The Pitch: It's like The Trial meets Career Opportunities!  

My hands hurt. I wrote something like 4,500 words today and I've decided to relax by quickly jotting down another couple hundred or so.

This is another in a line of test posts, as I'm trying out the blog-by-mail opportunity that Blogger offers. I was never really that interested in blogging by mail (although I've been caught twice at work by people who recognize the interface) until just recently when I got my new writing tool: a Dana Wireless by Alphasmart. I wanted something that could send
and receive emails and maybe surf the web if I wanted it to and so decided
to splurge the extra money on this. I'v e been using a Palm Pilot since,
jeez, I dunno, 1997?, and using it for writing since about '99 and it took
me a long time to realize the reason they kept going bad wasn't because of
anything I was doing to them, it was because they were cheaply assembled.
My last Palm Pilot has been on the rocks for over a year and the one bfore
that lasted only a year, as did the one before that. The ferocious battle
for the PDA market had Palm jamming more and more features in while
keeping the prices as low as possible, so naturally they ended up breaking
sooner and sooner.

I tried looking into the Pocket PCs but they seemed almost as bad: stories
of screens that cracked or filled up with mositure seemed rampant on the
web (although who knows any more what's real testimony on the web and
what's merely competitive trash talk) so I decided to go with something
that would have the Palm OS but wasn't made by Palm. So here I am. The damn email program got slower and slower the longer the email became, so there's something a little half-baked in the Dana's emailing capabilities. In fact, I'd say, generally, that the Dana is, so far, on the pricey half-baked side of things, although still very sturdy. And I've used it to write a great deal in the five days or so since I've had it. If it wasn't for the fact that it's holding all my scrupulously accumulated info I've put on my Palm Pilot, I'd think about returning it and getting an Alphasmart Neo which is about half the price and has an absurdly long battery life (but no Palm OS).