I started to write yesterday about getting a new PDA. There is a small pot of money available that I should probably encumber as soon as possible and so I spent a couple of hours yesterday and came to the conclusion that it was a tossup between the new 
Palm Tungsten C and the Zaurus 5600. What a dilemma! On the one hand, the zaurus runs linux, which means it can do real multitasking. On the other hand, the palm has support for syncing with a Mac. One other possibility might be to get one of the lindows laptops. Any or all of these could be useful, in a gadget-y sort of way. When Hoogendyk got back, I asked him what he thought and he suggested getting things to help one of several projects move forward: building wireless resources for the department (buying a switch and some basestations) or getting exportable home-directories on snapper (buying a mini firewall or a second ethernet interface for snapper and a big disk). Sigh... These are good ideas too, but they all involve work. This is going to be harder than I thought.
So I finally decided to get a Tungsten C. Getting a Tungsten C will help me be more productive, which I think will benefit other projects more than using this small amount of money to support them directly. At least, I can rationalize it that way. The University can be reasonably be expected to provide support for infrastructure. And if they were to fund the blasted contracts, faculty would be getting professional development funds that could be used to for personal support. In the absence of that, I have to look to any windfall that come along.
I also decided to get a Margi Presenter to Go, which might allow me to not have to carry my laptop at home. I love my tibook, but it quickly becomes heavy.
Boingboing had a quote from William Gibson about the future of the music industry. I've heard similar analyses for about a year now. I wish the RIAA would wither up and die already. I was more interested in this quote
I imagine that one of the things our great-grandchildren will find quaintest about us is how we had all these different, function-specific devices. Their fridges will remind them of appointments and the trunks of their cars will, if need be, keep the groceries from thawing. The environment itself will be smart, rather than various function-specific nodes scattered through it. Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like warm Vaseline. Genuinely evolved interfaces are transparent, so transparent as to be invisible.
I disagree. I think we're more likely to see a pendulum effect, with a back-and-forth between consolidation and diversity which takes place over time, but also takes place across economic levels. Just like people predicted that everyone would be driving a 'car-plane' by now, I think it will turn out that having one thing that's a 'car' and one thing that's a plane works better for the vast majority of uses. And sure, there will be some people who want one thing that does both and are willing to pay a premium. But there are still better single-purpose cars and single-purpose planes and even if most people bought carplanes, there would be a market at the highest end for fancy single-purpose cars and planes.