I'd been trying to talk myself out of it, then I'd try to talk myself into it, then I'd try to talk myself out of it again, but I finally went out last night and bought a folding expandable keyboard for my handheld. My concern was that, since Handspring is no longer making the Visor Deluxe (which is what I have), Targus would quit making the keyboard that fits it, and since I knew I was going to want one sooner or later, I decided I might as well just go ahead and get it.

I don't plan to carry it around with me on a daily basis, but just when I know I'm going to want to write at length, and won't be near a computer. So I didn't bring it into work this morning, but I mentioned that I had bought it, and Gard said, "You're getting a little geeky, aren't you?" Yeah. I'm geeky.

It's pretty cool. Attaching the handheld to the keyboard is kind of an adventure, because it fits very snugly, and getting it off is difficult, too. I suppose I'll get used to it. Another thing is that apparently unless you actually go into the software on the handheld and disable the keyboard, the handheld doesn't go off like it normally does.

I got up this morning and mine, even though the preferences are set for it to shut off after two minutes, was on. At first I thought I must have accidentally turned it on when I picked it up, but I knew I didn't. I got out the CD that came with the software, and read the documentation again, and the only thing it said was something like, "Be sure to uncheck 'enable keyboard' if you're not using the keyboard." It would seem to have made a lot more sense to actually spell out why you should do that, i.e., "If the keyboard software is enabled, the handheld will stay on and not shut off no matter what your general preferences are."

No big deal, and no harm except that it used up about half my battery power. Fortunately I had just changed the batteries, so there wasn't any concern about it draining them completely and then causing the thing to crash. Just another little lesson.

At work this week I'm trying to teach myself how to customize a Yahoo! store, and it's awful. You can customize a store using their templates, i.e., change colors and styles of buttons and typeface, fairly easily, but if you want your storefront to look like a seamless part of the rest of your website, you have to learn their proprietary language, RTML. I believe they invented it so that once you have a Yahoo! store, you can't easily change your mind and move it somewhere else without spending a lot of money to have it converted to a more portable language.

In any event, that's what I'm doing, and I'm finding it slow going. It's difficult because it's a whole new thing, possibly made more difficult because it's like HTML in many ways, and sort of looks like it, but with subtle, important, annoying differences. And it's so boring . . .

There are instructions called "fuse," and "grab," and yank ("returns a copy of sequence with all instances of element removed"). Who invented this anyway? Yeah, probably teenagers, like everything else on the web. And there's almost no documentation or support--I had to buy an ebook from a guy on the web to even come close to understanding this stuff. It's just a complete pain. Although I guess once I learn it I can add another skill to my resumé.

Dinah is slowly getting back to normal; last night Bob was sitting upstairs in the office and he asked me to go get her and bring her up and see if she'd sit on his lap. So I went down and got her--she was asleep in my chair. I scooped her up and carried her up to Bob and put her on his lap, and she curled up and let him pet her, and she rolled around and purred, and I sat there in the other chair and supervised.

Sometimes, like last night, she'll be fine, and other times she'll look up at him and hiss and spit, or growl. It's like she forgets that she thinks she's supposed to be afraid of him, or mad at him, and she suddenly remembers. I think it's getting better, though. I think she'll be fine in a couple more days. Maybe.