Day: January 19, 2001

Steinbrenner’s Insanity

It is inconceivable to me why George Steinbrenner is dragging his feet on paying Derek Jeter what he’s worth.

Look, you’ve got Alex Rodriguez making $25 million a year for the Texas Rangers. Hmmm. How many World Series did Rodriguez help Seattle win? Oh that’s right, none.

Jeter, on the other hand, is really the driving force behind a Yankees team that has won four of the last five series. And he’s only going to better. Jeter’s game has steadily improved every year and he’s one of the most professional athletes in sports.

On the other hand, it might be worth it to see Steinbrenner whiff on signing Jeter only to see him leave for the Mets at the end of the upcoming season when Jeter will be a free agent.

Is Conversant Too Complex?

Giles Turnbull evaluates three free web creation tools in a BBC article. Turnbull includes Conversant, which powers this web site. Basically Turnbull says Conversant is powerful, but complex.

Conversant sites, like Manila sites, are potentially very powerful, but there is some learning to be done, even for experienced web users… the process of creating the site of your dreams might be time-consuming.

Once you have got the hang of using Conversant, you will be able to do some really clever things with your website. Create new templates for whizzy designs, automatically send email to regular readers when new items are posted, even manage a collection of digital photos, or any other files.

How complex is Conversant? From my experience, Conversant is about as complex as desktop web authoring tools such as Dreamweaver. I am far from a Dreamweaver expert and many parts of the program overwhelm me (i.e. I have no clue what certain features are supposed to accomplish). I can use Dreamweaver well enough, however, to create and update a web site with thousands of pages.

The complexity of Conversant is comparable to the sort of complexity found in an application such as Dreamweaver. If all you want is a basic weblog, end of story, then Conversant might be overkill. On the other hand it is perfect for small to medium to large websites where a) applications such as Dreamweaver really start to break down as far as effectively managing a site structure, and b) every other product out there is either much more expensive and even more complex.

I’ve got about 4,000 web pages on several different domains and receive about 2.4 million page views a year — relatively small potatoes but not bad for just one person in his spare time. For me, although there was a bit of learning curve, Conversant is actually far less complicated than the alternatives and delivers a lot of features that frankly I haven’t seen in other content management systems.

The Pockey Portable Hard Drive

Something I’ve been seriously considering buying over the past 6 to 8 months is a portable hard drive. I tend to do a lot of work at a number of different computers, and have typically used ZIP or floppy drives to take files with me, but that gets old quickly.

There are a number of portable hard drive solutions that use USB or Firewire interfaces, but they all tend to have serious drawbacks for my intended use. Almost all such drives require external power supplies, for example, and I’m really not excited about having to carry around a power cable. There are a few portables that use batteries, but then you’re limited to three or four hours at most before recharging (plus the available battery driven drives haven’t received very good reviews).

That’s why I’m very excited about the Pockey Drive. This is basically a 2.5″ hard drive in an case that’s almost as small as my Palm, so it’s very portable. It uses a USB interface so it’s going to be slow, but given how common USB ports are these days, the tradeoff in compatibility is worth it to me.

More importantly, though, the Pockey Drive is engineered to take all the power it needs directly from the computer to which it is connected — no power cables needed, thank you very much (does the Fire Wire standard support this sort of feature?)

The price is right, too, ranging from $250 for a 6 gigabyte version to $400 for a 20 gigabyte version. Sure, paying $400 for a 20 gigabyte drive is not cheap compared to the 80 gigabyte drive you can pick up for under $300 these days, but I’m thinking more along the lines that I once paid $500 for two 250 megabyte drives and thought I had a killer system. $400 for 20 gigabytes the size of my Palm? Bargain-o-rama.

Although the drive has been available in Korea for awhile, it’s just hitting the U.S. so there aren’t any reviews I could find that are in English (and my Korean is not very good). PCWorld does give the Pockey drive high marks in passing as part of a larger article on portable storage, saying that the drive “installs like a charm…Our test Pockey seemed sturdy, but all hard drives should be handled with care.”