Confessions of a Geek

A little over three years ago, for our 25th wedding anniversary, my husband gave me a Dell Axim PDA. After 25 years he’s well trained in the rules of buying me gifts – no clothes; NO kitchen appliances! Garden tools are all right as long as they don't come with small gasoline engines. (The "Weedeater" for our 15th anniversary was a bit of a bust but still better than a blender.) Technology is good. I loved the PDA. It’s even appropriately silver.

The point of a PDA was to have easy access to the library holdings while shopping. Most of the videos for the library come from Wal-Mart. With a Pocket Excel file of all the videos in the library, I can stand in the store and make sure that the video in my hand is not already on the shelf at the library. Or if I see bargain books in a bookstore, I can check to see which titles we don’t have. Very nice.

It turns out that getting the list of holdings out of the library database and into manageable Excel spreadsheets on the PDA is not as trivial as one might hope and it’s past time to update my files again, but it has been useful. And, besides, PDAs do more than spreadsheets. My Dell has calendars, notes, contacts, and task lists that sync with Microsoft Outlook. This means that in one small silver box I keep my address book with phone numbers, my datebook, my grocery list, my to-do list, and miscellaneous notes such as the estimate for a car repair, the hours of the recycling center, the part number for buying vacuum cleaner bags from Sears, and how to update the cell phone. That’s nice. It’s not perfect. I’ve totally missed meetings and appointments because I forgot to check the calendar and didn’t notice the reminder message, but it’s still nice.

Back a year or so, someone mentioned on an internet message board that they used their PDA to play midi files for church services, plugging it into the sound system. This caught my attention. I knew that my PDA would play .mp3 files but the sound quality is certainly nothing to write home about with its chintzy little speaker. I seldom messed with music on it. What was this about plugging it into a sound system? I examined it and discovered something I had completely overlooked – a headphone jack! Voila! I have an mp3 player! It does playlists and shuffles between songs and works with the tape adapters we already had in our cars for portable CD players. This opened up a whole new career for my PDA. Except I needed more memory. I could only squeeze 16 songs onto the SD memory card I had for it. I put a bigger card on my Christmas list. I also found a small CF memory card for the other slot that would hold four songs.

Last week I attended the “Women of Faith” conference in Chicago. During a break, the bag I was carrying somehow became inverted and the velcro pocket holding my PDA wasn’t fastened shut. The PDA hit the floor and the stylus fell out. I gathered it up and was relieved to discover that it still worked. It wasn’t until the following day on my way home that I discovered my music selection was drastically reduced. Closer examination revealed that the SD card slot was empty. All my nice music was in a little memory card left on the floor of a restroom in the United Center in Chicago. I felt such loss. Which is ridiculous. I still had the PDA and it still worked. I still had all of the songs on my laptop at home. I had actually lost nothing except the memory card. But it was gone. Forever gone. (OK, I could contact the United Center and ask them to check lost-and-found and mail it back to me, but short of making that effort it’s gone.) I was sad.

Less than a week later, my husband and I took our daughter to the airport and had time to shop on the way home. At the first store, we headed to “Electronics”. And there it was! The purchase of my dreams. A 512 MB SD card packaged with a translucent reader which converts it into a USB jump drive. I excitedly made the purchase and started the arduous process of extracting it from its plastic armored packaging. So much memory. I wondered about adding more software to my PDA. The one thing it hadn’t become was a portable Bible for when I found myself facing a sermon without the proper resources. I started looking around stores for software and discovered it’s rather pricey.

As we made our way home, my husband spotted a Verizon dealer and decided to take care of a family cell phone crisis. I asked to be dropped off at a nearby K-Mart while he did that. I thought I’d look at clothes. Or maybe luggage. But where did I end up? “Electronics,” of course. This time I found a 64 MB CF card – four times as big as the one I had – marked down to $7. How could I pass up such a bargain?

I came home and, with a greater awareness of the value of software for the device, downloaded a couple of demo programs, including a $14 Bible reader and one free Bible translation. Now, along with the address book, notebook, library card catalog, and .mp3 player, my little silver box contains a portable Bible for life’s little emergencies. And there are yet untapped capabilities. It would happily serve as an alarm clock if I found myself in a Motel 6 and had forgotten to bring my clock radio. I have map software that I need to find a way to load onto it.

I was so excited about my buys I wanted to tell all my friends. But who really cares about memory cards and software for my geeky PDA? I didn’t have a single sensible “girl purchase” to show for my day.

It’s true. I’m a geek. I love my technological toys. Did I mention the GPS I thought I was buying for my husband a few years back? Oh well, maybe another time.