New Gadget!

I got a new gadget!

Well, it's really more like a gadget upgrade. I still have the same total number of gadgets, but this one gadget is better than it used to be. And by "better," I mean "cooler and shinier."

What I got was a new Palm Pilot. For the past few weeks, I've been forcing myself to use my Palm, and I've been feeling pretty high-tech as a result. Check me out; I've got a teeny little computer in my pocket! Except that while the Palm V was mighty cool when I bought it, it's now strictly last century's news. It was neat, all right, but it wasn't really neat. And it was practically obsolete. They didn't even sell them anymore.

So I was in the market for a newer Palm, one with color and a lot of memory. And through one of those coincidences that so often causes me to spend my discretionary income, somebody at work had just decided that he wasn't getting any use out of his Palm.

So I bought it, and at a pretty good price, too. So I'm now typing on a Sony Clié, which is so high-tech that it even has a made-up name.

It's keen. For one thing, it's got color. Glorious color! Now when I play solitaire, the red and black cards will look different! And, um, I guess there might be some productivity improvement. Mostly, though, I'm excited that my games will look neater. My address book can include pictures, but I'm not sure why. I mean, I already know what my friends look like, don't I? Well, actually, I have friends on the Internet, and I really don't know what they look like. But in those cases, I don't think I have a picture of them to add to the address book, do I?

Also, this thing can play MP3s. I realize this isn't that big a deal to those of you who've been carrying miniscule MP3 players for years, but I find it really neat that I can listen to MP3s on the same device I'm typing on. And storage isn't really an issue, because this thing uses memory cards. Which means I've got 128 Megabytes standing by.

That 128 MB, incidentally, is 64,000 times the bigger than the first personal computer I ever had, the positively ancient TRS-80 Model I. I still remember when we upgraded it to four kilobytes of memory. Luxury.

I mention that because along with my fascination with the newest and shiniest, I also get geeked up by things from my past. And I'm endlessly entertained by the ability to emulate my TRS-80 on my computer. Somewhere, somebody put forth a lot of effort so that an complicated piece of machinery could pretend to be a much simpler machine. I've also just now noticed that there are Palm versions of really old games. Like, for example, Scott Adams Text Adventures. That's not the Scott Adams who does Dilbert. It would probably take too long to explain. Just trust me that it's cool.