The Blog With No Name

I am a prisoner of my favorite toys, like a fly stuck in amber in a bad SF movie. I lovelovelove my Palm Centro, but Palm doesn’t make it any more, no one writes software for it any more, and none of the new groovy calendar- and contact-syncing web sites work with PalmOS any more. I love MS Money on my computer and Ultrasoft Money on my Palm (they talk to each other! perfectly!) but Microsoft has discontinued Money and won’t be supporting it after the end of the year. Eventually my Centro will die (noooooo……….) or my computer will totally crash, and then how will I track my finances as perfectly and easily as I do now? I am whining. I still don’t trust Mint or Wesabe or those totally-online “solutions.” Maybe I’m wrong. But I’m going to take really good care of my phone!

I admit it – I am bad with money. Bad with budgets, bad with controlling impulse spending, and so on.  I will focus on fixing this in 2009. In light of that, I was greatly amused at the small print in the middle of the packaging for a small stocking-stuffer gift I got for Christmas. I bet you can figure out what I’m talking about…

I’ve been assimilated into the Borg, I mean Facebook. Yeah, that’s it. Pretty amazing how people you haven’t seen in umpty years pop out of the woodwork at you. Sort of like, um, here too.

I also have a new cell phone. A Centro. Free from Verizon after I get their little debit card dealie. I LOVE MY NEW PHONE. This convergence stuff is beginning to seem cooler and cooler. My phone, my checkbook register, my shopping list, my to-dos, all on one small (really small!) so-far very sturdy, device. LOVELOVELOVE.

I need someone with a cattle prod near me at all times, to make me write!

The kids are on break. Luckily, the weather is not so dreadful that they can’t play outside occasionally.

The Boy is now obsessed with Runequest. I do mean obsessed. I plan to nuke their computer and reinstall everything this weekend, and I plan to do it verrrrrrrrrrry slowwwwwwwwwwwwly.

I now have an 80GB iPod Classic, and much to my disgust I find myself watching videos on it – mostly of CNET tech news, but still, after ragging on the kiddies so much for watching TV shows on their tiny little nano screens, it’s a bit embarrassing.

Hell Week at work hasn’t been as terrible as I thought it would be – I had to finish the bulletins for Th/Fri/Sun today, as my volunteer collator wanted to come in this evening to put everything together. That means tomorrow I can do all the little things that always get put off, so I can leave for my long weekend with a clean desk. I like that.

The Daughter and I are having a spa day on Monday, Charles’ Christmas present to us. Both very much looking forward to that, I must say!

Trying to figure out what to wear to the wedding in late April – have been told by numerous people to check out J. Jill, so I guess I’ll have to take a look.

Little tiny baby computer

We are all newly phoned as of last night. I have my Samsung SCH-u740 and Charles has his Treo 700p. As an extra added bonus, Verizon was running a “buy one get one free” deal on the Samsung, so our daughter got one a year earlier than she expected. She doesn’t get to take it to school or anything radical like that, but if she’s going to be out and about and I want to be able to get in touch/be alerted if there is a problem, she can take it with her. She is over the moon about this; has already figured out all the phone features, sent a video message, and set up various voice dialing features. I guess I’ll be asking her for help in setting up the voicemail later today…

(Extra extra added bonus – we are now on Verizon, so free calls to most of the people we call regularly!)

Our current plan expires at the end of the month. We are going to move from US Cellular to Verizon. Charles knows that he wants a Treo, so that’s no problem. I of course am now wallowing in the depths of gadget indecision hell. My brother has a Samsung SCH-u740 and loves it. It is quite the sexy little gadget, but would some LG phone be better? Oh I hate this. Don’t care about a camera, don’t care about music, just want a phone and maybe good (easy) texting. Thoughts?

Taken with my new toy, a Canon A550 PowerShot. It dawned on me that my current digital camera was approaching ten years old! Yikes! It’ s not a great photo, because a) I’m not a great photographer and b) I haven’t begun to read the manual, but the neat thing is that I took it from all the way across the pool, with all sorts of zoom action going on. Yay! I can get pictures now where my children are actually recognizable!

Now my daughter is busy reading the manual for her new camera, and taking pictures of her bloody dog.

I got my new Palm in the mail a few days ago, and it seems to be working fine. I’m very happy to have my brain back. Amazon sent me a confirmation that my dead Palm had been received, then sent me a notice saying that they were refunding a certain portion of the purchase price. Their refund policy for things over 30 days is around 80% of the purchase price, and frankly for things like electronic gadgets I think that’s quite generous, given the abuse that these things suffer (who’s to say that mine didn’t die because I dropped it a lot, for example [I DID NOT DROP IT, EVER]). Their refund notice looked something like this:

276.00 original price

-5.50 shipping

-4.40 something else

211.00 refund

Now of course those numbers don’t add up, or should I say subtract down; so I wrote a reply, asking for clarification on the amount deducted per their refund policy. I truly didn’t complain, I said that I understood their refund policy wasn’t 100% of the price, I just wanted the actual number they were deducting, but by God if I didn’t get a note back saying that they were refunding the difference as well! Mystifying to me, but wow, I got a brand-new brain after 9 months, with no cost but shipping. I like that. Chalk me up as a happy Amazon customer.

My Palm T|X died the other day. I am devastated. I had to write notes to myself on, on … paper. It was unnerving. I actually printed out a paper calendar today.

I also ordered a new Palm T|X from Amazon. I believe (oh please oh please) that they will take the old one back and give me roughly 80% of its purchase price as a refund. As the price has fallen about 10% since I bought mine, I will end up being out $30 plus whatever I pay for shipping. In my saner moments I question this decision; after all, this first one didn’t even last a year, and in general reviews online were so-so on the quality of the PalmTX. But I am so hooked on the e-mail checking, the big color screen, the web surfing. I know other people who swear by their smart phones, but the screen size, oh my poor eyes. I want my new Palm and I want it NOW!