At Pennsic, my prosthetic brain[1] failed, taking six weeks of not-backed-up memories with it (which was doubly annoying because I thought that I had backed it up in mid-July). So not only did I lose most of the notes I'd taken on it during Pennsic, including the email address of the woman from House Bloodjack I'm supposed to send mandolin-tabulature transcriptions to (if anybody from Bloodjack is reading this, contact me, eh?) and my records of recent credit union activity (I think I can get back on track regarding my current balance unless there are outstanding checks that I've entirely forgotten about (which is the sort of thing I needed a prosthetic brain for in the first place, right?)), I also lost all my calendar notes about upcoming gigs and potential gigs, and the contact info fron the person from the city government I need to talk nicely to about my difficulties in getting my front windows replaced (as the city has ordered, threatening large fines).[2]
When I noticed the PDA wouldn't power up, I started taking notes on index cards. *sigh* I've already misplaced the first stack of those, which included some calendar notes. (I'm still looking for 'em ... but this is one of the reasons a PDA was a better solution for me than going old-tech[3] -- I didn't randomly misplace pages of it.) So at this point I'm really not quite certain where I'm supposed to be, when. I think I've got a gig tomorrow, but all I could find digging through archived email is next weekend, and anything farther out is a blank (except that I do remember that the Anne Arundel Scottish Games, usually in October, unfortunately won't be happening this year).
Between fibro-fog[4] and just generally being disorganized without the tools I've gotten used to, I really do kind of feel like a chunk of my brain is offline. My jokes about the PDA being my prosthetic brain were perhaps closer to the mark than I'd realized. This is a terribly frustrating feeling (though the changes in memory in my bio-brain after the fibro got bad are even more frustrating[5], and there are brain diseases and injuries out there that I find uncomfortable to even think about the possibility of -- <<shudder>>). I'm feeling ... helpless and incompetent. *grumble*
I think I've got another broken Clié around here somewhere that I picked up a couple of years ago for spare parts, if I can remember where it migrated to, so maybe, if the battery problem is a wear issue rather than a shelf-life issue[6], I can do a battery-transplant and get my brain back. Failing that, I may have to take a whole lot of stuff out of my purse to make room for a DayRunner binder (that seems so huge after a few years of using a PDA instead) and get a printer working well enough to print out a stack of the custom pages I used to use in it.
In the meantime, I'm still trying to reconsruct my calendar for the next couple months ... and pondering better ways to keep multiple copies of the information all accessible and constantly in sync with each other, once I reconstruct it. (A PDA that runs Linux would be a good start, I think, but IIRC there was only one that did, it wasn't marketed in the US, and was too expensive on eBay the last time I looked.) With the calendar tool in PalmOS, I think I could make it automagically sync with Outlook -- which I don't use -- or I could get at the PC copy of the info through the Palm Desktop app, but I didn't sync every week because I had to do a backup-to-Memory-Stick beforehand, then restore afterward, then access a backed-up spreadsheet via FilePoint, to unscramble some bizarre screwage hotsync did to the Documents To Go installation I used for spreadsheets ... I liked my prosthetic brain, but it wasn't perfect.
Whee. Gonna go comb my email for dates again.
[1] Sony Clié PEG-SJ30/U running PalmOS 4.1. And a very handy little prosthetic brain it was, despite the glitchitude with Documents To Go after hotsyncing. The battery went from "hmm, it doesn't last quite as long as it used to between charges, so I'll have to watch that" but still reasonable as long as I could plug it in every 36 hours or so, to running down completely and losing its memory in a single afternoon and only sometimes deigning to actually take a charge when plugged in; and the transition between those two states happened between one day and the next, near the end of Pennsic. Since I'd been pretty careful about making sure it got plugged in at least once a day at Pennsic, I was pretty annoyed to find that one day it had just Not Charged, wouldn't come back on for the next three days, and had (of course) lost its memory entirely when it came back.
[2] So the city says I have to replace my windows and repaint, or they'll fine me. And I have to apply for a permit to do the work I've been ordered to do. And since this is an historic neighbourhood, I'm limited in what kinds of windows I can have put in. And the person who was supposed to know what kind of windows I need told me to call somebody else who told me to call a third person who tried to tell me to ask the first person and then admitted that he was really the one who should know but he couldn't tell me until the permit application people processed my application ($25 fee) and forwarded it to him -- or maybe he had too then forward it to person #2, I forget -- but the permit application needs an estimate from the contractor who in turn is waiting to hear what kind of windows to spec for the estimate. With me so far? Where we left off before Pennsic was: I had complained of the difficulty with getting to City Hall during business hours and standing in line (It's going to cost me at least an extra day to recover from what that'll cost me in spoons, and that's after I manage to find a day when I'm feeling well enough early enough and don't absolutely need to conserve spoons for a gig -- and, this being the XXIst Freaking Century and all, asked why instructions for submitting the application electronically or by snailmail were not on the city's web site. He couldn't tell me what to do, but gave me the phone number of the applications desk, saying they'd be able to tell me how to submit an application in a modern way ... and calling that number at various times of day over a two week span, nobody ever answered the damned phone. Of course, all my notes of whom I'd talked to and when, their phone numbers, and what they'd told me, were in my prosthetic brain (which I could've sworn I'd backed up a week or two before Pennsic, doggone it) when it died.
[3] In case there's anybody left who thinks therse things are toys, other reasons a PDA works better for me than the DayRunner I used to use: Finding notes again later, if I didn't remember which day I'd written them on (or which non-calender section I'd written them in) was a bit of a chore sometimes, and an electronic device, unlike paper, is grepable[7]. And the PDA could store a lot more than just my notes of the past few weeks, an address book, and a couple of other small references: I could carry multiple novels in it, all sorts of handy references for stuff I'd need to look up every so often, spreadsheets, a Bible, memo files containing driving directions to most of the places I go to just seldom enough to need reminders for, sheet music in ABC notation (and programs to display it in standard notation or play it through the wee speaker) ... stuff that would take way more paper than it'd be reasonable to carry with me everywhere. And for things that I really want in a computer, copying documents over the USB cable is ever so much faster than typing things in from my handwritten notes. Some of the extra stuff I could carry in it was Good To Have Handy; some was Just Because I Could. And in case I got bored away from home, there's the on-board assembler, BASIC interpreter, C compiler, Forth interpreter, and Lisp interpreter to entertain me. All in all a much better solution for me than a stack of index cards or a DayRunner.
[4] "Fibro fog"[8] is sortakinda like what some people refer to as "a senior moment": short-term memory goes out the window, and we can't remember what we were just doing a moment ago, car keys get stashed in really odd places, etc., but it's not a moment. Usually complaints about this are met with a "well that happens to everyone", but the thing is, instead of being a lapse here and there, a single "Doh!" moment, this can be an entire %$#@ing day. It's not just, "Oh, I forgot what I came downstairs for"; it's going back upstairs, seeing something that reminds me, coming back downstairs and forgetting again, six times in a row; it's having a whole day when thinking feels like wading through mud, a huge effort just to connect one thought to another without losing my balance and dropping everything in the muck. When throwing around abbreviations like FMS, CFS, IBS, etc., people will sometimes refer to this as "CRS" (Can't Remember Shit), and we know what each other mean when we hear that, forgetting is just one aspect of it. Man, I miss my pre-fibromyalgia brain ... I miss having a good idea how competent I'd be from one day to the next, instead of not knowing which days I'm going to wake up stupid. Note that the other way this is often invalidated by listeners is with a comment along the lines of, "Yeah, welcome to old age," but a) people shouldn't have been saying that when I complained about this in my mid-thirties, and it happens to fibro patients a lot younger even than that, and b) a whole bunch of stuff Americans think of as inevitable effects of aging are really symptoms of things that are treatable and should be treated, not "just getting old" after all.
[5] The short-term-memory and attention deficits that seem to be associated with fibromyalgia[8] really do a number on one's programming skills, and are annoyingly dismissed as minor by at least some doctors. When a neurologist tested me in response to my complaints about memory problems, she reported that my results were "normal for an adult" and therefore I had nothing to complain about. My response that I was no longer normal for a programmer and thus had Lost Something and what I'd lost affected my ability to do what I was used to being paid to do, fell on deaf ears. "Within the normal range" translated to "nothing is wrong". But damn it, I can remember what it was like to have a brain that worked better, and ten years later this has not gotten any less frustrating. And yeah, I'm still pissed off at that neurologist.
[6] Some types (chemistries) of rechargeable battery just go bad from age regardless of whether they're used or not, which makes stocking up on spares fruitless ... and can be a big problem if later models of the device use a different shape or kind of battery so the manufacturer isn't making new ones that fit any more when the old one goes. I haven't checked yet to see which type the Clié uses, or whether it's still availabe of the one from the parts-PDA is also bad.
[7] Unix users didn't need to click on that link to know what 'grep' is ... but some other folks might, from hearing Unix folk use it in conversation, understand the basic idea -- that it can search files for lines containing a particular string -- without realizing how much more powerful it is than the old MS-DOS 'find', or control-F/command-F in your browser or text editor (unless you're using a real text editor, like vi (yay) or emacs (hiss), in which case your editor's search command is as powerful as grep after all). The search function in PalmOS isn't that powerful (alas), but ... but I got distracted here writing footnotes and got off on this tangent. It's that kind of day.
[8] Not part of the definition of the syndrome, but, like a bunch of other associated symptoms, occurring in a large percentage of fibromyalgia patients.