Saturday,
November 17, 2001

Conward bound

Daily word count: 0

Word count for the month: 10,682

Hey, I had to drive, okay?

In short, I'm in Austin at 'Dillocon, having managed to miss all of my panels except the Musketeer fencing demo because I didn't realize that my Saturday panel was at 1:00 PM and after the contretemps of yesterday I wound up sleeping through the alarm and not getting up until 9:00 AM, which made it utterly impossible to get down to Austin in time, since I'm currently without warp drive ability. Oh, and have I mentioned I'm feeling sick as a dog to boot? (I thought you weren't supposed to get Con Crud until AFTER the event.)

However, if I'm feeling better by tomorrow (and I suspect I will be, as I think the illness is related to some battered mushrooms we had at a steakhouse this evening), I will be buckling my swash and playing swishy-poke with Elizabeth, Rachel, Susan Kroupa, Lee and assorted other folk who have been recruited to fill out the temporarily depleted ranks of the Musketeers.

Pray for me?

He's making a list, and checking it twice -- on his PDA, of course

Remember how the Man from McKinney sold me his old Palm III a couple of weeks ago? I discovered just how useful it was to have one of these thingies -- I could read websites off-line, keep all my info in one place, even check my email if I bothered to get the modem adaptor. All in all, it was a very cool piece of kit.

Of course, I then promptly dropped it and broke it, being the klutz that I am.

Anyway, I sent it off to be repaired, so I am currently PDAless. As such, we were talking about it on the way down to Austin, when Lyndon asked me if I liked the Palms. I said, "Oh, yeah, they're really nice, and the newest one is absolutely gorgeous -- I'm going to see about getting one sometime after the holidays."

"What's the newest one?"

"The m505 -- it comes with a color screen, Word-compatible software and a whole bunch of other goodies," I explained. I went on the rave about the ability to download websites and read them off-line, grab e-books and read them anywhere, and how I could then get the collapsible keyboard and be able to write anywhere I felt like it.

Somehow, I'm not quite sure how, this conversation turned into a discussion about Christmas presents, and it now seems that I'm getting a Palm m505 for Christmas. Which is totally fabulous, but now I'm also left with a Palm III with all the goodies (extra Hotsync cradles, styli and a non-collapsible keyboard), and no user.

Hmm. Oh, Mikey. . .