I succumbed to my geeky nature last weekend. Though I am not 100% committed to having any good reason to have one, I ordered a PDA. Specifically, I ordered a TRGPro Palm Pilot compatible PDA.

Now, I have never been a Datebook sort of person and in fact I simply don't have a complicated enough schedule to need a datebook. But I do have a lot of things that could be organized into task lists. And there is the fact that, as a System Administrator, I am always being stopped in the halls by people who want to report problems, but haven't learned to send email to our trouble queue.

Of course, there is always my grocery list, which at the moment I write up on a note pad and carry in my checkbook. And lose half the time and have to wing it when I get to King Soopers.

I do have another excuse/reason. I always wanted an RPN scientific calculator. About the time I stopped being a poor student and could actually afford one, HP stopped making their RPN scientific calculators. "What do you mean 'they discontinued the HP15C?'"

Since then HP has started making RPN scientifics again, but they are all graphing calculators. I never wanted a graphing calculator. I've always viewed that as a calculator trying to be a computer and not really doing a good job of it. To a certain extent, I can visualize equation graphics and when an equation exceeds my visualization abilities, well I jump onto a real computer and use IDL from Research Systems, Inc.

IDL is an interesting programming language that has fantastically optimized array/vector operations and a very simple plotting interface that encourages you to make one-off plots just for the hell of it. On the other hand, you can work carefully and make publication quality plots.

But getting back to the Palm PDAs, there is what appears to be a very good RPN calculator available, RPN 2.57 It's programmable, extensible and who knows, might get graphing functions put into it someday, at a screen resolution better than the HP graphing calculators today.

It's all right. I do see the inconsistency of objecting to graphing calculators for having pretensions of being a computer, while accepting PDAs. The cases are enough different that I can get by it. Using a ~PDA as a calculator strikes me as no different from using "xcalc -rpn" under Xwindows on my Linux box. It's not a case of trying to work at the limit of the PDA's abilities.