Tech stuff

Well, my colleagues who know me as a geek will be interested to know that I have jumped back onto the Palm electronic organizer bandwagon.

For those who don't care to dig into the archives, last spring my Sony Clie NR70V died. Well, not totally dead, but the datebook crashed and took the back-up database with it. Like anyone who tries to do too much in a day, I had to reconstruct 2 months worth of appointments including teaching assignments, private practice clients, travel dates and schedules and so on.

That spooked me. I went to paper.

This seemed to coincide with much ado about paper organizers and the Hipster PDA which I tried for a short time. I also tried the Moleskine phenomenon for a while, and still use one of their 3x5 notebooks on occasion. Finally, I went back to a Daytimer (the wirebound compact 3x5 2-pages/week.) But, great as those Daytimers are, it suffered from one issue that I could always get my Palm to do - automatically advance unfinished tasks from one day to the next. What I found was that I would just forget tasks and information once I turned the page. (so... if you have called me sometime between now and this past January and I haven't returned your call, it's likely that you are lost on some page that was turned as the new week began. It was nothing personal. Call me again, if you will.)

I spent some time with my Apple Newton 2100 during this paper phase. I got it to successfully connect thru wifi and am the proud owner of a Lucent Orinoco Silver card that made the wifi come together. I used the Newton for a while, took notes on it, synced it with iCal, blogged from it over my home network, etc. But in the end, it was too big. The Newton is brilliant. But too big. And I really got used to colour - Sony colour on my PDA screen. (And don't ask - I am keeping the Newton. It won't gather dust, I have other ideas for it. Long live the Green.)

So, with some minor reservation, I dove back into the Palm world and picked up a Palm TX at my local London Drugs. (Purely as an aside, I seem to always end up back at LD for my bigger electronics purchases. I have often felt that their prices were higher overall, but when I get down to the nitty-gritty of actually buying something, they tend to come through with the price and the stock availability. No - not being paid by LD, just an observation.)

The TX is small, sleek, has built-in wifi and bluetooth and seems to be a big improvement over Palm OS 4.1 which was the last version I used. All of my previously registered software was still valid (which confirmed my suspicion that the Palm world has kind of stagnated in its development.) Previously, I would have had to upgrade versions of apps in order to be current, but I could now miss almost a year, and my software still be current and valid. Go figure...

Set up on a Mac? No problem. That familiar Palm Desktop that I have been using since lord-knows-when loaded easily and the Hot-sync process is seamless, including through Bluetooth. Everything I did with it just worked. No hard wifi set-ups. No problems backing up to my Mac (so no more data islands.) And I have also backed up the Palm folder on my Mac to my iPod and to a memory stick. So I am also multiply redundant in my storage... no paranoia here!

So, I am back to being digitally organized. More thoughts as I re-acquaint myself with my Palm.