Tales from the Train - Riding the Train from NYC to Hamilton

I downloaded and activated my Journal software on the new laptop and configured to be able to automatically post to my blog. It is a great thing to combine journaling with blogging as often my blog is like a journal. At least until people start weighing-in on various subjects with comments and opinions.

I don't know if I can use The Journal as a full-featured blog editing tool but I will experiment with the functions that I find most useful. For anyone interested in this software you can locate it at http://www.davidrm.com/thejournal . People may have better software for journaling, particularly within the aspect of online journaling or blogging but this one seems fairly full-featured with what I want it to do.

I like the aspect of it being secure and private, even though I am posting this entry as a blog-article. If anyone know of or has a recommendation for true online journaling software with public view capability as well as private, be sure and let me know.

It is Thursday and I am riding the train from NYC to Hamilton, NJ. I have been liking the 5:30 express train that only stops in Newark Penn Station, Princeton Junction, and Hamilton. It seems to make it out of the city before things get overly congested traffic-wise or overly full people-wise. For a long time I was taking the 6:03 but in addition to it being a busier train, it is normally one of the old types. This 5:30 express is one of the new double-decker trains being operated on the northeast corridor by NJ Transit. A very nice ride for commuting to NYC every weekday.

I was also checking the Chestnut Hill College website for a report of the baseball team's progress through spring training in Florida. Dan has been calling me or text messaging daily with updates but I wanted to check to see his overall stats. It seems his hitting has been doing very good averaging over .500 so I couldn't ask for a better start to his first college season. The Griffins aren't doing all that good as a team with a pre-season record of about 1-6 but Dan is off to a great start.

It is a nice pre-spring day in central NJ and I can't wait for the temps to warm up for actual spring. Steve starts his spring baseball season tomorrow and I can't wait to see him in his games. He indicated he will be playing short stop and will pitch one inning in the first scrimmage tomorrow. I would love to be there to see him but have a budget meeting in the afternoon. Maybe God will smile and make the meeting not happen.

As I write this and prepare to send it to my blog-site, I am reminded about how I began blogging using my Blackberry and Treo. At that time, the Tales from the Train series was much more difficult to write seeing as how I was punching the keys with my thumbs. On this laptop (Dell Latitude D430) I have an almost full sized keyboard and can keyboard much better. Of course one of the good things at least from a reader's perspective was that my articles were fairly short as it was so hard to type on the mobile devices.

I am enjoying this new computer and praise Scott for taking the care to set it up the way he did. It is a smaller and lighter laptop and is easier to pull out quickly and get something written. The other one was just too cumbersome to want to whip out and use during a normal commute. I am working to keep things better organized on this computer and am using various online tools including BaseCamp and Sakai to store things better. I have really enjoyed learning to use Sakai and bringing forward the ideas for a system that incorporates collaborative tools including blogs, wikis, file repository, podcast library, and discussion board. It will do more but those are the main things I have been using for my collaborative system needs.

Well, that is enough for this entry and I will end this to attempt to send it to the blog. I did a test yesterday and it seemed to work fine but we'll see. Have a great evening, everyone. David