Geek-o-rama

My wife is pissed at me.
It's because I've spent an inordinately large amount of time this weekend on a new toy.
You may recall from an earlier post that I bemoaned the fact that I was deprived of web access for extended periods when I was on my three-week motorcycle ride through the West in July. I opined at that time that it would be nice to have a PDA with WiFi capabilities - something that would let me e-mail and blog from the road without hauling around a notebook computer.
Recently, I discovered a possibly more elegant solution - the PalmOne Treo family of PDA/cell phones. The premier model at the moment is the Treo 600, which combines the functions of a cell phone, PDA and digital camera. It also costs about $600.
The model it displaced, the Treo 300, has no camera and a bit less memory, but it does most of the same stuff.
I started poking around on Ebay looking for used Treos and found one with a Buy It Now price of $70. How could I go wrong? So I bought it on Thursday and, thanks for the magic of PayPal and the U.S. Postal Service Priority Mail, it showed up in my mailbox yesterday.
Since I've never even worked a PDA, this involved a fairly steep learning curve (which I am still ascending), learning to input information, puzzle out the HotSynch feature that links it with my PC, get Sprint to transfer my old cell phone number to the Treo 300, and on, and on.
This, of course, took a lot of time - time my wife thought I should be using in other pursuits.
The major benefit, as far as she is concerned, is that this frees up my old cell phone for use by her daughter, who is a sophomore in college this fall. With the proper Sprint calling plan, she can share in our pool of unlimited night and weekend minutes and talk until the microwaves fry her head.
My Treo being a used device, still had some of the previous owner's setting in place, which kept me from accessing the Web when it was activated yesterday.
So this afternoon, after I got my stepdaughter her own cell phone number, I hooked up with Sprint Tech Support to sort out the Web issue.
In order to get a signal, I had to take the Treo outside, talking to the techie on my cordless land line phone while I fiddled with the Treo.
Naturally, my neighbor chose this time to mow his lawn. He even felt generous enough to mow my lawn, which made an even louder racket while I was tying to peck my way through the various screen commands to get online. In the middle of all this, my dog Ruthie decided there was a dire threat in the neighborhood that required lots of loud barking.
I finally retreated into my car in the driveway as sort of an improvised phone booth and eventually got everything sorted out.
But not before my wife and her son threw me out of the car because they had to get to the hardware store before closing. My stepson, who is in a building trades class in his senior year of high school, had undertaken to install a new bathroom ceiling light fixture and needed a new junction box and some other stuff to finish the job.
Anyhow, the Treo 300 is now fully functional and my wife is sure I've wasted my weekend on something she considers utterly stupid.
I guess I'm glad she sees it that way. Otherwise, she'd probably want her own Treo.