I Want My MPC - or Trouble With Technology
MPC: Mobile personal communicator. It's been about 6 years since I last dropped my old Palm V PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) on the ground and it forever stopped working. The $50 aluminum hardshell rhino case didn't make a difference. That was $700 (Cdn) down the drain. What's worse is that all of the PDA apps that I'd downloaded or was creating were lost when I accidentally trashed a 17Gb drive on an older computer last year (along with 300 songs I'd composed over 5 years).
What was I doing? Trying to create a partition so that I could install Linux (an operating system I'd installed dozens of times on a standalone basis) as part of a dual-boot system with Windows 98, since I didn't have space on my Win XP laptop. Try as I might, the data on the drive was lost forever, without expensive data recovery services that I just didn't have the funds for. Even scouring the sectors one at a time with a special recovery program didn't help.
What's always a wonder to me is that for someone who has 29+ years of computer programming and various other technical background, that I have such trouble with technology that should be functionally simple to set up. I'm one of those people that can write 5000-line computer programs with triple-void, amorphous data structures in C (don't ask), but can't always program a VCR or a simple digital alarm clock.
I'm also one of those strange anomalies that's part Luddite and part gadgethead. I love my electronic toys, but don't ever try to convince me that any of them are really going to save society or even help my productivity. For example, I just got a brand spanking, sparkly PalmOne Treo 650 smartphone that's a combo phone and PDA. In other words, an MPC (Mobile Personal Communicator). As for using the device for productive work, instead of using yesterday and today to write the 10-15 weblog posts I had scheduled, all I've done, besides the post you're reading, is waste two days trying to find free palmos (productivity) software :)
What's more, a totally annoying feature of the PalmOne Treo is that it shuts off every 30 seconds by default. Unfortunately, for mobile warriors like myself, 3 minutes is the limit before the device shuts off, unless I'm actively doing something with it or to it. Not exactly productive for someone that's on the go a lot, especially if I'm getting frustrated turning the damn thing back on again all the time. (Was this intentional design? If so, why aren't the options a bit more generous?)
Oh, okay, I also plan to use Treo 650 to browse weblog feeds while commuting, or whenever my laptop is offline. And write a number of RSS-based applications for my free RSS-based WebFeedMail project. But for now, I'm simply procrastinating by tell myself I'm just doing research.
Technorati Tags: tech watch, palm, treo, palmpilot, palmos, PDA, mobile devices, productivity, MPC
What was I doing? Trying to create a partition so that I could install Linux (an operating system I'd installed dozens of times on a standalone basis) as part of a dual-boot system with Windows 98, since I didn't have space on my Win XP laptop. Try as I might, the data on the drive was lost forever, without expensive data recovery services that I just didn't have the funds for. Even scouring the sectors one at a time with a special recovery program didn't help.
What's always a wonder to me is that for someone who has 29+ years of computer programming and various other technical background, that I have such trouble with technology that should be functionally simple to set up. I'm one of those people that can write 5000-line computer programs with triple-void, amorphous data structures in C (don't ask), but can't always program a VCR or a simple digital alarm clock.
I'm also one of those strange anomalies that's part Luddite and part gadgethead. I love my electronic toys, but don't ever try to convince me that any of them are really going to save society or even help my productivity. For example, I just got a brand spanking, sparkly PalmOne Treo 650 smartphone that's a combo phone and PDA. In other words, an MPC (Mobile Personal Communicator). As for using the device for productive work, instead of using yesterday and today to write the 10-15 weblog posts I had scheduled, all I've done, besides the post you're reading, is waste two days trying to find free palmos (productivity) software :)
What's more, a totally annoying feature of the PalmOne Treo is that it shuts off every 30 seconds by default. Unfortunately, for mobile warriors like myself, 3 minutes is the limit before the device shuts off, unless I'm actively doing something with it or to it. Not exactly productive for someone that's on the go a lot, especially if I'm getting frustrated turning the damn thing back on again all the time. (Was this intentional design? If so, why aren't the options a bit more generous?)
Oh, okay, I also plan to use Treo 650 to browse weblog feeds while commuting, or whenever my laptop is offline. And write a number of RSS-based applications for my free RSS-based WebFeedMail project. But for now, I'm simply procrastinating by tell myself I'm just doing research.
Technorati Tags: tech watch, palm, treo, palmpilot, palmos, PDA, mobile devices, productivity, MPC
