We’ll be testing GPS navigation gear and other cool gadgets to see how they work during a real road trip. But because it’s a road trip, we’ll also be camping and enjoying some of the most spectacular sites in the Southwest and Southeastern United States. And we’ll be asking CNN.com users to suggest destinations and to vote on where we travel.

Cody and Brian have both been here for years and it will be interesting to follow their journey across the country in Cody’s 1978 International Harvester Scout.

Can biofuels solve America’s oil crunch? – CNN.com

I don’t think I am heading out to upgrade just yet, but it is nice to see that you didn’t have to wait in line for 12 hours unless you just had to have it on Friday.

Most of the Atlanta stores still have them in stock, although some are sold out of specific models (the black 16GB typically).  As a side note it seems they take down the availability as the stores begin to open since now the link for the GA stores doesn’t include the info.

I was able to connect to my office via ActiveSync and use our Cisco VPN to connect to the internal servers.  Now I still don’t care for the touch keyboard but the new features make it worth trying again.  I like that the VPN connecting even works over the EDGE network.

I also downloaded a few apps to play with and think opening the platform up will be the key in them taking on RIM.  While I love my BB and its keyboard I have always wanted it to do a few more things easily.  Letting developers easily get an app on the device will attract a whole new group – possibly including myself if I can get used to touch typing.

I agree with Peter Ha, the touchscreen keyboard just doesn’t work for me.  Give me a Blackberry with a better screen and new OS and I will be a happy man.

CrunchGear: Blackberry Bold

Of course my wife, friends and colleagues all have expressed confusion on such a move and I must admit the first week was rocky.  A brand new Dell XPS 1530 arrived with Vista Ultimate and after installing just a few basic apps (Cisco VPN, Firefox, etc.) I was crashing pretty regularly.  Fortunately after a few days of installing all the updates and service packs everything has settled down and it seems stable now.

I still have all Macs at home and love the MBP (still sits on my desk in easy reach) but I felt in some ways that I just couldn’t come to love Entourage.  Early on I lamented on the older version and just held out waiting for Office 2008 but even that didn’t get close to Outlook 2007 (with Xobni).  Most of my day is spent in email and MS Office products and while the the Mac versions have come a long way they just don’t have the polish of the Windows counterparts.

In some ways I feel like I am thinking different (to borrow from the old Mac campaign) by switching back since conventional wisdom and recent trends clearly suggest that the best option is the MacBook Pro.  So I can live with the pokes on Vista and that Windows is inferior to Mac OS X.  Truth is that I am free to use what I want and for me Windows is a better fit for corporate life.  I prefer Mac’s and worked around the issues they bring (Parallels for Windows apps, etc.) but in the end it is those Windows apps I used the most and I thought I should just see if I could make that work again.

I have pretty quickly found a new set of [free] tools to help with blogs and pictures and haven’t stumbled on any app that was Mac only.  Since I have Macs at home I still rely on them for all my digital content management and now have both at home and at work with no need to launch a VM. 

The report isn’t free but here it is. Luckily Gizmodo got a copy:

“The iPhone will thus match up initially in several segments against its main smartphone competitors — BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian Series 60.”

Now maybe the corporate IT departments will at least consider signing up for the Enterprise Beta (hint, hint).

Well it came yesterday and of course I wanted to give it a trial run before heading out of the country with it. It did a great job tracking my trip in to work, handling downtown Atlanta without any issues. Just plug it in to the MacBook Pro and pull off the file. I uploaded it to GPS Visualizer to see what it looked like and it was very smooth and precise. The device took a few minutes to get itself locked but didn’t drop once it had connected. I deleted a few points that were close to home so I don’t give away too much about where I live but this shows how smooth the tracking was.

Here are a few sites I have been reading to get myself ready and learn more about how to easily handle capturing and adding in the geo data to my photos:

• Geocode Your Images
• Sony GPS-CS1 for Mac

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Hey Im a Mac and I camped out in a mall for a week to get these clothes even though I could have just walked in and bought them

The new homepage isn’t out just yet but should be soon. We made a few changes based on feedback so hopefully everyone will appreciate that we are listening.

Update: New homepage is live (12:45pm)

We activated it pretty quickly and then began to play. The typing is the hard part to pick up – but everything else comes pretty naturally. It feels better in the hand than I expected and they have taken the mobile interface forward about 5 years.

Also as expected the packaging is slick.