Me at Columbia

Jill snapped this pic of me chatting it up with Sree at the Columbia School of Journalism last night. That's actually my resume up on screen behind us, a lot of people there wanted to understand why I'd ditched a career in journalism for the life of a blogger.

UPDATE: I stupidly deleted their comment while killing some comment spam (still getting the hang of WordPress), but someone asked if being a blogger meant that I was still technically a journalist. I suppose it depends on how broadly or narrowly you define both "blogging" and "journalism", but the questuion I believe the audience was asking was with respect to why and how I ended up giving up what looked like a "safe" career in traditional magazine and newspaper journalism for a full-time career as a blogger.

Live and in person

I'm still not quite used to blogging about myself rather than gadgets, but I've got a couple of speaking gigs coming up where you can see me talk about gadgets (or about blogging about gadgets) in person:

5/10 - Columbia School of Journalism - Sree Sreenivasan invited to speak at a workshop about blogging. (Sorry for the late notice, only just today realized that it was open to the public, though it may already be sold out.)

6/6 - Core 77 panel in San Francisco on product design.

6/23 - Digital Media Wire's Digital Media Conference in McLean, VA. I'm on the 11am panel, "THE BATTLE FOR THE DIGITAL CONSUMER". (It's always a war, isn't it?)

Also, assuming there are enough Engadget readers in my hometown to justify it, I think I'm going to hold an informal Engadget Reader Meetup in my Merced, CA sometime around June 10th.

Palm sync for Google Calendar?

Google Calendar is ruling my world at the moment, but what I'm really looking for is a way to sync it with my Treo 650. Any solutions out there? There has to be someone taking advantage of that open API, right?

Monitor mania

Man, do I have a problem: just like Jason, I can't seem to ever have enough screen real estate. I thought I'd be satisfied with a pair of 20-inch widescreeen LCDs (which I have connected to a desktop), but I finally gave into my desires and picked up a second video card so I could add a third (and probably fourth) monitor. I've had an old Samsung widescreen 17-inch LCD sitting on my desk for months, but I only last week did I realize that for an investment of just fifty bucks that that display could be doing something other than gather dust. Now I'm rocking three monitors, so I should be happy, right? Yeah, except that with a resolution of "just" 1280 x 768 the Samsung feels like a porthole compared to the 1680 x 1050 I'm getting with each of the 20-inch displays. Those new 24-inch and 30-inch LCDs from Dell are looking mighty tempting...

P.S. - I'll post a pic of my new setup as soon as I can figure out why Word Press is making it impossible for me to upload images.

On Sirius Radio this week

Almost forgot to mention this: it ain't Howard Stern, but I'll be a guest on Josh Dorfman's Sirius satellite radio show, The Lazy Environmentalist, this week, talking about (you guessed it) technology and the environment. The other guest is Laura Moorhead, who was my editor when I used to write for Wired mag. The first airing was this morning, but you'll be able to catch encores on Sirius Satellite Radio 114 and streaming live at Lime.com tonight at 9PM, tomorrow at 3AM, 2PM, 8PM, Friday at 2AM, and Sunday at 1PM. All times are EST.