Very expensive To Do list

I have succumbed to the allure of a shiny new toy.

There was a degree of inevitability about it. My PDA (the one that survived a near death drowning experience) is about to reach its sixth birthday and, although it has served me faithfully (despite all the abuse), recent changes in my work computing environment have meant that I was running two diaries that wouldn’t speak to each other. This was making me dysfunctional. [Actually, I suspect this is just an excuse for my dysfunctionality, and that I suffer from a deep-seated chronic and incurable psychological state of “Huh? What’s happening?”!]

The thought of having a machine that syncs with my laptop-based work diary (despite my misgivings about work having such influence!) AND can sync with emails as well AND can  access the web AND be a phone (yes, it will do this too) AND (best of all 🙂 ) still provide a good database for geocaching (it’ll even be a GPS, although it doesn’t do this quite so well as everything else), was too much to resist.

So, I jumped on the iPhone bandwagon.

Most of it has been very easy to set up (the “It just works” slogan has held true by and large). In fact the hardest part was to find a belt pouch for the thing. Apparently belt pouches are daggy*, but since daggy is one of my talents—and since there was no point in having a diary (or phone) that wasn’t immediately to hand when I needed it—then I had to find one. It took a while, but eventually I succeeded.

Of course, the other thing I needed was a To Do list program, since the scary thing about getting started with the year 2010 was that my “Huh? What’s happening?” neurosis was having a field day. I ended up with a nice simple program called “Done” which I quite like, and which—in fact—wasn’t very expensive at all (about $2.50).**

The one slight problem with my shiny new toy is that I also downloaded a couple of games. I’ve found that these can interfere with crossing things off To Do lists.

* “Daggy” is Australian slang for untrendy. Kind of like “dorky” only with a degree of comfort permitted.

** There is a bit of a not-quite-Schrodinger’s-cat time-travel problem with the screen shot. You see, just prior to taking the screen shot the “Take screen shot” task hadn’t been done and so couldn’t, by rights, be ticked off. Once the screen shot had been taken, however, the job had been done (which is clearly true since you can see the shot above), which meant that I could tick it off, but then I’d have had to take another screen shot showing the task ticked off, which would have implied that the task had actually been done before I took the screen shot, which would have been just wrong—not to mention very confusing—and liable to lead to lengthy and convoluted explanations involving sentences with multiple subclauses, of the kind that I really do try to avoid (along with parenthetical comments) under most circumstances when I am writing blog entries.