After many repairs and renovations (and one small fire), the Victorian Princess is back in the water. It was lifted from the dock at Erie Sand & Gravel’s Montfort Terminal Thursday afternoon.

My friend Kurt Suhlmann has produced a great video for this group in Pittsburgh.  It highlights many of the things that Pittsburgh does right and Erie does wrong.  Let’s follow the lead of our “big brother” city.

Saturday morning I was reading a Newsweek article on my BlackBerry about the future of personal computing and the popularity of the tablet platform.  Personally, I’m a skeptic of the iPad.  It seems to be a gadget, something to have if you’ve got the money, and nothing more.  According to this article some experts anticipate a billion tablet PC’s of various types being sold in the next decade.  On its face this number seems ridiculous and of course it assumes that no “better” product will emerge tomorrow, shoving the tablet into bins with laser discs and HD-DVD.

While I was reading, my  2 1/2 year old daughter was sitting on my lap watching a show, and as usual showed an interest in whatever I was doing on my phone in order to compete for my attention as she thinks I enjoy Dora the Explorer for some reason and wants to share that boundless joy with me.  With her focus now on my phone I was implored to let her play with it, so I loaded up my FaceBook app.  Gladly she scrolled through the updates, highlighting and selecting items.  I brought up pictures for her to look at and she somehow managed to change my profile picture to one of her from last Halloween, which I wasn’t aware you could do on the mobile app.

She’s going to be brought up in an entirely different age of computing than I was.  Our first PC was bought when I was 12, thusly destroying any and all “free time” I’ve had since.  Her entire life will be spent with a PC in some form readily available, information constantly available at her fingertips.  Were I to have an iPad, surely I’d be doing my morning news reading on that instead of the small screen of my phone.  We all will be soon, as the technology advances, Microsoft, Google, RIM, Motorola etc. all get their hands in the bag, and we really see what this technology is all about.  Plastic scrolls that we carry in our pocket?  Being perfected.  Over-the-eye pieces with spatially manipulated environments you can change with your hands?  Sure.  The latest wave of 3-D enabled televisions puts us a step closer to fully holographic computing environments in which we can touch and move objects with the simplicity of chess pieces.

I may not be a believer in the iPad and Apple’s closed minded approach to business, but I’ll never underestimate the progression of computing technology.  I wouldn’t bore anyone with tales of how things have advanced, but I will close with this: most of this article was originally typed out on the keyboard of a BlackBerry Storm.  Painstakingly typed with thumbs and a click screen for a note on FaceBook; wiped out with one misplaced press of the thumb.  

I need a tablet.

The ship Edgar B. Speer has finished its winter portage here and is now off to the great blue seas.

This morning, Erie Coke was up to something that I’ve never seen before.  Behind the smoke was another stack shooting flames out no less than 20 FT.