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I hear you asking, “Why does Steve want an iPod Touch?” Here’s my story:

For as long as I’ve lived I’ve been a dedicated organizer. I make lists. I like to electronically organize all kinds of data. I like to put things in order. I keep all the bottles on my side of the medicine cabinet with the labels facing outward. I’m one of those kinds of people.

Since I was about high school age I’ve been carrying some kind of electronic organizer, which was about when they were invented. For many years it’s been a Palm device and I’ve been happy. (There was a brief stretch when I used Microsoft Windows CE because of work stuff, but I quickly went back to Palm.) There are many, many great little apps available for the Palm, many of them free. Most Palm apps are written to take full advantage of the tiny screen, not worrying so much about being pretty as being useful.

I’ve gone through many models of Palm devices, including three Treo’s, Palm’s popular cell phone device. I’m currently using a Treo 755p with Sprint service.

It’s not a bad device. It’s also not a great device. The Treo has gotten better over the years, but there’s still the occasional random crash or lockup. I can live with it. The Sprint plan I’m on is also great, for $30 a month giving me unlimited internet and text messaging. I don’t use the actual phone portion much, but I do use a heck of a lot of internet and text messaging. For the most part this little package works pretty well for me. I have programs I’ve settled into for managing appointments and tasks and other little things.

But Palm is really starting to show its age. The company pretty much hasn’t put out anything substantially new for something like 5 years. This is starting to hurt in a couple of ways. One, there’s not really a big cottage industry turning out new cool Palm apps anymore. Things have gotten stagnant. Two, some of the built-in apps don’t work in conjunction with other modern apps.

As an example, our family has really taken to using Google Calendar.

It’s a very, very nice (and free!) group scheduling program, and Terry and I basically keep everything in it with different calendars for each family member all merged into one display. And through the use of some 3rd party tools it’s not hard to keep these calendars all in sync with the calendar app on my Mac and the calendar app on my PC at work. Everything is dandy.

Except that the Palm scheduling app is old and doesn’t understand certain types of appointments like ones that repeat across multiple days, so I can’t really sync our calendars with it very well. Ouch. And that’s just one of many examples of why Palm seems to be slowly spiraling around the death drain.

So along comes Apple with the iPhone:

Now things are getting interesting!!! Except… It’s way expensive. You have to switch to AT&T and the monthly charges to get the equivalent of what I have now with Sprint would be nearly 3 times as much! And after some deeper investigation it’s clear that the apps are pretty, but not nearly as functional as what I have on my Treo. Not only that, but adding applications was a problematic unsupported mess, so there really wasn’t a good path for getting it to be as functional as my Treo. The desire to get one dissolved. And it wasn’t just a matter of putting it out of my mind because it was so expensive, I actually just didn’t want one at all.

Then Apple released the iPod Touch.

By itself, this was no big deal. It was basically an iPhone without the phone and fewer apps.

But then the iPhone/Touch SDK (software development kit) was announced. To borrow a phrase, this changes everything.

What made the Palm so very, very useful was not really the built-in software, it was the plethora of 3rd party stuff that was available. Take an iPhone/Touch SDK, mix in hordes of nerdy Apple fanboys, and you should end up with scores of really good and interesting apps.

Now we’re talking! Both the iPhone and the Touch should rapidly get far more useful after this SDK comes out. (There are still some nagging questions about some aspects of the SDK, but I’m confident things will work out fine.)

The iPhone, though, is still too expensive on a monthly basis for my wallet. I just can’t bring myself to commit to something like that.

After a lot of thought, I realized that the iPod Touch would really be a useful device for me in the long run. Why?

• It’s got a WiFi radio. For most of my waking day I’m within range of a WiFi connection. If I want to do some quick surfing or checking of email, my couch plus the Touch will be a nice little combination. When I’m not in WiFi range, I’ll still have my Treo, which will work fine as a fallback device if I need to hit the internet for something.
• It doesn’t require an Internet connection to be useful. Applications like the calendar use local storage. As apps appear that use the SDK, there will be many more that may be somewhat more useful with an Internet connection, but will also work just fine without one. Things like list makers or fancy calculators or games, for example.
• I have little doubt that there will be many, many great apps that I’ll want to run on this thing. Probably within 30 days or less of the day the SDK comes out.

It’s still a bummer that I’ll still have to carry two devices, the Touch and Treo. But I’ve been doing that for a while anyway with my iPod Nano and my Treo. This isn’t that much different. Perhaps someday in the distant future the iPhone version 3 or 4 or 5 will come out and the monthly cost will be reasonable and I’ll switch over. But until then I’m confident I’ll be happy for a long time with the Touch that’s showing up here next week. Not only will I be happy, but I’ll actually get a lot of good use out of it, too. Now that’s a bonus.

Those of you who might actually be following this blog in some kind of feed reader have probably noticed in the past that images were not being included in the feed. I believe I’ve remedied the problem and all images should now be present so that you never have to actually set foot on the stinking site itself. Let me know if it’s still not working right in some way.

What is going on here? I just posted about being able to resist a power use measuring device. Now today something in my mailbox led me to find this thing pictured on the right. It has a very powerful draw on me. It very clearly is way cool on many levels. It’s also not very expensive (in my opinion) for what it is. I am going to have a lot of trouble resisting this thing….

Update: My wife seems to think it’s really not something we need. Hmph. She also doesn’t seem to think the price is that low. Hmph again. Maybe she just needs to see the picture….

I woke up a few days ago to find a pointer to this in my inbox:

You may recall from this blog entry that I was already lusting after an iPod Touch.

Well, I just happened to make a mistake on my withholdings and we’re getting back a significant tax refund this year, so I convinced myself that it would be okay to splurge on such a thing. (See the previous posting for how this works.)

But I was eyeing the 16GB version. And I was going through “Apple Anguish” over whether I should wait until the end of the month to see if there might be price reductions or a model update or something else when they (supposedly) announce the iPhone/Touch SDK. Should I splurge now? Should I wait? Will it matter? Much anguish.

Then they lay the 32 — 32! — gigabyte model on me. Damn. Another $100. But how can you not lay out the extra hundred to double the storage? It seems stupid not to. After all, this is a device that will surely be kept and used for a few years, so one wants to be prepared for future storage needs. And since they just updated the product line, they surely won’t be dropping the price or releasing a new version anytime soon. This all makes sense. Right? Right?!?

Mine should be here next week. Damn it.

Here is a device that rings all of my bells and makes my saliva start flowing:

Why? Let’s see.

1. It has a lot of buttons.
2. Some of the buttons glow.
3. It has a display.
4. The display glows.
5. The display shows lots of interesting numbers to be interpreted.
6. It does something that can be rationalized into being useful.

Do I need this device? Absolutely not. But I can’t help having a desire. There’s some part of me wired to respond to such a thing.

It’s particularly sad because I already have one of these things:

It basically does the same thing. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting the new thing.

Thankfully, I have matured a bit and I can safely move on without actually purchasing the new item. There was a time in my life when that would have been really hard. That’s not to say that I’m successful in avoiding all things such as this, but I’m much, much better at it. I’m sure my wife is thankful for that, too.

Here’s an example of something I bought a few years ago:

Looks not too unlike that top thing, eh? It never really got used that much, and I could successfully resist it today. But it sure is cool.

Now excuse me while I flip to the pages of the catalog where the LED flashlights are listed. Mmmmm….. Flashlights……

Check out Instapaper. It’s a dirt-simple website that does one thing well: it saves links for you to visit later. They provide a bookmark you can add to your browser, then when you’re on a page that you don’t want to read right that minute you just click the bookmark and it’s saved to Instapaper. Later you can pop over to Instapaper and catch up on your backlog, deleting entries as you go.

Yeah, there are other sites that do this kind of thing, but Instapaper seems to be one of those nice apps that’s focused on exactly one thing, so they do it very cleanly and simply. Other sites that do this typically want to be your home for bookmarks, which is not the same goal that Instapaper has. This app might be especially useful if you have an iPod Touch or iPhone.

The world of content suppliers has caught up with our desires and started offering movie rentals. (Amazon Unbox, Apple iTunes.) Now if they would just go one tiny step farther things would be truly grand.

I want to rent TV shows.

Just like movies, there’s little chance I’ll ever watch a TV episode more than once. Why would I want to buy it? Buying it makes me feel like I should keep those bits I purchased (in the case of iTunes where I can’t download my purchases more than once), but that’s going to be quite a waste for something I’m likely never to watch again.

$1.99 is too much for purchase or rental of a TV show. I think 99 cents is too much. My initial inclination was for a 50 cent price level. But then I started thinking. TV shows tend to come in different lengths: 30 minutes, an hour, two hours (minus subtracted commercial content). Renting an “hour” long TV show for 50 cents sounds palatable to me. So why not this:

Offer me TV shows for rent for 1 cent per minute. That 23 minute sitcom then rents for about a quarter. Sounds good. The 2-hour season finale of Lost? Around a buck. I can stomach that. You know what? If the content were available, I think we would totally ditch our cable and the Tivo and watch everything this way.

But there’s no way I’m buying the shows we watch for $1.99 a pop.

They don’t seem to advertise it, but every year State Farm provides a link that will enable you to use online Turbo Tax for free. You just need to have some kind of insurance through them and to obtain a login to their web site.

The government should give those rebates/tax credits/stipends in the form of something like VISA gift cards if they really want to ensure maximum stimulation (so to speak).

It’s probably too much to ask for them to be Apple Store gift cards.

Anthony Horowitz is the British author of several books that Calvin has really enjoyed. The series Calvin’s lapped up is the Alex Rider series, about a teenage boy who has adventures doing spy type stuff with MI6.

He is on a book tour to promote his latest book, Snakehead (Alex Rider Adventure), and one of his stops was here in K.C. Mr. Horowitz was quite a good speaker, who really spent most of his speaking time doing a good job of answering questions. He’s clearly done this for a while as he has a pretty good patter down and is good at dropping funny stuff in his answers while sounding like he’s never said the same thing 30 times before. He was also good at making real off-the-cuff answers quite entertaining and interesting.

Calvin and I had a good time listening, and then we got in line so that Calvin could meet him in person and get all of his books signed. I mentioned to Mr. Horowitz that I was sure this book tour stuff must be very taxing, and I think he was glad to have somebody recognize that fact! He told me about his already long day (it was only about 1pm at that point) and how he had to fly out again that evening. I mentioned that he didn’t really get to see K.C. then, and he agreed, saying that he only got to visit the museum (I assume The Nelson) briefly. But he also said that he’s going to bring his wife back with him later on a tour of the states, and he’s definitely going to include K.C. in that visit!

All in all, he seemed like a very nice guy and it made for a fun thing to do that morning.