Following the upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4, lots of smaller stuff got broken. One of those things that affected me was that PocketMac, which I use to sync my iPaq with my Macs, stopped working. And then with the upgrade to 10.4.1, it got broken again.

I get frustrated pretty easily when something like this gets broken, since it rendered my iPaq (which functions as my portable brain) more or less useless for the things I use it for.

Luckily for me, Shelley still hasn’t sold her old Palm (which I shall hereafter refer to as “Plam,” both because I think it’s funny and because it seems to be catching on). And actually, the term originated, so far as I know, on the Palm usenet newsgroup back in the last century.

So I started using Shelley’s Plam, which synced up, no muss, no fuss, and worked flawlessly. No extra software to buy. No hitches. It just worked. Like a Mac is supposed to.

All was good, except that this older Plam had some limitations that didn’t sit well with me. The screen is too small (which is one of the reasons I switched to the iPaq in the first place). You can’t rotate it. The keyboards for it are expensive and, without going into detail, are difficult for me to type on. It won’t use wireless cards.

But it did most of what I needed it to. Except store the location of meetings. Or assign then categories without some third-party application.

And the fonts were chintzy.

So the other night, as Shelley and I were preparing our technology for London, I decided to give the iPaq another try. See, the last time we were in London, I had a fair ride every morning on the very, very swampy Northern Line from Waterloo up to Euston Station, and then a short walk from Euston Station down to the British Library. With my laptop, power adapter, zip disks, notes, and everything else in my satchel, I felt increasingly like a pack animal.

Even though I have a significantly lighter laptop now (my old one was a Powerbook 3400c; my new one is a 12″ Powerbook), when you takes off to the British Library for the day, it’s never just the laptop. It’s all the crap I mentioned before, plus the cable-lock. So while you start off with a 5 lb laptop, you wind up with 10 lbs of stuff to wag around. And London in the summer—millions of people, concrete everywhere, cars all over the place—can be fairly balmy. Actually, it can be downright miserable.

All I need to do is transcribe from the documents I’ll be working on and get them into so kind of word processing document. The iPaq and wireless keyboard are ideal for this. They’ll both fit in the pocket of a pair fo cargo pants. It’ll create Word documents natively. And it’ll have far better battery life than my Powerbook.

So that’s the plan. I spent part of yesterday and today getting the iPaq up and running again, and all seems good to go.

There was one small problem.

The ebook reader that came with Shelley’s Plam has a book on it that I had started to read, and I was kind of interested in finishing it. You see, I tend to read old books, and really only pick up new ones in airports or if they win the Man Booker Prize.

But I kind of got into this book. I don’t know why. I would read a few pages at night before I fell asleep, and I gues I just sort of got caught up.

Once I got the iPaq all set up, I went to eBooks.com figuring I’d buy it. It was only $10, so I did. On my Powerbook. When I got to the download page, it balked, telling me in apologetic terms that I needed to use Microsoft Internet Explorer to complete the transaction. No doubt so I could download a virus. I launched IE and went back to the page, which promptly stalled out. I launched OmniWeb and told it to tell the server it was IE. Same stall.

We only have one PC in the house, and I decided to try it. It asked me to jump through eleventeen hoops, installing this and that, “activating” something, installing something else, partnering my iPaq with it, getting a hotmail account, and generally doing things the Microsoft Wayâ„¢.

I don’t like the Microsoft Way. That’s why I quit using their operating system, which, of course, asks you to click a button labeled “start” to turn it off.

But, by God, I jumped through those hoops, and now I can finish my Star Trek novel.

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