Last night, after reading Leveck's week long blog on his
trip (written on his Sony Clie PEG-UX50)[1] and tfurrow's
commentary on writing offline being "more productive, more
introspective, and more fun"[2], I went downstairs, dusted
off a very old box, and pulled out my HP Jornada 680. I've
always been careful about storing the battery properly, and 
it seems to have paid off. I put the battery and the backup 
coin cell in, and it fired right up. 

There, in all it's glory, was the calibration screen. So I
calibrated it (poke, poke), set the date and time (it's not
1998 anymore, Toto!) and left it to charge overnight.

This is why I find myself sitting at the dining room table,
having a drink, and typing to that charming faux-typewriter
sound. 

The Jornada was always a bit of a strange but intriguing
little device. The first time I saw one was in 1998. I
wanted it badly (it was so ... pocketable!), but I was a
student and it was well over $1000 CDN. So I just looked. At
Christmas several years later (2006, I think), I stumbled
across the HPC:Factor and HPCNEC websites and the
fascination started all over again. A few years after that,
an NEC MobilePro 900 appeared on eBay for a reasonable price
and I snapped it up. It was a fun device. I spent hours
setting it up, installing a custom ROM created by a woman
named cmonex (you can still dig up her very gopher-esque
website on archive.org[3]), and even streaming internet
radio with it. But then I drifted into Palm devices again,
the MobilePro was sold to some anonymous character in
Chicago, and life went on...

Until the HPC bug hit again. This particular little Jornada
was put up for sale on eBay by someone holding an estate
sale. It was long enough ago that you could still find
miscategorized items (eBay suggests the proper categories
now) and it was definitely miscategorized. I got it for $5
and about $10 shipping. Since I'm a tech hound, I already
had a PCMCIA WiFi card that worked with it, and the first
few nights after I got it were spent sitting out on my
porch, drinking beer, and reading the Paxil diaries on
Kuro5hin.org and Slashdot. The author, McGrew, was the only
good thing ever to happen on Kuro5hin, and has since
compiled the diaries into a book. I highly recommend it.
Very Bukowski-esque. You can get it (free) at
mcgrewbooks.com[4].

Anyways, the Jornada's WiFi days are long since over, since
it only supported WEP encryption. But it seems fairly good
for hacking out phlog entries. I must confess, though, that
the little keyboard is cramped and is taking some time to
get used to again. The ancient Palm LifeDrive and the Palm
IR keyboard might be better, even with that hinge in the
middle of the space bar, exactly where my thumb usually
makes contact. Who designed that thing anyways?

The other news of note today is that I've discovered that
running an "e-mail, web, news or other similar server" or a
"relay server" is a violation of my ISP's terms of service.
They've even blocked all of the typical ports (not on the
router, but rather system-wide for all residential
customers). But they didn't block gopher port 70 ;) I doubt
they would care much about a gopher server, but it throws a
bit of a wrench in my home server plans, especially as
regards XMPP. A business account, which permits servers, is
another $240/year. So I might just get one of those little
$15/year VPS's. It's irritating though. The internet was
invented to allow bi-directional communication.

I guess that's it for me tonight. Keep writing, people. I'm
really enjoying your phlogs.

[1] gopher://1436.ninja/0/Phlog/20181113.post 
[2] gopher://grex.org/0/%7etfurrows/phlog/latest/adl_roadtripGopher.txt
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20110108205750/http://hpcmonex.net/
[4] https://www.mcgrewbooks.com/Paxil/index.html