Oh God, stuck in Limbo again

Just about a year ago, (now), I set out on the road. Seeking my fame and fortune... OK, enough of the Credence Clearwater Revival nostalgia trip, and due to the all-invasive nature of Google it's not even worth asking you lot to remember the name of the song, anyone can copy and paste that line into a search engine and shout 'Lodi' before you've finished reading this paragraph. The correct title was something like 'Oh God, stuck in Lodi again', but I really can't be bothered to Google to confirm that. You can do it, if you wish.

So, let's start again. Just about a year ago, I got into work on a Monday morning, after a drive of 270 miles, plugged my PDA into the charger, plugged it into the mains, switched on, and watched it flash the LED's dismally for a few seconds before dying. I was distraught, my life revolved around that thing. I switched on the desktop computer, and thought I'd better email a particular friend and tell her that there was no point texting me until I had got a replacement. The computer started up, but couldn't connect to the internet. The firewall in Holland was down. Fortunately I had synchronised the PDA with that computer, so I could dig out a phone number and give her a quick call. It's the only time we've ever spoken. I find that a bit sad, the internet has changed our lives so much that texts and emails and online chats have replaced the human voice.

Still, I managed to call my mobile company and discovered that the monthly rental I paid included a handset insurance policy, which would almost cover the cost of a replacement, there was simply the matter of a £25 excess charge. I said "ring it on, just give me the new phone." The problem was, my particular PDA, the O2 XDA 2s, was now obsolete. I would have to choose a different model. This threw me straight away, because I had bought a fold-away keyboard and become used to it, but after looking through the alternative phones, I discovered the XDA Mini also had the infra-red port needed to interface with the keyboard, and looked a nice little gadget. So I chose it. Then came the real problem, getting it to me. The place where I was working was over 12 miles square, and had a multitude of front gates. My particular office only had an internal address, and the phone carrier would only deliver to a post-code. I gave them the post-code of the head office, three miles away, and they said they couldn't deliver to that, because it was only a PO Box code. "Alright," I said, "I can live without it for this week, send it to my home address, I'll collect it on Friday." There was a problem, I was told, because the carrier who bought me the phone had to pick up the old phone and take it away with him. I would have to take the useless handset home with me on Friday, and get the Tynemaiden to do the exchange the following week. I would be without my PDA for a whole fortnight.

I thought a bit, called the mobile company again, spoke to the third different person, and agreed a way forward. I could supply the address of the security gate nearest to me, including the postcode, and the person I was speaking to managed to persuade the carrier company to meet me at that gate the next day, and the deal was duly done.

I was happy enough with my new toy, although the screen wasn't quite so large as the earlier model, and it predictably enough used the mini-SD memory cards instead of the SD cards. I had plenty of SD's but no minis. But the Argos store over the way had one left in stock. I re-synched all the details that had been on the old PDA with the new toy, downloaded a driver for the stowaway keyboard, and life went back to normal.



Here it is, complete with keyboard. If you want to see what the old XDA 2s looked like, follow this path What goes up...: The limits of my Geekiness are almost miniscule

Last Saturday, I was sitting behind the stall at Frome's indoor collectors market, filling in time between customers (all two of them), by typing in the handwritten pages I had sent home from Scandinavia during my travels. I had done this on the previous Wednesday, and it had made up for the lack of sales, because I felt the time had not been wasted. After almost both sides of the tiny pencil writing on page 7 had been converted into an RTF file courtesy of Word Mobile, I stood up, stretched, and glanced down. The screen had gone grey, with a few smudgy darker lines across it. I picked it up, turned it off and on again, shook it, reset it, and realised with that awful sinking feeling you get when you come up against an insoluble problem, that it was broken.

Later that afternoon, back home, I worked out that everything was working except for the display. I could couple the XDA up to the laptop by the USB lead and see all the files, with the exception of the un-saved Word document. I could copy files between the two machines. But I could not get the display working, and since it is a touch-screen device, couldn't effectively use it. I called up O2 and asked for a replacement, since I was still paying the handset insurance. There was nobody in the insurance section to speak to me, so I was given instead a complimentary £10 voucher.

Today, Monday, I called the O2 insurance section, and managed to negotiate a replacement. The XDA Mini, like my earlier XDA 2s, is now obsolete. No matter, because if there was one thing I had been dissatisfied with, it had been the small screen, and the XDA Exec they said I could have was almost identical in size to my original, and much-missed, XDA 2s. And, it has an infra-red port so I could still use my stowaway keyboard. They arranged to deliver it to me for the next day, and I got the dead Mini and power supply ready to hand over in exchange.

So, what was life like for two days without a PDA? Strangely enough, I managed. In fact, I actually found a better way of having mobile computing facilities without having to cart around a car battery and mains inverter to run a laptop on.



I dug through my collection of old computers and came up with this.

Remember it? It was the Amstrad battery-powered NC100 computer. It was advertised with the slogan "If you can't use this dedicated word-processor within 5 minutes, we'll give you your money back." I bought mine very cheaply, it was one of those where Amstrad had given someone their money back, and I only paid £50 for it. It used 4 AA-sized batteries, and ran for days on a single set. I took it on the plane to Japan with me, typed up the daily reports on it and printed them out on the Kawasaki Nikko Hotel's printer before faxing them back to England. I took it on the five-week sea survey for an underwater phone cable route where I was a Customer's Representative, again typing up the daily reports on the ship's printer before faxing them back. I used it on trains when I travelled between Wiltshire and Lancashire doing some power-station work.

You see, it had two distinct advantages over the 'proper' laptop I also had, which ran Windows for Workgroups 3.11. The first advantage was, it started up instantly. There was no boot-up sequence, no waiting while all the windows opened and the icons arranged themselves. Switch on, and you were instantly at the place you had been when it last switched off. The second advantage was that it would run continuously for well over a day on 4 little batteries, where the laptop might manage 3 hours on a pack the size of four king-size chocolate bars.

I stopped using it about six years ago, when I stupidly plugged the wrong mains adaptor into it. After reading about a simple fix on the internet, I mended it myself, just so that I knew it was ready should I ever need it again. I started using it a year or so later, when I went to work at the strange company in Swindon. It was the machine I left out overnight inadvertently and upset the security guards. (See What goes up...: Back in the juggling game again).

So, on Saturday, I started it up soon after confirming the XDA Mini wasn't going to come back to life, and began typing in the pages I had seen swallowed by the dead XDA. I was determined that, if I was going to continue sitting hopefully behind ranks of cuddly toys and assorted pictures in a market hall, I was going to be able to continue typing in my handwritten notes. And, for all the convenience it offers, the XDA Mini had two serious defects; it drank power when using the infra-red port to talk to the stowaway keyboard, and it frequently locked up and needed resetting. Well, it's Windows, it has to crash, doesn't it?

After a while, I realised that the main drawback with the NC100 was the screen; not the size, the 8 line by 80 character display actually showed as much text as the XDA Mini, but the problem was the angle of the screen. I found myself having to lean forwards and peer into it when the sunlight was in a particular position. So I dragged out my other toy, something I bought on ebay last year, the big-brother to the NC100, called, imaginatively enough, the NC200.



Some of you might recognise it, because I gather the schools used them for quite a while, badged up under a different name. It has a display twice the size of the NC100, but more importantly, it can be angled to suit the user. I've spent a couple of hours sitting out in the sunlight on the platform, typing in my travels. And guess what? It's more convenient to use than I first thought it would be. It's the funny letters, you see? I was wandering around Scandinavia where every other place-name has an umlaut, or a ring, or a strike-through in the letter O, and getting those characters in Word is tedious. OK, you can have 'charmap' open on the laptop and copy and paste letters in, but that's a bit of a pain, and I still haven't found out how to do anything similar in Word Mobile. The Amstrad word processor, called Protext, has a beautifully simple method that only needs two key-presses.

It's made me realise how far we've come since the early days of computing. My book was first started on a Tandy 100, and then continued on a Sinclair QL. I used to run a word-processor called Wordstar on CP/M and then DOS machines, but as Windows gained power I had to get to grips with WordPerfect, then Word, as my customers had all standardised on these heavyweights. Now, I am getting to grips with using MediaWiki and PHWiki on my home machines and servers. It's a continual learning curve, as new versions of the operating system come out and force new versions of the programs which run on it to be released, and new developments on the web promise to end the rule of disk-based programs for ever. I think we might have come too far. I have enjoyed the sheer simplicity of tapping away on the NC200's rather clumsy keyboard, and the lack of worry about resets and lock-ups. A simple machine, but I only want it to do a simple task.

Back indoors is my laptop, on which I collate and organise the growing amount of notes and drafts that will one day have to be printed out, double-spaced, and sent to a publisher, (or several, probably), to hopefully then emerge in the bookshops. It runs Windows XP Multimedia edition, but drinks power, and is a pain to use in bright sunlight. What a waste of the day, to be sitting indoors in the shade, just so as to be able to see what you're typing.



I have made one minor modification to my laptop. Here it is.

I have ripped off the Capslock key, because I am so tired of accidentally hitting it when I meant to either tap shift or A, and seeing wHAT YOU TYPE ALL COME out like that before you realise your mistake. Why, for God's sake, do we need a capslock key? Who types everything in capitals anyway, except for newbies and trolls on usenet? And why, if you have to have such a key, must it be put right next to the second most frequently used letter of the English alphabet, and just above the shift key as well?

Oh, and as a final little gem, the Tynemaiden took a phone call for me while I was out on a cycle ride. It was from O2. They had been evacuated from their offices because of a fire in an adjacent chemical works, and my replacement phone may not be arriving tomorrow after all. Is that fate telling me to go back to the simple solutions? Small isn't always best, you know, and sometimes battery power, like staying power, is more important in the long run.