Here's Why

Best ten bucks I ever spent

Last week we went to the Canadian National Exhibition, which is kind of like the Sydney Easter Show. There were a few cool things to see but not quite buy, like glow-in-the-dark t-shirt prints that changed colour in sunlight, and adult sizes of those sneakers with wheels hidden in the heels. They were just short of my size.
I’ve been envying those kids who switch from walking to gliding just by changing their weight, but perhaps I need to rewire my physical skill a little further before I get a pair.

The real find of the CNE was the cheappalm.com stand. Emma and I bought a Palm VII for C$10 each. Fully functional, with 2 Meg of non-expandable RAM and PalmOs 3.2. Of course the Pam VII also comes with a mobitex radio modem for wireless internet, but Palm.net went offline on the very day we bought the machines.

I’ve been entering ideas, thoughts, and things to remember in paper notepads since I was 9. The pads fill up, and then go into a drawer. Essential stuff gets copied to a more permanent place or to the new notepad, or gets forgotten in the drawer. In 1994 I first saw the IBM PC110 on a Japanese website, it was a 486 with a colour screen the size of a paperback novel. Stupidly, I set it as my benchmark of what I wanted from a pocket computer.

In 1996 I could finally afford a pocket computer and could see it as a better brain prosthetic than my paper notepad. However I wanted the colour screen I’d seen on the PC110, and some decent storage space. Then my income halved due to health problems, and I prudently held off.

So feeling poor, I actually hesitated about spending the $10 for a grey-screen, 2 meg, used Palm. Emma convinced me by buying one for herself.
Having gotten past the ten year old habit of researching palmtops because I need one but not buying one YET, I followed by buying the hotsync cable and a funky fold-out keyboard for another $15.

Emma’s been saying every day “This is the best ten bucks I ever spent!”

The Memopad is my main application while I transfer my notepad contents.
The TimeZone app is useful. I’ll see what else I can find as useful while travelling. I also have the the JPalm juggling simulator loaded.

I can do much more when I have my own desktop as a home base again.

About the author: Ian Woolf lives in Sydney, has a degree in Applied Physics, worked as a solar astronomer, software engineer, systems programmer, webmaster, Cisco CCNA tutor, Computational Theory lecturer, and subject coordinator; while changing his career to professional writing and broadcasting. Listen to Ian on the Discovery science show on radio 2SER 107.3Fm Mondays at 9am in Sydney or streaming audio on www.2ser.com, or listen to the Discovery sound archives.