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.

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.

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.

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.

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.