USA a third world country?

What is this flu vaccine nightmare? One company only that we buy from, and it is in the UK? And then they get contaminated and we have to cut back tremendously on our distribution of the vaccine? So - how much does this country really value health care, prevention and the lives of its citizens? All good questions. At least my aged father got a flu shot. Many of us who usually get them are not going to get them this year. There will be lives lost because of the incredible situation our healthcare priorities have begotten. And believe this - none of the politicians will really give us national health care because in order to run for office one must be beholden to far too many large corporations. The only way to GET better health care is to constantly lobby and write to your congressional representatives not once but consistently. And it will take far more people to do this than I think are willing to take the time. As long as SHAME is the reaction one has to having no health insurance, we are stuck in our own cultural morass.

Zire has me busy...

Exploring the capabilities of the Zire 21 has me busy. There are many applications you can get for it, but really, the ones they have are fine. the only thing I really want is a word processor/text editor and a converter to turn text files into palm DOC format for reading on the Palm. There are a couple out there as far as text editors, notably QED and WORDSMITH. See the descriptions at PalmOne software store or PalmGear. As far as a converter, on the Mac there seems to be not much choice, and the application PorDiBle seems to have excellent ratings, so I'll try it?

I got a cover and some extra styli, and I find reading "The Wizard of Oz" on the Zire great fun. Did I mention that eReader is just great!

Zire up and running...

I took it out of the box, and I cannot see how it is “blemished.” So that was good. Then I charged it for the three recommended hours. That was fine. I turned it on - it worked. I plugged in the USB cord, stuck it in the Mac, and installed the Palm Desktop for Mac. I dropped the files I wanted on the Zire, hit the HotSync icon, and WHOOOOSCH....up it all went - no sweat. Then I read a bit of “The Wizard of Oz” on the Zire, then fell into bed - now to get addresses imported - I am not putting them in by hand for sure.

I must say Palm OS really is smooth. I like the Palm Reader on the Mac and on Windows, and the Zire is working flawlessly so far. I made the mistake of reading too many dire postings of how the Mac would not support the HotSync, and in reality it all worked flawlessly. Anyhow - all seems well, and I am going to love this baby.

The drawback was absolutely NO paper in the box except the reminder to register the Zire. No booklet with set-up instructions. There are instructions in the software in Adobe Reader format, and luckily I had printed a lot of info from the documents at the PalmOne website before getting the unit. And quite a bit of the documentation is outdated in the version of the software I have - there were two differing instruction sets in two different documents on how to HotSync files from your desktop to the Zire, and neither were necessary with my version of Palm and OS X 10.2.8. It actually supports drag and drop from the directory on the desktop! Then you HotSync and that's that.

Now to get a case so I can carry it with me everywhere. And maybe a lighted stylus...and...

OmniWeb update...

OmniWeb is now MINE, and worth every penny. The nifty feature I haven't mentioned in the past is the built-in support for RSS! Yes, you can add RSS feeds to the bookmarks, and the dock icon will indicate the number of new unread items when you connect to the internet. So I tossed my stand-alone reader into the wastebasket because the built-in functionality in OmniWeb is sufficient for my RSS needs.

iTunes makes news in Redmond...

Well, the news that Mr. Balmer considers all of us iPod owners thieves must have certainly given the world of techdom some interesting reading. I suppose the fact that Apple created the iPod, and that Apple created iTunes Store has been a real bother for some like him.