New PDA

I got my eye on a new gadget: a Treo 650 Palm PDA/Phone. My current phone and my current PDA are both over five years old. It's about time to replace both of them. Why not kill two birds with one stone? Verizon (my cellular carrier) will be offering the Treo 650 beginning sometime next month. My only reservation is sacrificing analog service as a fallback. The Treo is digital only and digital converage in Michigan is not as extensive as the analog coverage. But I'm gambling that that will change in the next few years.

Moog

I saw Moog at the Detroit Film Theater Monday night. The documentary was a little slower that I expected, mainly due to halting quality of Bob's presentation. I had also expected more demonstrations of the instruments he invented, though a complete solo by Keith Emerson was offered in it's entirety.

Robert Moog has some interesting insights on the nature of invention. His views are decidedly spiritual or meta-physical when he talks about the man-machine connection he experiences with electronic equipment and that musicians experience with their instruments. He states that this connection is really bidirectional: not only does the player control the instrument but the instrument, in some manner, retains memory of the player and thus exerts a force on the musician.

The name "sythesizer" is often presumed to be derived from the premise that the generated sounds are synthetic (and, somehow, not real). Bob debunks this notion, claiming that the name comes from the fact that the sound is sythesized, or combined, from various modular components. Indeed, he says, the sound produced is very real.

I was most impressed by the performance of a young Japanese musician playing a theramin. I've never heard that instrument played with such accuracy. The lyrical impression of a cello was expected but the intonation was impeccable. I would not have believed the demonstration of a stacatto walking bass line in the jazz idiom, complete with triplet "kicks", had I simply heard it without the visual.

Morning Drive

Judy Adams really hit the sweet spot on her WDET program this morning. The lineup starting at 9:00 am was some pretty tasty jazz from Regina Carter, Jean Luc Ponty, and Ron Carter. It really made a long commute enjoyable.

Palm Disaster

My aging Palm Pilot IIIxe recently got wiped clean. That can happen if the alkaline batteries aren't replaced shortly after they're completely drained. I'm very faithful about replacing the batteries and this is the first time since I started using a Palm (about five years ago) I've experienced a complete memory erasure.

The mysterious amnesic event occured on Saturday. I had just referenced the address book on Friday and noted that the battery meter indicated about 50% (is that half full or half empty?). Saturday, while driving my wife's car to a family event, I placed the Palm on the center console. When I later accessed the device to check my schedule, I thought it odd that the digitizer calibration screen was active. And after re-calibrating the touch screen, I discovered that everything was gone. Hard reset.

I suspect the culprit was an EMF (electro-magnetic field) strike. My wife's car is a Saab with the ignition switch in the center console, only centimeters away from where I placed the Palm. The vehicle's key is not a normal mechanical one but rather a plastic fob with RF-tag technology. It's quite possible that a sizeable EMF could be generated when the ignition switch "reads" the key's information. Some of my colleagues who work with key fobs concur.

I've recovered most of the data (addresses, appointments, notes) from a six-month-old backup but all of the 3rd party applications I used to have are lost. Since I first loaded those applications onto the Palm, I've restaged the computer I sync with and I forgot to save the PC copies of those applications. So I'm now on a quest for useful free applications.

One neat thing I found was a compact Bible (with a special reader) from Olive Tree Bible Software, Inc. (www.OliveTree.com). The entire King James Version consumes only 1.4M. Other versions are available, some free and some for sale. The reader features a word search (no need for concordance!) as well as the ability to store your own notes attached to verses. If you want to fill up memory, multiple bible versions can be loaded simultaneously and can even be viewed side-by-side (one over the other, actually) in a split screen mode.

Reading Review

Currently Reading:

• Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter
• Poetics of Music by Igor Stravinsky
• The Gift of Change: Spiritual Guidance for a Radically New Life by Marianne Williamson

Recent Reads:

• Time's Eye (A time Odyssey, Book 1) by Arthur C. Clark and Stephen Baxter
• The Brethern by John Grisham
• The Broker by John Grisham
• The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
• State of Fear by Micheal Crichton
• Theory of Harmony by Arnold Schonberg
• The Journey of Desire: Searching for the Life We Only Dreamed of by John Eldridge
• Study of Counterpoint by J.J. Fux
• Jazz Composition and Orchestration by William Russo
• The Mastery of Love by Miguel Ruiz
• The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz
• The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom