Bleeding Edge of Technology

July 2, 2006

Once upon a time, I thrived living on the edge of technology. Every new gadget that came to market, I just had to have and conquer. I had ISDN before most people even knew what it was (I could go online with my modem AND talk on the phone at the same time - how novel!). When Palm Pilots first came out around 1997, I got one. I worked in medical software at the time and the small company I worked for decided to try to develop a handheld interface to our software for doctors and nurses to have quick access to appointments, patient records, etc. from examm rooms. To achieve this, I was sent to California to attend the Palm Dev Conference, taking my infant son with me and finding daycare out there. As a registered attendee, I won the grand prize drawing of every new Palm device that hit the market in 1998. Very cool!! I had Palms coming out my ears - I didn’t even know what to do with all of them. There was the III, IIIx, V, VII, the first Palmphone (monstrously huge thing), a UPC scanning Palm… the list goes on. I was in geek heaven for that year.

Needless to say, I’ve fallen off the cutting edge as family responsibilities took over during the last several years. I kept the Palm VII throughout it all, as it was my favorite device. In early 1998-2000 I was the only person I knew who could email friends from airport terminals or boring conference sessions, browse the web (text based), post to forums, and get Yahoo! directions when lost driving around looking for some place. Being an online socializer since 1994, the fact that I could stay wired no matter where I was was pure bliss. Slowly, built-in wired apps stopped functioning as the providers no longer supported the Palm plugin. I could still email and browse, though, with my $11/month subscriber charge. Then Palm pulled the plug on the wireless access with the advent of Blackberries and browsing cell phones, and I was suddenly disconnected. I guess that was a technology that failed to take hold while other technologies zoomed ahead (ones I haven’t gotten yet).

Still, my eight-year-old Palm device still chugs on and I still use the calendar and address books built in. I no longer raise the antenna as it serves no purpose. It is a rather large lunk of a device, but I’m attached to it. Imagine my surprise and thrill to find the ScorePAD software plugin actually worked in it! Yay! A new purpose for the old thing! Of course, I lust for a color screen that depicts the field in green and brown, but I can’t be choosy and the monochrome screen functions just fine (after 8 years, I finally figured out how to adjust the contrast to make it comfortably clear and viewable!).

I recently went to the CFUnited conference in Bethesda (only one night, as I didn’t register for the conference). It was more of a social visit to see my buddies from the annual Allaire Macromedia Adobe MAX conferences. I pulled out my Palm VII for some reason while we all sat in the hotel bar and they LAUGHED at me! In fact, they were so amused by the thing that they asked me to pass it around so they could marvel at this hunking lunk of old technology. I said, “but but… look! I can score baseball games on it!!”

“Soooooo?!?” they asked. Ok, obviously they aren’t baseball fans, I thought, and dropped that line of defense, as they popped the antenna up and down in wild wonder.
I was mortified! First off, I’m sitting with a bunch of computer geeks and I get mocked for my lack of current technology. This has NEVER happened to me before! I’ve always prided myself with being ahead of the technological curve.

But then I pulled out my PowerBook to show the pictures of the tree across my driveway.

“Oh look! It’s so SMALL! Ha! It’s only about twice the size of your Palm Pilot!” they roared.

Hmm.. that’s good, right? Maybe there’s hope for me yet.

This has nothing to do with the Nationals, but I thought it was a funny semi-relevant story anyway.

Posted in Baseball - General, Personal, Scoring