Revived

With the exception of today, I haven't carried any sort of mobile technology (other than a pen and notebook) in about a month and a half. My problem was—and in many cases still is—that given the type of work I do and the situations that I have to do it in, using a Pocket PC just wasn't working out in any sort realistic way. There's also a certain kind of romantic appeal to writing with a fountain pen, that I admit I'm a sucker for; additionally, I was/am carrying around several notebooks that wouldn't convert well to Pocket PC.

Then today (or last night) I decided to resurrect my Jornada. I cleaned off a lot of the stuff I wasn't using, I reorganized the documents, and I tweaked a few things according to how I had intended to use the Jornada. This morning, I popped it into the Vaja Case and put it and the Stowaway keyboard into my bag and trekked out to school.

I got through the day without taking it out once. I did pull out a notebook at one point and managed to write a poem while multi tasking during class, and I wrote a page in another notebook as part of a very preliminary outline for a novel that I hope to draft next year. Maybe its habit, maybe it’s the way my brain is weird, maybe I've been using paper too long; but maybe it's not completely my fault.

It seems to me that any kind of mobile technology device should allow you to be productive on the go with only very minimal reductions in efficiency. Pocket PCs should make things easier, not harder and at the vary least it shouldn't add to the time it takes to get complete a task. Now, admittedly I haven't used a Pocket PC in a month and a half so it may be me, but I have this feeling that it isn't.

Thankfully, I'm too stubborn and I'm not going to let this go easily, so stay tuned as I work through the reality of mobile writing, or at least reality from where I'm standing.