The Matt Faus Blog

I use Google Calendar for all of my school and personal appointments. Since it’s online, I can look at it from any computer. However, I really wanted to sync my Google Calendar with the built-in calendar on my 8525 so that I could get a buzzing or beeping alert an hour or two before each of the appointments. To do this, I am using ActiveGcSync. I actually just downloaded and installed it during my Automata Theory class, so I can’t give a full review, but it seems like it’s working well so far.

It downloaded all of my appointments from Google, and then when I made a change to one appointment on my phone and then re-synchronized it was uploaded and changed in the Google Calendar. The only thing that didn’t seem to work was that I added an e-mail address attendee to the appointment on my phone, but they were not included as a guest in the Google Calendar appointment.

It’s really awesome to see all this technology working together so elegantly.

I recently received my HTC 8525 Pocket PC, and boy is it sweet! It’s even cooler because Cingular has implemented the 3G network in Dallas and I can get DSL-esque download speeds from anywhere via my phone! Pair that with a 400MHz processor and you’ve got some serious Internet surfing power.

Not only that, but you can completely alter your lifestyle with programs like Windows Live Search. I’ve always been a big Google fan, but this program is simply incredible. After installing it to your device you run it and open up the map to scroll around, zoom in, and find your position. Now, at this point, it’s already impressive. The panning and zooming of the map is really quick - almost like looking at Google Maps from your desktop, just a little smaller. After you find your position, you save it as your Home location and go into the search dashboard. The search dashboard has several options. Categories allows you to surf categories of stuff, from Aerobics to Zoos, and tells you the closests instance of something that matches that category. Traffic gives you real-time updates on the most congested roads. (Not that I care about that, working from home and all, haha!) Finally, there is the almighty search box. Type anything in here, such as “thai food”, and it will find all of the restaurants near you in a matter of seconds, sorted by proximity! Scroll through the list, click the number, and order your food. I can literally find, call, and order food from a restuarant I have never heard of before in a matter of seconds. If I wanted to pick it up, it spits out driving directions from my location to the restaurant.

Now that’s something, eh? I guess the only improvement I could think of is having GPS integration. It might be supported, but I need to get a bluetooth dock before I can use my Pharos GPS Receiver with this phone.

Since I have always lived on campus at UTD, I’ve never really noticed how bad the parking situation is. I have heard a lot of people complain about this, and there is even a bumper sticker that reads “If you see my professors, tell them I’m running late because I’m still looking for a parking spot”. Now that I live at an off campus apartment, I get to feel this pain first-hand.

Last week, I pulled into the parking lot and saw a pair of reverse lights on the back of a car. By the time I got there, six other cars had raced over to vie for the parking spot. I was chuckling in glorious victory as I pulled into the spot.

Today, I rode my motorcycle to campus and there was not even a spot to park it! I really like riding my bike, because the parking spots are never full and they are right outside the door of the engineering building. Not today! I had to go all the way around to the spots near the library and then walk much further to class. All this, and I was already late!

UTD isn’t going to decrease it’s commuter population, but it was really not designed well for parking. The buildings are all centrally located, and the parking lots are all on the circumfrence. I think the campus could have had a parking lot for each of the buildings, and this would have made things much easier. However, the campus can’t all be rebuilt and the commuter population is not going to decrease, so the only real solution I see to the parking problem would be a parking garage. That way you can get lots of cars in one spot that is pretty close to all the buildings.