pushing the button on the iPad.  Multitasking on the iPad was certainly an afterthought for Apple, and it shows in the way it is implemented.  You can fire up video, chat, bridge and other apps on the PlayBook and switch between them easily without the device ever breaking a sweat.

You can tether the PlayBook to your BlackBerry and work away while on the road and not near any wi-fi, with additional carrier charges, of course.  The bridge apps even include a “bridge browser” that allows you to surf the web via the Bluetooth connection to your BlackBerry without having to tether at all.  Interestingly, AT&T has so far blocked the bridge app for BlackBerry phones from showing up in their App World store, probably because they won’t be able to tell if you are using that bridge browser app and charge you for it.  Morons.

The PlayBook hits the iPad in all of those familiar places where it is tender.  It has support for Java, Flash and has a micro-HDMI port for output to a monitor.  Most of my iPad experience is with the first generation model and its infuriating lack of video output.  Only certain iPad apps will push anything out of the docking port video adapter (which you have to buy separately), and the Safari web browser is not one of them.  In contrast, the PlayBook will mirror everything across HDMI and certain apps like the video player and Slideshow To Go (the PowerPoint app) have a presentation mode that uses the full 1080 lines of output for display while showing you additional controls on the device.  You can even switch between apps to look something up while the presentation mode continues on the external display.

Did I mention the speakers?  Audio coming out of the PlayBook sounds clearer than anything I’ve ever heard on a mobile device of any kind.

Of course, the PlayBook is far behind in the total number of apps available for it, though I might argue that there are a whole lot of useless apps out there for the iPad and Android.  It certainly needs Netflix and Skype clients, but they did crank out a Facebook app pretty quickly.

App development for the PlayBook will be interesting to watch because the native tools for QNX will be C/C++ while most of today’s BlackBerry development is done in Java.  There are a lot of unhappy BlackBerry Java developers out there, not only because it looks like QNX may be the future for new BlackBerry phones, but also because RIM is in a bigger hurry to get an Android app emulator written for the device before they get the native development tools ready.  Right now, your best bets for getting an app on the PlayBook are with Adobe Air or their WebWorks SDK that lets you make apps with HTML and Javascript.

All in all, the PlayBook is a really slick piece of hardware that ships with some very polished and useful business apps.  Multitasking and video output capabilities are second to none, and BlackBerry junkies like me will enjoy the bridge features to access data on their phone in a bigger, prettier interface.  Come on, RIM!  I am really rooting for you on this one.  With the right combination of apps, development tools and most importantly salesmanship, the PlayBook could definitely turn some heads.  And if you learn what you should about touch screens and QNX, you could set yourself up to produce some really nice, new BlackBerry models very soon.