Damned Long Weekend

When you have kids things just generally take longer. Sadly, technology doesn’t really make it any easier. You might be surprised to discover that I am not a PIM freak. In fact, I try to use PIMs as little as possible and I’m pretty successful with that effort. I’ve never found a PIM which liked me. There are plenty of them out there, too. I just can’t find one that works with what I like, nor is there likely to ever be one. I’m a nerd first and a journalist second. I get loads of gear all the time. Just check out my reviews, which really only represents about a third of what I get. Considering that the majority of the gear I get is mobility enabling, I should be able to find something which suits me and my needs.

This doesn’t work with that. That doesn’t sync with the other. The other doesn’t have services for this. Its all quite annoying, really. I used Palm devices for years, but still I was never quite satisfied. I’ve tried WinMo, but have always been unhappy with the Exchange/Outlook relationship and the closed nature of Microsoft’s technology. I don’t think that even the iPhone 2.0’s newly minted iintegration will make it any better. Of course, I’d likely think different if I got an iPhone 2.0. Right now I’m using a PIM-less Nokia N810. Brilliant device with a wide range of connectivity forms, but with no PIM to show off with its potency is a bit dulled. There is a port of a gaggle of GPE-based tools, but its all very un-integrated feeling and there are a slew of mismatched UI foibles. One app has a menu while the others don’t. That sort of thing. Very annoying.

I’ll have more on the Nokia N810 in a formal review soon. Really.

In the end, I multi-task (a misnomer if I’ve ever heard one. Its not possible to perform multiple tasks at the same time, only to organize your thoughts and actions in a distributed manner enough to work on several discreet tasks with enough time devoted to each one where you make progress each hour your work on said projects, but I digress…) and work on the priorities as I see fit. A little triage and I’n generally where I need to be… Except this weekend. I left The Dojo un-updated for three days! Y’all must’ve thought me dead. I had even considered set up some automatic story posting software but then, serendipitously, along came a salesleech asking me to integrate their junk into my stuff. I thought of my readers and decided that it would be unfair to you. It is me, I presume, that you all come to The Dojo for, after all.

Of course, I suspect, like much everything else, your wandering about the net is mostly object driven and I am not the object. That review I wrote about MacDrive 7 remains the top draw on the site, months after I wrote it. My guess would be that, since sales of Macs keep rising strongly, that it will remain a very popular piece. Well, whatever drives you all here is good.

So, not to make excuses and such, but I was very busy over the weekend, shuttling girls to and fro like some kind of taxicab. One friend of my daughter’s even complained that the supple, leathered backseat of my Saab 900 Turbo drophead coupe was “cramped”. The nerve! Its almost 20 years old and still runs like a champion, and the seats are quite comfortable, thank you.