Motion Based Frustrations (Verizon Delight)

OK, there is not much to do riding in a van between Huntsville and St. Louis, so fooling around on line is about as good as it gets. Thanks to a couple of trips that put me in places that only had expensive (or sketchy) internet connections, my Blackberry has Verizon's unlimited EVDO network. I am surprised and delighted to discover that I have been able to get a decent (if somewhat slower than DSL) connection along the entire route, meaning that I can easily pass the time with my laptop. The connection is too slow to really deal with MS Exchange's bandwidth-eating interface with Outlook, but this is actually pretty good since it keeps me honest about vacation (and xmail is so maddening, that I have mostly been off of that too).

That's the good part. On the bad side, I use Motion Based to analyze data from my workouts and it is the most finicky program for uploads. Even on the giant data pipe at work, I get unreliable results, so it is not network speed on my end (the upload is only about 500kb on average). I have been playing around with other software for this an the best (for my purposes) so far has been the TCX converter which can convert the raw data into excel format. Together with a data dump from NOAA for lakefront data and I can really have a serving of data-geek-delight. That said, I am pretty busy and data geekism is a luxury, so something like MB is a nice workaround (and much better than the slightly useful Training Center).

Anyway, MB has a nice suite of features, making it that much more frustrating that its problems seem tied to underpowered servers.