So, I’m at VillageIdiot. Literally: I brought the palmtop with me. I’ve been awake for two hours, and my day is already kinda wrecked. I’m not sure what I was expecting my day to be instead; I just don’t think this was what I’d had in mind.

It started when I woke up and discovered that I had four cigarettes. Which is slightly inaccurate: I knew that when I fell asleep too; but, when I first wake up, I discover all sorts of new things. Like gravity. Newton wasn’t all that special.

So I lurched out into the...whatever this is: the sunlight of Mercury and the temperature of Pluto. Which is why Pluto’s not a planet: it’s not about mass, or geological properties; it’s that no one will ever want to live there. And I wound up at Starbucks on the way to DiamondShamrock for smokes. Kinda dumb, since SmokerFriendly are across the street, next to VillageIdiot, where I now am; and, while the prices are about the same between the two, I kinda like to reward SmokerFriendly for being all smokerfriendly; but, at the time, I didn’t know I was planning to come over here, meaning that I hadn’t noticed how cold it is out or that I was kinda munchy yet.

So, here’s the Review bit: VillageIdiot have these new and special German Skillet things [I’m not sure what they’re really called; the menu’s gone now] with sausage and sauerkraut and...it sounds good, to those of us who like that sort of thing; it’s just, in actuality, not. Avoid. Of course, officially, the thing comes with pancakes, since that’s the only thing VillageIdiot are any good at making; naturally, I wound up getting toast, which they’re not much good at making, thinking the sausage and sauerkraut and all would itself be more than I could really eat. I suppose I was right about that, if for the wrong reasons.

Damnit. I just got hit by the same old question: ‘Is that a computer?!?’ Yup: this is the HP660LX palmtop, from 1997. I’m so advanced, I’ve got an elevenyearold Blackberry here. I should go home now, so I can smoke while writing about having a bad day.

Man, that angers me. Really. It’s not cute anymore. It wasn’t really cute in 1983 when they asked whether my Commodore SX64 was a computer; but, at least, back then, it was more like a twit asking whether that’s a motorised carriage in 1885 than today.

Really bothersome was that the twit asking me that was older than I am, but only by ten or fifteen years. Meaning that she was twenty-two or twenty-seven when the SX64 came out; she was thirty-seven or forty-two when the 660LX came out; it took her until today to notice any of that. Thank Zeus I’d already put the DSLite aside to start typing, or it woulda been ‘Is that an Atari?!?’ I’m guessing; I remember back before Nintendo became this pervasive that Intellivision, Coleco, and even the early Sega were all Atari, to old people.

Where the hell was I, apart from VillageIdiot, noticing that accidentally listening to morons chittering beneath Howard Jones and Tom Waits no longer helps when you can’t ignore it by smoking. Which is how I now know that I’ll never quit smoking. I can’t. Not for habitual reasons, per se; but because I wouldn’t want to be one of the millions of twerps who have quit smoking and now feel great watching television for the rest of their lives because their brains no longer work. I can live with only being able to hold my breath for two minutes so long as my brain works well enough to figure out that two minutes are 120 seconds without a calculator.

I might have some good news, on whatever subject we’re now into: Sony have apparently officially announced plans to make a keyboard for the PSP. Which is good since they’ve never really made anything else for it. Something’s really wrong with walking around with a palmtop, PSP, DSLite, and mobilephone, realising that, between them, you’d have a functional computer, if there were any way to link them all up. Something’s also wrong with walking around with a laptop, realising that you’d have a real computer if it weren’t ten pounds with a battery good for three hours if you’re not going near its CPU. Don’t ask me about patents and tradedresses; but I wonder if people are really so stupid, in general, that they wouldn’t want something the size and shape of a 660LX, the multimedia of a PSP, the advanced touchscreen of a DSLite, and whatever the average modern mobilephone has which is lacking in those three things combined. I wonder because I’m about five seconds away from designing this damned thing for real, if only I could hope that I’d have a need to make more than one of them. Would half a billion people want one, or are there only about three of us. It makes a difference when R&D is the cost of a small nation. I fixed the bug on the comments here, so let me know.

One excuse I’m tired of hearing for why no one wants something like this is ‘I couldn’t type on a keyboard that small’; which is great, until they tell you that by texting you from their phones. Though, in fairness, they usually text ‘I != TYPE @ < KBD’. So the world is saved once again.

Why do I bother writing novels....

I’ve been listening to an AudioBook recently. Not on purpose. But I’ve been hooking up with MondoHebe to do various things lately, and he’s been listening to the same one for a couple weeks now. And I realise, listening to it, that nothing I’d ever write could be an AudioBook. Possibly including this. Because the one he’s been playing in his car all year is more erudite and exact than stuff I’ve seen people react to as though it were a virus. Then there’s me. I write reasonably sesquipedalian stuff. I don’t apologise for it, because it makes little sense to apologise for being smarter and/or more educated than average. But I do get that, so long as I’m not a fucking idiot, most people will have trouble keeping up. It sounds cynical; but there are people out there entrusted with the task of leaving the house for sausage and sauerkraut who are just learning today that we can cram computers into housings smaller than that of the HAL9000. People are morons.

I’ve been awake for three hours now. My day is totally wrecked. I’m not sure what I was expecting my day to be instead, but I’m gonna go play videogames until it’s all over.

More later....