Wicked Palm

Convoluted Story:

I had an hour or so to kill on the westside between shifts this week, so I stopped in the big bookstore they have. Glancing through the new fiction paperbacks, I saw Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Someone had recommended it some time ago, saying "it's more political than I would have expected." I forget who.

So I picked it up, read the first two chapters, and fell asleep in the comfy chairs they have. After they called me back into work, I bought the book.

I don't know why I liked the book, but here's a guess: the protagonist is flawed in ways that I can identify with.

I wanted to read up on the source material, which has fallen into the public domain. So I downloaded the text from Project Gutenberg.

The best way I have to read ebooks is on my palm m105. I can do this flat on my back, which is how I like to read anyways. I'd get a fancier PDA, but I can't justify spending money if all I do is read books on the damn thing.

The m105 has some advantages and disadvantages. It was relatively cheap at the time it was released, and made a nice graduation present from my parents. It uses 2xAAA batteries, so I don't have to worry about the lifetime of a rechargeable.

On the other hand, it uses old-fashioned RAM for its memory and when the batteries die, the memory is all lost. So every time that happens, I have to reinstall databases and applications. I've tried to make that as easy as possible: The directories $HOME/Palm/Docs and $HOME/Palm/Apps contain PalmDoc ebooks and Palm applications. The pilot-link tools make re-installing everything easy. PILOTPORT=/dev/ttyS0 PILOTRATE=115200 pilot-xfer -i ~/Palm/Docs/* ~/Palm/Apps/*

I do wish I had one of the models that relied on a removable Flash drive and not RAM.