Amazed by the Palm in My Hand!

Reading has become a passion for me. I have had dozens and dozens of hobbies over the years. I have failed at almost all of them with the notable exception of riding bicycles. I am pretty good at that and have enjoyed it ever since I was ten years old. I've tried to build models of cars and airplanes and ships. I have attempted the Cutty Sark a thousand times, so it seems. With the opening of each new model came the dream that this time it would end up just like the picture on the box top. Sadly, after many hundreds of attempts and many hundreds of dollars, none ever looked anywhere as nice as the pictures. Those who were real model makers were bonified artists. I am not. Oh, well. So I would try my hand at music. Ask any family member if I am in fact a musician. Be sure you have ear protection on when they tell you , they scream at you, that I am no violinist! Painting, wood burning, drawing, chess, checkers, running, weight lifting, singing are just some of the "tried and false" hobby starts for me. There are more, but I don't want to embarrass myself too much. It is one thing to be honest. It is another to beat up on yourself. Life is hard enough. I'll stop with the hobby list now.

During my official educational career I was a poor to slow reader. That always bothered me. I wanted to be an English teacher. I loved stories. Literature always seemed to benefit my being. The Bible was a book. To be able to really read it and understand it felt so necessary. All the way through college I read slowly. I had good to excellent comprehension, but I simply could not read fast enough to get enough of what I needed to know into my mind in time to get the excellent grades required. I graduated from the twelfth grade in 1970 and from college with a bachelor's degree in 1981. I was on the eleven year college program. As I said, I was a slow reader. That made my official educational training twenty-three years long. It took me a long time to read a book.

Something happened to me. Something in me clicked about eight years ago. I would have been forty-seven years old. I am not sure what it was. I did get seamless trifocal glasses at about that time. That may have had something to do with it, but there is more than just the pieces of glass I wear on my nose. Suddenly I developed a burning desire to read and read and read. I pursued this desire and ordered video courses on the subject and I studied them diligently. The passion did not pass. It grew. A year went by and I continued to practice. I got faster and faster maintaining the same comprehension levels as before. I got faster and faster and my comprehension levels went up. I got faster and faster and I started to have more and more fun. I began and now do love to read. I just love it.

During this period I discovered the new technology of eBooks. They are electronically stored books that can be read using a computer. I purchased an RCA iBook about five years ago. It was great and I stored almost one hundred books on it. Sadly that company went out of business. The idea stuck with me though and I kept my eye out for and read in the computer trade magazines anything that sounded interesting associated with eBooks. I discovered that the Palm company, famous for inventing the handheld computer, had purchased the electronic library of the RCA machine company which had gone out of business. They improved it and came out with a large screened Palm and the necessary software to download and read eBooks. I had business reasons for purchasing a new Palm Pilot. I went with the Palm T/X which is pictured above. It is pretty pricey, but it is very capable. It plays music in the MP3 format, it plays video, it has scheduling programs, writing programs, MS Word and Excel, a vivid color screen and more. It has a memory slot that will take as much memory as can be purchased. I bought a 512 megabyte card for it, which now can be replaced with as much as 4 gigabytes. Wow! I may have to get me one of them cards!

Here is the kicker. In the old RCA machine I stored 100 plus books the size of "War and Peace." (I calculated one time that this would represent a bookshelf twenty-five feet long.) If you don't know it, that is a very large book. In that machine I had 128 megabits of memory. It was the size of a medium hard covered book. The Palm T/X operates even more smoothly. It is a sort of "Next Generation" in eBook readers. It is also more flexible as the RCA could only read books. The Palm fits in the "palm of your hand." I can surf the Internet using my WiFi modem, make phone calls, schedule, and play a seemingly infinite number of computer games on the Palm. With the memory I can store as many as 400 books such as "War and Peace." If I purchase a 4 gigabyte card...well, you do the math! The slots on the left side of the carrying case are for extra cards. What if I have three 4 gigabyte cards! Well, you do the math! You will need a computer. The Palm can do the calculating for you. I'm thinking I could download into the palm of my hand the entire Library of Congress if it were on a compatible data base. I think it is! Wow!

In the Palm of my hand I hold a man made miracle. It is that indeed. It is beyond comprehension for this fifty-five year old man. Oh, and I can download all the files to my laptop computer and it has a sixty gigabyte hard drive. Well, you do the math! So, I asked myself, "What should I download first?" The answer was simple.

The "Bible" seemed so important and necessary to read and understand. So, I did.