Jornada 820

It's always a good idea to check new homes for corpses.  It seems a new homeowner in Toledo, Ohio had a nasty suprise waiting in the living room for him.  Boy, you'd think someone would check the house before just putting it up for auction.  All I have to say, is that the new homeowner is going to need some serious rental time with a Rug Doctor to get that smell out. This quote kills me:

Dean Nowakowski, 33, who lives two houses away, said the last time he saw Bearringer was more than two years ago. “I always wondered what happened to that dude,” he said. “It got awful quiet over there.”

I left work a bit early so that I could go to the eye doctor.  I'm glad I didn't do it earlier in the day, as I'm just now starting to regain my vision well enough to read my computer screen.  They dialated my pupils, and it took about 6 hours to wear off.  Prior to that, it looked to me as if someone had smeared my nice monitor with Vaseline, since I couldn't focus well enough to read anything.  It was worth it, as he discovered that the contacts I'd been wearing for the past two weeks were the wrong size.  The ones I'm now wearing are much more comfortable, and I'm 20/20, albeit a very fuzzy 20/20, since the contacts don't correct for my astigmatisms.  In case you're curious, my vision is pretty bad, my contacts correct -6.5 diopters in both eyes.  So, without them, I can see clearly for about 5-7 inches...

It looks like I'm going to have two PDA's now.  We managed to get a couple of Hewlett-Packard's Jornada 820 devices ordered today.  I say "managed" because it was rather a hassle.  The 820 is being discontinued, which is why it's so cheap, but there is no immediate replacement or equivalent to it.  The only place that seems to have them in stock is HPShopping.com, which does not take purchase orders.  Working for a University where the purchasing process is not a simple one, I can't just order equipment on the purchasing credit card.  HPShopping told me to contact the educational division of HP, who can take P.O.'s.  Of course, they don't have any of the 820's in stock, only the HPShopping.com division does.  The solution wound up being the Dean ordering the devices on her credit card, and then she'll have the University reimburse her for the cost.  What a pain.

So why do I need this, in addition to my "Visor"?  Well, they're two very different devices.  The Jornada is more of an alternative to a laptop, it's something you can sit down and type out some e-mail on, or surf a web page or two.  You can't do that so easily with the Visor.  But, at $540, it's a lot cheaper than a laptop, only weighs 2.5 pounds, and it can run 10 hours between recharging it's batteries.  You can display simple PowerPoint presentations with it, it's got a standard VGA-out port, and there are quite a few appliations you can run on Windows CE.