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With Apologies To All

© Julia Buitrago

Whew! I don’t know about the rest of you, but the past couple of months have been absolutely crazy. Aside from all of the national and international issues, I’ve found myself swamped by deadlines. This past month I’ve made friends with my local FedEx delivery man, since he’s been at my house almost daily, delivering contracts, research, royalty checks (yay!), and advance copies of my latest books. As the holiday seasons draw near, I know that things will slow down, but in some ways I will be very glad to try and return to a “normal” life.

Aside from my historical writing projects, I’ve also been writing a course about the Pocket PC. In order to write this course, I needed to have in my possession a Pocket PC. So. . . voila! I am now a Pocket PC fiend.

For those of you who don’t know, a Pocket PC is a portable computer, designed to fit in the palm of your hand. Unlike a Palm or other Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), the Pocket PC comes with a small version of the Windows operating system and compact versions of various Microsoft products, including Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, Pocket Outlook, and Pocket Internet Explorer. To enter information on the Pocket PC, you can “type” information by tapping your stylus (a small plastic pen-like device) on the pressure sensitive screen’s keyboard or write information using the stylus which the Pocket PC (attempts to) translate into typed copy.

So, here I am in August, with my shiny Compaq iPaq in hand, ready to begin writing a pictorial history of a golf course and researching for a Pocket PC course. What better way to merge the two than to use the Pocket PC to write my historical pictorial?

Well, four months later the manuscript and the Pocket PC course are complete. How did the Pocket PC technology help or hurt while creating the historical pictorial manuscript? Tune in next time for Part 2: The Past Meets The Future.