This blog post is to claim The Hot Iron for my Technorati Profile.

More writing to come.

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I read on the Mashable blog this morning about the release of version 9 of the Netscape browser. What? They still make a Netscape browser?

Netscape was the original browser, born from the original NCSA Mosaic graphical browser created at the University of Illinois. Then along came Microsoft, and Netscape fell by the way. AOL bought it, then spun off the codebase to the Mozilla Foundation, and Firefox was its new offspring. I am simplifying this story, but trying to make the point that Netscape has become the forgotten one.

As a Web developer who may have users of Web sites I develop, I will download and try it. Of course I will run it on a secondary workstation, just like I do Internet Explorer 7. If I haven’t said it before, I am loyal to Firefox and its sibling the Thunderbird email program.

Let me know if anyone reading will be installing Netscape!

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Is it getting better for Palm? Apparently so, as today it was announced that the mobile device manufacturer sold a 25% stake in itself to Elevation Partners, a private equity firm who counts as one of its partners Bono, the lead singer of U2.

This announcement makes it a beautiful day for Palm, as not only are they getting some star power, but some horsepower in management. Apple’s former top hardware engineer Jon Rubenstein, who ran the iPod division for 2 years, will walk on to the Palm board as Executive Chairman. My guess is he had nothing to do with last week's announcement of the already much maligned Palm Foleo which may be destined to be a lemon.

If you look at the corporate history of Palm, it seems like it still hasn’t found what it’s looking for. Take the spinoff of its software division, the manufacturer of the Palm operating system, then to only license it back from its new owners. You have to wonder with repeated moves like this over the years where did it all go wrong?

As a loyal Palm user until the end of the world, I take pride and welcome this move like a summer rain. Hopefully today’s announcement will be like New Year’s Day for Palm, and not a day too soon with the announcement of the Apple iPhone’s release on June 29. If Palm doesn’t act soon, it may be stuck in a moment that it can’t get out of.

Ok, now tell me how many U2 songs I referenced in this post!

(The accompanying photo is a picture of Bono I snapped from Google Images with my Treo 680, then I took a picture of the Treo with my digital camera.)

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Last Friday I had 2 appointments, and like most entrepreneurs they were at coffee shops. Each shop offered WiFi, with their own access method and process – which is more of the norm than the exception today.

My first stop was Caribou Coffee who offers free WiFi, providing you buy something. The barista will give you a code upon request that you will need to enter into the default Web page that comes up when you log into your computer. The code is only good for one hour, but you can get another code upon request. My guess is that it is at the discretion of the staff, and buying more should help you get a new code.

Starbucks was my second stop, and they use T-Mobile’s HotSpot service. As I am a T-Mobile customer, I pay an extra $10 a month for HotSpot on top of the $20 I pay for data service for my Treo smartphone. If I didn’t have T-Mobile or its data service, I would have to pay a daily fee under $10 or a monthly fee around $30.

Before I left for my meetings I saw this article on the cost of unused WiFi service, and I could relate to it. Had my meetings been elsewhere, I may have had to pay a different way, or not at all if I went to a forward-thinking locale. There is certainly money to be made from Internet access, and it makes sense to be forward-thinking for how you yourself will use the Internet and plan ahead as to where you go and how you connect.

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Am I a nerd? Isolating my technical knowledge, I would consider myself a moderate nerd. My guess is that friends and clients would rate it much higher. I have always considered myself a generalist, balancing both technical and business knowledge, and making me the Internet professional I am today!

So I could not resist taking a Nerd Test that I read about on Cshel’s blog. And how did I do? I got a 67. I attribute the score to my lack of knowledge of the periodic table, owning a simple calculator and not having a biohazard logo in my bedroom (hey, it doesn’t really match my wife’s décor!).

Give the short survey a try – how did you do?

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