By Kevin Quin
The other day my father called up and reported that he had discovered first-hand that beige carpets and red wine don't go together. What to do? Being the technologically savvy person that I am (you in the back row -- shut up!), I knew that the answer could be found on the Web with just a few clicks of the mouse and a vast expenditure of time. Sure enough, even before my hair turned gray, I had the solution. Tide.com told me that with a few gentle soakings and blottings with detergent, the stain would come right out.
But while surfing the site, I came across "The Tide Stain Detective for the Palm Connected Organizer." Really. It's available at http://www.tide.com/stainDet/palmdownload.html.
I'm betting that this program was written for folks like my dorm roommate from my freshman year, a guy who was a whiz at math and computers but so slovenly that we once found one of his gym socks in a pizza box. No one has ever disproved my theory that he ate the other one. It's just possible that by having the Tide Stain Detective at his fingertips EVERY WAKING MOMENT he may no longer resemble Pigpen. But I doubt it.
Yes, yes, I'm getting to the point, which is that the hype is true. There really are thousands upon thousands of applications for Palm organizers. The Tide Stain Detective is just the tip of the iceberg. You say you want a better calculator than the one your Palm organizer came with? How about a financial calculator? A graphing calculator? An algebraic calculator? A pregnancy timetable calculator? A reverse Polish notation (if you don't know, ask my college roommate -- no, no, don't bother) calculator? A Celsius-to-Fahrenheit conversion plug -- in module for a reverse Polish notation calculator?
The problem for us regular folks (who want to use their Palm organizers to get organized, not clean their clothes) is that what the great Einstein told us is also true: ninety percent of everything is bunk. Or was it the great Edison? I should look it up. And I will, as soon as I finish this column.
So, I've decided that, in my Technology Skeptic column, I'll occasionally write about software that the rest of us might want to actually use, rather than show off to our friends to demonstrate our technological know-how and prove that we have way too much time on our hands. I'll be focusing on programs that are free because
