{"id":63,"date":"2006-03-30T22:03:45","date_gmt":"2006-03-31T03:03:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/?p=63"},"modified":"2006-03-30T22:03:45","modified_gmt":"2006-03-31T03:03:45","slug":"paa-personal-analog-assistant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/30\/paa-personal-analog-assistant\/","title":{"rendered":"PAA (personal analog assistant)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I use an analog sheet of paper instead of my personal digital assistant to manage my todo list. A friend recommended I upgrade from the blank pages I currently use to a hand-crafted page from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pocketmod.com\/\">pocketmod.com<\/a>. Maybe I will.<\/p>\n<p>I have a <a href=\"http:\/\/palmone.r3h.net\/us\/products\/handhelds\/tungsten-e2\/\">PDA<\/a> that I use mainly for my vocabulary <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telusplanet.net\/public\/spaw\/\">flashcards<\/a> and playing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.astraware.com\/palm\/bejeweled\/\">Bejeweled<\/a>. Once in a long while I have an appointment or a phone number to look up and it does that too. But it&#8217;s lousy for keeping lists of things to do.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Partly this is because my Apple-branded <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/macosx\/features\/ical\/\">to-do software<\/a> is lousy. (Lousy as to-do software. As a calendar it&#8217;s not half bad. Better than the one that my PDA has, and that&#8217;s a whole separae problem.)<\/li>\n<li>Partly its because it takes forever to sync my PDA with my iBook. To sync at all requires <a href=\"http:\/\/www.markspace.com\/missingsync_palmos.php\">third-party software<\/a>, which runs fine until it starts running the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/macosx\/features\/isync\/\">Apple conduits<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>But mostly it&#8217;s because the input methods on the PDA range from lousy (typing on the on-screen keyboard) to worse (handwriting using Graffiti 2.0).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Instead, I put next to my PDA in my shirt pocket either a 8.5&#8243;x11&#8243; sheet of paper folded in half vertically then thirds horizontally, or, sometimes, a 3.5&#8243;x5&#8243; index card. I can write anything I want on them, including diagrams. That&#8217;s where I generally manage my todos.<\/p>\n<p>Now a friend has pointed me to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pocketmod.com\/\">PocketMod<\/a>, &#8220;the free disposable personal organizer.&#8221; I&#8217;ve played with it and it&#8217;s pretty cool. Give it a try.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nMy first reaction was that they have something downloadable but it requires Microsoft .NET. (Unlike Vista.) Well, I&#8217;ve got rid of my last Windows box months ago and I&#8217;m not going back. So that&#8217;s a dead-end.<\/p>\n<p>My next thought is that they have a downloadable something for Mac OS X. I&#8217;m working on one of the lab machines at school so I can&#8217;t check it out. Save that idea for later.<\/p>\n<p>My third observation is that they have some interactive feature I can use right now. Okay. Let&#8217;s give that a try. Oops. No good. My web browser doesn&#8217;t have the right plug-in loaded. (Nor will it, ever. I enabled JavaScript, didn&#8217;t I? That should be enough, and at some sites, even that is too much.)<\/p>\n<p>Since I&#8217;m at school, I fired up a copy of IE6 (pausing to note how ugly its toolbar is &#8230; but not as ugly as it will be next year) and of course it wouldn&#8217;t be a IE6 if it didn&#8217;t have every plug-in under the sun all quivering anxiously, just waiting to collude with the script kiddies to turn your machine into a zombie SpamBot. But! whatever plug-in it is that PocketMod needs, it has that too. So I played with it and it&#8217;s pretty cute. Give it a try.<\/p>\n<p><em>Update<\/em>. Could it be a Java applet? No way! I knew that Cobol programs had survived the Y2K transition and were still running, but it&#8217;s hard to believe that anybody is still using Java!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I use an analog sheet of paper instead of my personal digital assistant to manage my todo list. A friend recommended I upgrade from the blank pages I currently use to a hand-crafted page from pocketmod.com. Maybe I will. I have a PDA that I use mainly for my vocabulary flashcards and playing Bejeweled. Once [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRqpr-11","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}