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I haven't the faintest idea what I'm going to type. If that's not exciting, I don't know what is.

Life has been a long list of troubles and a short list of minor pleasures that I've had to savor with much conscious effort, because there haven't been any major pleasures to savor.

I guess the biggest of the minors is that I've decided I like my PDA. I spent much time stripping PalmGear HQ of everything I thought was potentially useful. Out of 4300 listings there, I evaluated 600 and some programs, and kept about 70 of them, nearly all freeware. Of that 70, perhaps 25 I am still evaluating, most of those being shareware or commercial software.

Here's a hint for you. Buy one of the good database programs. Many, many, many of the programs on PalmGear fit into similar classes and a lot of these are essentially databases. I would guess that there are probably more than 100 check register programs available on PalmGear. I bought HanDBase and made a database check register which is better than half the programs out there, as good as another quarter, and though there may be better check registers among the 20 or so more programs, A) mine is tailored to what I wanted to do with it and B) I didn't have to wade through 100 programs to find the 20 really good ones and then evaluate each of them.

I did the same thing with auto mileage programs. One HanDBase database that does only what I want, no added features that I couldn't care less about.

Of course, this scheme doesn't work for everything. Games, doc readers, stopwatches, clocks, calculators. There was still a load of things to evaluate.

Well, surprise! My black mood didn't really dominate today's entry. I got some really bad news at work today, but a couple of hours relaxation has at least pushed it back off the top of my mind for now.

After a couple of weeks of comparison shopping, I bought myself a digital camera. No one had any kind of deal going. Each store had the same selection of models at the same price down to the penny. Talk about annoying. What good does it do to comparison shop if you can't find a deal?

But I found a little bit of a deal. I ended up buying a little more of a digicam than I really needed because one store had an open box special on a camera that was beyond my range normally. The special dropped it down to about $30 above my limit and I gritted my teeth and bought it.

Probably the nicest feature of the camera is that it uses Compact Flash memory cards, just like my TRGpro PDA. Which, by the way, arrived a little over a week ago. I've already changed the batteries in that sucker once. Of course, the "Runtime" program that I installed showed that I had run it for 26 hours between Sunday and Thursday. I sort of had new toy syndrome.

Of course, I now get to play around with moving stuff back and forth to the Compact Flash card. That should eat my batteries some, too. I hope that I will eventually tail off on the high usage and my batteries will start lasting something more like the advertisements, as I start using more like the mythical "typical" user.

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.

I liked the look of Robert Cringely's web page so when his most recent "Pulpit" announced that the look was going to change, I figured I had better get my thieving done soon.

So here's the new look for Swimming Upstream of Unconsciousness.

Web design, the classical way. I.e. find something you like, then steal it.

Busy, busy. Yes, my work has been using me up recently. A really good sign of too much stress at work is waking up at 3 in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep because you are thinking about your task list at work.

Well, contrary to the optimistic prediction in my last installment, I may have to write a driver of some sort myself. Yikes!

What happened? Everyone is as busy as I am. And the guys working on the next version of XFree86 have been completely rewriting the input model for X. This means they aren't too interested in creating a module for the old version of X, since it probably won't work with their new input model.

Here is what I want to do:

There already exists a USB driver that talks to the Graphire and translates its information onto an input device.
There already exists an XFree86 module that can read from a serial Wacom Graphire.
I want to write a program with listens to the input device and emulates a serial port Graphire.

Here is what I am capable of doing:

Bit of a mismatch there at the moment.

Well, I have started trying anyway. I've begun converting xf86Wacom.c into a program which opens a serial device and simply reports to the screen on the data it finds there. This is solely a test program so that I don't have to bind my X pointer to the output of a program under development.

The reason I opted for this route is because I didn't want to write an X module. But I am finding that in order to get my test program working, I need to download a huge chunk of the X sources, just to get the defines that xf86Wacom.c uses. Yuck. I have MITophobia, the irrational fear of the X consortium. I don't want to dig into their source code.

So doing the dishes and the laundry are looking a lot more attractive and I haven't even begun thinking about the real program yet. I have a feeling that before this program is done, I will have turned my compost heap.