It is a beautiful weekend. Lucy and I did our usual Saturday morning walk around town and then went to the grocery store to pick up supplies for a picnic. The plan is for Charlie and I to ride someplace and for the rest to come in the car with the fixings for the picnic. We got lots of good stuff. After the picnic, Charlie and I will be able to decide whether we want to ride home, or just put our bikes on the car and take the easy way home.
Jacob and I got the 
most recent ESNE newsletter finished. I'm a bit grumpy because after my rather extraordinary efforts to get us to use free software, it was produced using Word. Oh, well. Maybe next time. The content is pretty good. I also wrote a letter from the president that I'm rather pleased with. OK, so maybe Alisa's right and the type is too small -- the content of the letter is still pretty good.
My palm pilot died the other day. Although I had told myself I wasn't going to get another one unless they made one that used the original grafiti, I went ahead and let Alisa get me one anyway. I think I'll be able to hack it to make it use grafiti 1. I really can't live without something that will remind me about meetings. I was disappointed when I saw that my LG phone is not supported by the new version of iSync coming out with Tiger -- otherwise I might have just used that.
When I bought my ipod, I bought some music at the iTunes Music Store. For a long time, I've been wanting to get some music from the Austin Lounge Lizards. Richard had told me about their song Jesus Loves Me But He Can't Stand You several years ago. I had been tempted to order the album, but didn't know if it would be worth it just for the one song. I ended up buying several of their songs through the ITMS including Stupid Texas Song, which is a scream. The boys particularly love Flatnose, the Tree Climbin' Dog and I had to let Heather listen to The Dogs They Really Miss You. Unfortunately, you can't get Banana Slugs! Racing Down the Field (Proposed UC-Santa Cruz Fight Song). This summer the ELNA Kongreso is going to be in Austin. Maybe I'll get a chance to see the lounge lizards while I'm there. They're playing at the Kerryville Folk Festival on the 11th.
Our picnic was a big success. We didn't actually ride all that far -- just 5 miles to Groff Park. We had all kinds of good things to eat: tasty bread with seafood salad, hummus, cheese, and summer sausage. We relaxed in the sunshine while the boys played on the play structures and took a little walk along the trail. Charlie wanted to take the easy way home, so I put his bike on car. It's a long climb back from Groff to Amherst, but I've found that my legs are a lot stronger this year than they were even at the end of last year. The climbs aren't pleasant, but they're not daunting like they were before.
I stopped by my office to set up my new palm pilot, but discovered that you can't do much in your office if you don't bring your office keyring. So I rode home, got my keys, and went back to the office.
It took me a couple of hours, and a couple of tries, to get everything sync'ed and to get the "original graffiti" set up properly. At first I just sync'ed, but it installed a bunch of stuff from the tungsten that I'll never use again (all the wifi stuff, for instance). I couldn't remember exactly how to get graffiti 1 working again and I ended up having to do a hard restart once after I screwed it up. I can't believe that, in spite of the fact that Palm won their lawsuit on appeal, they still haven't offered an officially sanctioned upgrade path for people who want graffiti 1. I haven't seen anyone who likes Graffiti 2 -- it is almost universally loathed and despised. Eventually, I found the site that explained how to do it and provided the necessary files. Now I'm all set.
StevenBrewer