Well, technically it isn't a Palm Pilot; it's a Handspring Visor Deluxe, in green. But under the shiny case, it's identical to the old Palm III. Mono screen (but larger than the newer Palm Zire), 8MB memory, IR port, antiquated slow-as-a-pissed-up-three-legged-dog CPU ... but adequate for my needs, and cheap at NZ$55 on TradeMe, including leather hard case.

Then it went spastic

I left the thing in the car overnight. An alarm went off (to remind me of something or other) ... and kept going off, draining the battery to the point where it shut down, having first corrupted its filesystem. It turns out the thing has power management software so old (dates back to the mid-1990s, I believe) that it simply drained itself flat rather than powering down.

So I plugged it into my desktop, intending to restore my last hotsynch backup. But no ... instead, Something Bad(TM) happened during the hotsynch process, which corrupted the backup itself

This represented nothing short of a crisis

All my passwords were stored on the thing (securely encrypted with the GNU Keyring software as recommended to me by Julian - an excellent application, which I wholeheartedly endorse), I had contacts, appointments, and of course my most treasured posession - an iRogue score table

So, I'm in the process of rebuilding it now. I've beamed some apps from my wife's Palm Zire 21, downloaded the rest, resurrected my contacts database from Evolution ... and am busy trying to remember my PayPal password.

The thing that's surprised me is how dependant I've become upon the device ... I stored my appointments, reminders, to-do lists, memos, everything in it. I'm going to have to start creating backups of my backups - burning my HotSynch directory to CD every so often.