I’m not saying I don’t like spring. I do. But every year (seemingly) around this time of year, I’m hit with your typical spring allergies. I cough, my nose runs, I feel somewhat miserable. Familiar story, I’m sure.

Except, in my case, every year it turns out that it isn’t allergies after all. I don’t have allergies (well, not to airborne stuff). Instead, I have a cold. This is some kind of stealth cold that doesn’t seem like a cold until I’m four days into it. The cold sneakily convinces me every year that, of course, I’ve developed seasonal allergies.

As an experiment, I asked my more politically-aware buddy Grumpy for the names of some political blogs that would represent both the left and the right. As I consider myself pretty centrist (or as Grumpy says, “moderate”), I was curious as to how I would react to these (differing, extreme) points of view.

Well, the experiment is over.

After reading them for a few weeks, I found myself unable to read them any more. “I ran out of time,” I thought to myself. This was really an excuse. The truth is that my curiosity over what makes the left the left and the right the right wasn’t anywhere near enough to overcome the feelings of tedium and disgust that I eventually felt while reading these things.

The other day I was reading about Yahoo!’s new music service, which sounds to me like a cheaper version of Napster-To-Go. Or, in other words, a music subscription service. And, of course, once again I was reading about the imminent death of the iTunes music store, the iPod, and Apple.

Now, while I recognize that some folks would certainly find a subscription service useful, most analysis on this subject always seems to forget one thing: people consume music differently than most other media.

I went to Best Buy to get two things: a 512MB SD card for my new camera, and a USB 2.0 reader for said card. I came out of Best Buy with two things: a (sucky) reader for the SD card I refused to buy, and Jade Empire. I was thinking about pre-ordering this game, but I procrastinated too long. Turns out, no big deal. It wasn’t even hard to find the “limited edition” of the game at BB. I’m only about 4 hours into it so far, but it is looking great. It bears the most resemblence to BioWare’s previous Xbox RPG: Knights of the Old Republic, but only in UI and basic game form. This game looks better, in general, and the combat is totally different (and harder, since it sort of requires, you know, skill.) Actually, the combat sort of reminds me of Battle Arena Toshinden – I think it is because of the way you can roll left or right while fighting.

Like Grumpy, I too have reached a point where something had to be done about my cell phone. We had the same phone (the Nokia 3650 on AT&T Wireless) because, and I’m not ashamed to admit this, I’m a follower, not a leader. At least in this corner of gadgetology.

When it comes to cell phones, I need a trail-blazer. I need that trail-blazer to come to my house and make a phone call from within my house. If that works, then we have a winner.

In my previous post I described the process of how I came to obtain a Cingular-branded Treo 650. What I didn’t describe what the flurry of activity that commenced immediate thereafter. See, I got that Treo merely two days before going to that geek-fest that was the 62nd meeting of the IETF.

A new cell phone isn’t really that big of a deal – I expected it to work as a phone, and for the immediate future that was all that I needed. What was missing was a case. The store from whence the phone came had zero cases. The Cingular store near my house had none, either. I wasn’t panicked. I told myself that I didn’t need a case. I could put in my jacket pocket, or a sock, or… Ok, I needed a case. I wasn’t going to be lugging my jacket around the entire IETF, I don’t carry a purse, and the thing really wasn’t comfortable in my pants pockets (YMMV).