All set? Good!

Friday was a darned eventful day, in both good and bad ways. We'll address the bad ways first.

Richard Sorenson passed away on Friday, after long illness. He was my uncle, married to Joann Burns Sorenson, my father's sister. Uncle Dick (not to be confused with Uncle Dick Burns, who's my father's brother and is still very much alive) was someone who was always a part of my landscape and life, and yet was not someone I'd say I was close to, or knew well. Certainly, Aunt Joann is someone I knew better. She was very active and vocal when I was growing up and we were down visiting "the cousins." Their children, Jan, John and Stein, were among my favorite cousins, with Stein and I, along with my cousin Cory, forming the clique I remember best from my extreme youth.

Uncle Dick was an educator, and a builder of stone walls. He was a builder of many things, clearly very good with his hands. His demeanor was excellent and his manner was friendly and amiable, and I don't remember ever being unhappy around him. He was a good man, and he will be missed.

In the bittersweet department, I have bitten the bullet and nodded to progress. I and Eileen (and soon others in the office) have gotten Palmpilots, and it is time for my Newton Messagepad 2100 to retire with honor. (Or get sold on eBay.)

I love the Newton. I love its look and feel. I like how it learned my horrible handwriting and made it possible to scrawl things out easily and quickly. But it's a bit cumbersome and it's dropping off the zone, and it was time to try out the new one.

We got Palm Vx's, which are high memory, slim things. The thing is tiny, and the engineering is remarkable. For one thing, it just works. Rather than the rather cumbersome procedure for backing up my Newton, I just have to drop the Palm into the cradle, push the HotSync button, and watch it Hotsync. If I make changes to my online organizer/address book, they're slurped onto the Palm. If I want to add, say, online books or software or junk, I put them in the install queue and they're installed on the next HotSync. It's really very simple and brilliant.

And the Palm is tiny. I can walk around with it in my pocket with no problem. The Newton was a hair inconvenient, and so it got left at the office a lot.

That being said, there's no way I'll be taking notes in meetings on my Palm, like I did my Newton. Graffiti isn't meant for fast writing, and it's a bit stupid about putting in spaces. The Palm is more of a classic organizer, with simple notes and information able to be dropped on it, along with the ability to store large amounts of text and some simple amusements.

Having it very much reminds me of the old Apple IIe's I'd use, or my old Apple IIc computer. It's got a lot of the same basic level games (including ports of Zork and Adventureland, no less. And Lode Runner! Now there's an old memory for you...) and the like. I have a copy of a rock/paper/scissors emulation on mine, sans graphics. It reminds us well that once we only needed 64k or 128k or RAM and we were perfectly happy.

In Entertainments, I've also downloaded a lot of Doc files, which are Palm Documents. I've got The Wind in the Willows and The Man Who Knew Too Much and a bunch of reference works.

So it's not the Newton, but it's a good amount of fun and it's well put together, and I enjoy it.

Now, how to keep my more rabid Palm associates from bombarding me with cool minutia for it.... I almost feel like I'm taking up Magic: The Gathering -- it's not the game, it's the gamers.

Which brings us to the cool department. I've had my outline for the extended writeup of Alaemon, the Demon Prince of Secrets, accepted by Steve Jackson Games, for the In Nomine game. Which is extremely exciting stuff for me. I mean, I've been involved with role playing games for a couple of decades now, but finally something I'm doing can go back into it.

I've had professional publications before, but not in this market and not for so large a company. That alone is exciting. To have it in SJGames, which is one of the major players and a big part of my landscape... well, that's gravy.

I have a couple of months. I'm waiting on the revised, "in canon" version of the Outline to come back to me, and then it's going on my top priority list. But I was fair to dancing -- I like to write, and I like to write things that people will read. This is really exciting for me, and I can't wait to get into it.

And yes, my draft Outline is sitting as a Doc file on my Palm now. What did you expect?