Dibs and dabs: Investing in dead technology, how to survive November, and things that scared me as a kid that don’t scare me anymore

This is one of those buffet posts, so dig in.

I. I bought a Palm T|X two days ago.

I’ve been a Palm fan for a few years now; I bought a IIIxe in 2000, and then in 2003 an expensive and not-as-cool-as-it-looked Tungsten C, which had a crappy built-in web browser and dodgy wi-fi. I have been mostly using it for reading e-books for the last couple of years, but when the charger connector broke, I knew it was time for a replacement. I figured (maybe incorrectly, I’m afraid) that I’d need a Palm OS machine so I wouldn’t lose my investment in all (nearly 40) of my e-books. The problem is that, while Palm once had a bevy of models, it is now down to three, only one of which has wi-fi. I could buy another model and then get wi-fi with an expansion card (an SD card with a sort of antenna sticking out the top of it), but I needed that slot for my books, all of which are on a minuscule 128 mb card, which still has room for about 90 more books, part of the great appeal of e-books for me. Anyway, the T|X had a big, beautiful screen and alleged updates to Palm’s web browser, so I decided to get one.

Problem: where to buy? I used to see PDAs (Palm-based and others) all over the place, at London Drugs and Staples and such. I could order online, but if I did I had to wait and pay for shipping, and Palm’s site was asking C$399 for a machine that costs US$299, or LESS than C$299 with our current insanely strong dollar. Ordering off the US site was impossible without a US shipping address… we’re more than 3 hours north of the US border here, a fact that I never lamented before as much as I do now. So I was stuck with finding it in a store here. This was no easy task: PDAs are dead. They’ve been dying since around 2003, when mobile phones started to usurp many of their functions. Palm is now, for all intents and purposes, a smart phone manufacturer. Thing is, I don’t want a Treo; I already have a cell phone. I can’t even fathom reading a book or using a great program like Documents to Go on that dinky 240×240 Treo screen. Ain’t gonna happen.

I managed to find one at Staples. So here I am, late adopter, not going gently into the night. I just bought a PDA. What a bizarre thing to read, in November, 2007.

II. November bad.

November should be renamed “flu.” When I think if November, I think of the flu (especially today since I am getting a flu shot this afternoon). It is, no question, my least favourite month: the days are getting very palpably short, without the happy turnaround of the solstice that December has; the trees are bare (in Alberta at least); there is no longer that October hope for a last shot at Indian Summer; a cold spell (which we’ve avoided so far this one) reminds you that we have five months more of this to endure; everybody is getting sick and coughing and puking and threatening me with mumps and mono… it’s basically the month that only a sadist can love.

Nothing can redeem November, but I’ve made it through 43 of them so I must be doing something right. Since I’ve moved so far north (hey, Ontario readers: Calgary is as far north as Moose Factory. We’re far, far, FAR north of Sudbury. We’re north of Kapuskasing. We’re north of Kenora. Isn’t that amazing?), my panic about the short winter days–not S.A.D., just a short of mourning and melancholy–has become acute. Now, thank God, Calgary has the sunniest winter days of any city in Canada, so one does not have to slit one’s wrists or murder everyone in one’s apartment complex as they do in winter in Vancouver, which is gray and drizzle for six straight months. This leads me to my list of suggestions for surviving November:

1. Insult other cities, as I just did to Vancouver. It’s always worse somewhere. Edmonton is a good whipping boy here.

2. Keep abreast of sunrise and sunset tables and count the days until the earliest sunset and latest sunrise. They’re not on the same day. Make a game of it.

3. Um… I can’t think of anything else. November sucks.

III. That which did not kill me is now pretty lame.

I was scared of my own shadow (really!) when I was a kid. If my mom and my siblings are reading this maybe some can remember how I locked myself in the bathroom crying because I’d read, this was in 1973, that Comet Kohoutek would destroy the world. I didn’t reason, at nine years old, that locking myself in the bathroom (a bathroom shared with eight other people, I must add) would not do much good, but it was par for the course for me. If I wasn’t convinced I had cancer (yes, quaint old cancer), I was terrified that the sun was going to blow up. I am not making this up. I was a very, very weird kid. I’m good weird now, but back then- jeez.

Anyhoo, one thing that used to really freak me out when I was a kid were any sorts of bizarre images that I’d catch on TV, pop art things or weird sound effects. It’s hard to describe this and harder to explain this, but do you remember the “our feature starts in five minutes” and “our feature presentation” trailers at the drive in? With the horrible distorted soundtrack? THOSE used to scare the hell out of me. Being outside the car, like en route to or from the snack bar or the bathroom, with those inscrutable things on the screen made me feel like I was in the midst of an alien invasion. Now I see them and just feel a kind of bemused nostalgia.

And so it is with many things. When I was 13 or 14 I saw this piece of interesting animation on PBS’s International Festival of Animation, and it haunted me. It’s still a provocative film, and that “tikka tikka, tikka tikka, tikka tikka” soundtrack is still creepy, but when I uncovered it yesterday (”YES! Hunger! I’ve been looking for this for years!”) at the NFB site, I was hoping to recapture some of that horror. It’s not there. I can appreciate it as an artistic product, but this must be another example of lost innocence. Or maybe I really am a grown-up, now.