Palm Zire....into the handheld world

Today's email brought a special from the PalmOne Store on "Blemished" handhelds. Well, I fell into the "pit of weakness" and ordered a Zire 21. This is my chance to get that "ebook hardware" I have been lusting after all these years. I don't care a whit about a calendar or reading my books in color, so the price was really right. After shipping and tax, $59 and change. This is my first experience with handhelds, with the exception of the iPod which is really not the same at all. Still, it feels a little like the same experience to me. I can't wait to get my hands on it. Hope all goes well with the installation of the Palm Desktop on the Mac. We'll see. I checked the support docs at the Palm site and there are known issues, so again, we'll see. I have hopes for the eBook Reader on the Palm because I love it on the Mac and the Wintel machines. Good or bad - I'll report on it here.

Dinotopia...ode to Zippo

Having never even heard of "Dinotopia", I rented the 284 minute long DVD set last weekend, and we sat down to enjoy what I thought would be probably a first installment of a three night viewing. I thought it might even be too silly, so I wasn't expecting very much. Well, it was fascinating. I think I was in an escapist mode anyway, and I was riveted. Two of us sat there through the whole thing, with only minor snack and exercise breaks.

What a romp. The story thickens with the detail of the world of "Dinotopia" and its residents whom we meet and appreciate on the way to the final crisis and the "finding of the light." The dino-people are entertaining, and intelligent, especially Zippo the librarian! The realistic dinosaurs and the settings were a tribute to James Gurney who created the "Dinotopia" book which was published in the nineties. The book is really a bound set of beautiful and imaginative illustrations as well as a story. The story *IS* the land of Dinotopia. Based on the gentle "Laws of Dinotopia", the culture does appeal to a better side of humanity than the usual fantasy-sci-fi outing.

And whoever said librarians are quiet and retiring has not met Zippo!

OmniWeb post the second...

Omniweb has become essential to my "browsing experience" to put it in today's vernacular. Possibly it even suggests the idea of a book title: "The Spirituality of OmniWeb as Browsing Experience". The tabs have the additional duty of creating multiple "desktops" which can be interchanged as you need a new default desktop for your browsing. I love this. Then, there is the bookmark list which I finally read the HELP on and figured out. So I now have a slick list of bookmarks which incorporate the Safari bookmarks I brought into OmniWeb and the default list OmniWeb supplies. I got rid of all sorts of links I didn't want, and the result is much better. I will admit the people at Omniweb could take a look at the bookmark SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) over at Opera. But this has been a minor irritant, and I can see where some people might like the rather intricate way one could set up the bookmarks. The premier look and feel of OmniWeb accentuates the technical acuity. So far I have downloaded from various sites, ordered from various sites, and made a point to do everything with it that Firefox is "iffy" about. I can't find a single thing OmniWeb doesn't handle flawlessly. I did have a couple crashes of the software the other night when I was busy doing some "cross-window" cut and pasting, and I think I may have overgrossed it myself.

Books, books and more books

Another shipment of brain food arrived from Alibris the other day. It is getting so that I must remove some furniture from the den to make way for books. Unfortunately, I also have a problem because I now have over twenty books I have not read and they are sitting around here and there staring at me as I walk by. If I sit and watch television, I feel their sorrow. Earlier on in life I always had read what I had on the shelves, but now they burgeon out of bounds. The advent of the computer has eroded away my reading time, and although I have to count my ereading time, that is also another area in which to build a book collection of unread titles. The bright spot in all this is that for the next several decades I ought to have something to do.

Old-tech paper punches

WHY can't someone invent a reasonably priced, non-problematic 3-hole punch?! The one I have at home you have to literally jump up and come down on it with force and then you hurt. The one at work that cost four times as much has one punch that doesn't function all the time, though there is a twisty thing to regulate that...but it doesn't stay in place. Absurdly, I just exchanged a new paperpunch of medium price for another because one punch would go down but not come up. And three of the ones I tried of the same make and model also had that problem. I have come to the conclusion that the whole species "paper-punch" is flawed. The design has not changed in decades, maybe over five decades. Inventing genius, your time is NOW.