The march of technology

I obtained two new pieces of technology this week.

The first was a 30-day evaluation copy of a software application called DayNotez, for my LifeDrive. DayNotez is a mobile digital journal.

I've been using another tool for journaling on my LifeDrive, a tool called Documents To Go. DTG is a mobile version of Microsoft Word. I've been using it for personal journaling for maybe two years now, first on my Palm m500, and then on my LifeDrive. The thing about using a word processor for journaling is that all my entries are stored in a linear fashion. This means that if I want to look up something I wrote several months ago, I have to scroll back through all the entries I've written since.

In DayNotez I can assign categories and keywords to my entries, so I can filter my entries if I want to, say, find all entries I wrote about a particular subject. DayNotez also gives me a list view of my entries. That means I can see a list showing the first line of each entry; instead of scrolling through all the text of everything I've written I can scroll through the list if I want to look up a particular entry. I like these features.

The second was a new cell phone, a Samsung SPH-A920. My previous phone was getting flaky on me. My requirements for a new cell phone were that it has Bluetooth (for communicating with my LifeDrive) and a video camera (because of my interest in media creation). Later I added a new requirement - that it has the ability to play mp3 files so that I could listen to podcasts in my car while driving to work. As an added bonus, I want to be able to customize the ring tone so I can set it to be Friday Nights at The Wedge. How cool could that be, to hear Friday Nights at The Wedge play every time someone calls me! Not to mention the self-promotional value.

So far I have discovered that my LifeDrive does not have a phone driver for communicating with my Samsung phone using Bluetooth. Doh! I thought Bluetooth was Bluetooth and as long as my PDA and phone both have it I'd be able to pair them up. I'll have to find out if I can download a driver.