Portable PCs

I am really getting settled down now with the various systems I have put together. I really like using gmail for, duh, my email, and the Yahoo! calender is coming in very handy. I am pretty confident, having thought about it, that I am going to put the webmail notes hack into place, and of course I really like WordPress as a blog engine, and am settled into Bloglines for my RSS feeds for now.

The only difficulty with all of this is the fact that none of it is available without a PC. I really need to get some sort of handheld device, if only to take notes and things whilst offline. But even better would be if I could email, access my calender and post to here from an online PDA type device. Is this possible? I don’t know much about them. Plus, I haven’t any money for this kind of thing. Perhaps I should just forget about it all…

More Wasp Factory

10.15 Am now on page 132 of The Wasp Factory now, roughly the half-way point. It isn’t getting any more normal! Banks’ writing, though, is superb. He keeps it full of dark suspense, and the black humour is hilarious and horrific. I wanted to read this partly because I knew it to be somewhat macabre and it certainly hasn’t disappointed. I can imagine it being a book I would want to re-read, though obviously not exactly for pleasure…

Gmail Journal

Interesting post here on using a gmail (or indeed any free webmail account) as a journal or note-taking system. The great thing about using Gmail is of course the labels which means you can organise your notes easily. I might try using this, although I do tend to use this blog to make notes of things.

Perhaps I might use my spare Yahoo! email address for this, becuase at least then it is in the same place as my online calender and stuff. It would be easy enough to set up folders on the email account for each type of note, which I would then put in the subject header, meaning that stuff can easily be found.

I have 50 Gmail invites to give away, by the way.

Sideways

I have just invested in this:

Sideways, by Rex Pickett

Which I saw in Waterstones, strangely without a UK price on the back. It turned out it was £8.99.

My interest was first sparked by this article in the Guardian, which made it sound like a very amusing read:

One final point: Rex Pickett did not, just for the record, stagger into a winery and drink down the wine from the dump bucket, as Miles does. “No,” Pickett says. “I did not do that in a winery. I did it at a high-end tasting.” He laughs. “Everyone else was horrified. But I thought, hey, there’s a thousand dollars’ worth of wine in there, and I need another drink.”

It is also quite remarkably bound. It’s, er, floppy. I can open in on my desk and it just stays on the page I want, without breaking the spine at all. Great!