Typing on my Crazy Little Machine
Monday, Apr. 14, 2003

Well, I suppose that the little thing I did for my new Palm IIIxe did the trick. I had been messing up, meaning crashing and forgetting everything, about every hour of use or more frequently, ever since I got it.

To make a very long story, in my opinion, shorter. What I finally ended up doing was taking the back off and then undoing the clip that holds the ribbon cable which connects the back circuit board (the processor) to the front circuit board (the screen module). I cleaned the little contacts with rubbing alcohol and a swab and then scratched the contacts up with an emery board. Then I put the cable back in and it hasn't crashed since.

See, when I had it earlier, and I had opened it twice and hadn't noticed this, there was about 2mm of the little silver contacts on the ribbon cable showing. Now there's nothing.

In fact, I'm tying this on the little Palm. I got a Palm Portable Keyboard for 99 cents plus $12 shipping. I tell ya, you have to realize that money is money on those ebay auctions. If they'd charged 99 cents shipping, you know it'd go for much more than $12. In fact, when I was ready to write the little sucker off, I was looking at the pitiful selection of Palms they have at Office Depot and I saw my keyboard. It was selling for $100.

I also saw my case, the little leather one that came with my Palm. It was $34. I also saw styli (there's just no good way to say the plural of styluses) that were really cool for up to $14 each. But let me tell ya, they weren't $14 cool.

It takes a little bit to get used to the full sized keyboard for me. The keys are the right size, but so that it can fold in three places and get into a size about the size of my palm in it's little leather case, the keys only depress to "laptop depth".

Until I got this I'd never heard of Laptop depth keys.

They don't press in that far, let me tell ya.

The original intention of buying this is because with the Miata, I won't have room to take the old Mac Classic II on vacation with us. This thing and it's keyboard can be carried inside Aisai's purse, or 40 of the sets could be carried in a carryon.

And that brings us to the irony. The next "vacation" we're going on is a medical mission to a very poor area of Mexico City. That's this June. I don't think I'll take the palm since I might be more than a little self conscious of it. After all, it's very cool and these people eat beans every day to stay alive.

The next vacation we're taking the Focus Wagon. We could carry 40+ of the Mac Classic IIs in that. Thousands of these palms. But we're taking it so we can buy something at Ikea. It might be flooring. I dunno. Right now I'm thinking that a nice Tile throughout the entire downstairs would be really cool.

I found out that the school that my nephew Brad goes to, a magnet school, is pretty good. Thats great since the other two are pretty crappy. (No offense to your educations, Chris and Jess, you guys are exceptions.)

Well, I need to go upstairs and synch this up. I'm using Intellisynch with my Palm Hotsynch to port this stuff directly to my Yahoo Notepad. From there, I can cut and paste directly into Diaryland.

I almost changed from Diaryland to Livejournal. The thing that kept me from doing it is that I've still got another year as a Gold Member paid up at D-land. Plus, I don't like the inflexibility of the template on LJ.

If notepad truncates this, I'll freak.

I do have DocumentsToGo, but I type so fast that it can't keep up. And I have the 33 mHz Dragonball VX, or whatever that processor is called. And monochrome. Why, why, can't this commercial software (which was given away free with the palm) keep up?

And I think I found a pop/smtp portal. Grooby.