Lee Hopkins seems nearly as frustrated with non-functioning technology as I
Just after posting my last post, about how thoroughly up-to-here I’ve had it with stuff that doesn’t work, Google Reader brought me Lee’s feed, with this post.
Lee, my friend, it happens that I do have some advice:
Admit that Mrs. BetterComms is right. For technology that really works, is really mobile, is really supported, you’ll need to pay enterprise prices. I’m afraid that’s just all there is to it.
Full disclosure: I gave up on all of it while I was still on a paltry pastor’s salary, and I suppose I could now pay a bit more and might get some cocktail of ingredients that works. But, for now, here’s what I’ve settled on:
I keep my contacts (a quite large number) in a very old version of ACT!
I keep my calendar and my to-do lists on my Palm, using Palm’s basic, native applications. I don’t use Palm’s to-do list app, because I need too many different lists (they’re context-specific, a la David Allen). So they’re simply in Palm Memos.
I write notes on whatever I find, and I clear all the notes out of my wallet fairly often so they’ll get into the software.
I have to keep using:
- a linux laptop (for video editing)…
- a Vista laptop (which is my basic business machine now)…
- a Win XP laptop (because elements of my podcast rig won’t work with Vista)…
- and a Palm Z22 because I don’t need anything fancier in a PDA, and even if I bought something snazzy I know full well I’d never get its apps to work across the other platforms.
And I will absolutely not attempt to get my do-lists, contacts, and calendar all working across all these machines until I have at least US$4K and a full week to throw at the problem. And I won’t put my data online until I find Internet service that’s truly ubiquitous and fully trustworthy (I believe this is a long way off.)
I’ll be curious to see how others advise you. For now I’m happy with a non-integrated, somewhat low-tech solution.
BTW, Lee, I think you meant U3, not E3.
P.S. New additions to my list of stuff that doesn’t work:
- Enidicia electronic postage (U.S. only) doesn’t work with Vista.
- Jaiku (gave up on that piece of trash a month ago, should have been 5 months)
- URLtea, which went down for days last week, after I’ve sent out a lot of URLS using the service. None of those URLs worked, of course, because the whole URLtea server was MIA.