Antarctica Starts Here.

I knew that something was going to happen when I spoke to my mom, and she mentioned getting ready for an ice storm in Pittsburgh on Saturday night.

That meant only one thing: It was headed toward DC.

Early this morning, I was awakened by the sound of snowflakes merrily ticking against the window above the bed that Lyssa and I share. Some time after we went to bed last night, the ice storm arrived in DC and the snow began to fall.

And fall.

And fall.

The local weather report says that we're looking and three to six inches of accumulation by the end of today, followed by what they euphemistically call a 'wintry mix' for the remainder of the night and into tomorrow. To the non-politically correct, this means that it's going to start sleeting, and probably freeze solid. Fuck. The ice finally melted enough to make travel safe as of Saturday morning.

I just went outside to check, and there is, at the moment, four and one half inches of snow on the ground, and it shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. At least Lyssa and I are working from home tomorrow (because she has a doctor's appointment tomorrow afternoon).

On Friday afternoon my old cellphone finally packed it in. For months, it would refuse to charge roughly 95% of the time (I tested this, actually - once out of every twenty tries, or a 5% success rate), but lately it climbed to the heights of "sod off, I'm not going to recharge for you at all" when I needed it the most. On top of all of this, the headset jack hasn't worked for months, but that hasn't been that big a deal because I haven't needed my headset for anything since I left my position at Sunrocket (not being on call 24x7 anymore means I'm not as popular as I used to be). A few months of searching to try to find a security screwdriver that would open my old cellphone's casing were fruitless, so I couldn't even get in there to see if anything was physically damaged inside (it was very obvious what happened to the outside, though).

After all of the swearing and bitching was done, Lyssa and I headed to the mall so she could buy a pizza stone to bake bread and pizzas on, and I wandered down to the Sprint store so that I could purchase a Treo 700p, powered by PalmOS. Not only was I getting fed up with my old cellphone but I needed my own PDA (I borrowed Elwing's spare about a year ago and never gave it back to her, something that I will do soon) and this neatly kills two birds with one stone. On top of that, I can save information about calls in the contacts database and expand the entries as necessary, which saves a lot of retyping.

Unfortunately, I had to pay the entire cost of the phone up front, but I've got some rebates coming back in the next few weeks.

Initial impression: This is what a PDA should be. These are the pocket secretaries written about in Shadowrun. They're cellphones. They take photographs and record movies. They can store huge databases of contacts, things to do, and reams of memos. You can use them as miniature office computers, down to editing and storing Word documents. There's even an expansion slot for Secure Digital cards that you can use as storage space, or to install applications to. I don't have any Bluetooth equipment yet, but that'll change once the need for a headset arises.

Much of Friday night was spent learning my way around the Treo and getting used to how it worked. I also installed quite a bit of software that I'd downloaded earlier in the day that I thought I'd need on a daily basis. Yesterday afternoon was spent transferring relevant phone numbers from my old cellular phone (which, probably out of spite, had decided to take to the charger one final time) to the Treo by using the keypad, a process which too roughly one wallclock hour (much to my surprise).

Later on in the evening, as Lyssa and I sat around relaxing, I tried beaming some entries from the other PDA into my Treo, but wasn't successful. Somehow, I can beam data off of the Treo, but not into it. This needs to be fixed, and soon.