elizabeth grigg - the other fourth meal

It's been the weekend "plus" a frazzled Monday, and several times I have pulled up this lovely movable type cgi window to make an entry and then no dice. I wish I could bottle those times when the ideas flow freely. The main image this brings to mind is Mr Rogers putting a sound into a shoebox. His point to the kids was not "it can't be done" but rather "the sound is in there if you believe in it." And thus we come to the public's relationship with caffeine, where one great conversation or productive night came accompanied by a high-caf beverage, and then we think it lives in that drink, like "mojo."

I can bottle ideas, which is why I have revived my pocketpc from the dead and am using it in the kitchen. My old kitchen routine was to maintain pads of paper on the fridge, which were expensive, because they had to have a magnet on the back to stay up. I would have two grocery lists: one for actual groceries with a symbol next to the item for what store to find them in, and another was compiled into actual meal options (entrees, snacks, etc). I would also have two to-do lists, one for near term and another for general betterment of the universe such as building shelves. Now, with my pocketpc, all these lists are on the device, with an additional list of blog topics (currently being ignored).

With "thinker" blogs like this one (rather than "linker" blogs), creativity is core to keeping it going. Creativity is not some kind of transcendental state, it is a way of organizing your life so that you are ready for the idea when it happens. A receptacle for your joy, as it were, in rugrats speak. That's an awful lot to ask from your pocketpc, but it's worth a try.

Notes from the product review peanut gallery: The only way I can get wifi with the pocketpc is to turn battery save features off. So the little switch at the bottom that powers the card on and off is really important - I use it 2 or 3 times a day. Trouble is, it's right next to the "nuke all internal memory" switch. Also, transitioning from the tabletpc to the pocketpc has been interesting. There are some things that the tablet decided not to pick up, such as the block transcriber having 3 windows: caps, lowercase, and numbers. Note to tabletpc folks: you can still do the cute word-guessing thing by users writing in place than writing linearly across the tablet. Once you bite that one off, you have space to throw in other goodies such as dedicated areas for : and // and . and and and.

Kramer: "Why don't you just tell me what movie you'd like to see?"

Link of the day: Read this and discover why Joel is still my hero.