FATAL EXCEPTION

on the screen whenever I turned it on. Resetting didn’t help. I contact Palm support and was told that what I needed to do was a "hard reset", which involved wiping out every bit of data on the Palm Pilot and deleting the entire applications database, except for the default appliations that were shipped with the device in the first place. So I did that, and then I spent the next hour rebuilding the database. Fortunately, I’d synced up just before I caused this crash, so I was pretty much covered. I just had to download and install one or two programs that weren’t restored with the backup.

"What did you do to your defenseless Palm Pilot?" I hear you ask. Well, it’s kind of a long story.

In my ongoing quest for new responsiblities at work — especially now that the recent reorganization has consolidated almost all development up in Portland but a quirk of organizational necessity and budgetary windfall has kept me and the other Sacramento office developer employed — I wormed my way, with all of the subtlety of Arnold Schwartzenegger in Terminator, into the Palm Pilot development project. As I’ve already written, it was pretty easy to get B–, the Sacramento lead for this project, to let me get in. So I installed Code Warrior and started playing around.

This past weekend, I also picked up a copy of The PalmOS Programming Bible, which is published by the same people who publish the …for Dummies books. I picked up this book instead of PalmOS for Dummies for two reasons; first, it was the only book that didn’t start off the introduction with the words, "We assume you’re an advanced C programmer" (it began with, "We assume you’re an experienced C programmer" — and, as I pointed out to a skeptical Jennifer, I am more "experienced" than I am "advanced"), and because the …Bible series is generally much better than the …for Dummies series. (A book like Vocabulary for Dummies might contain a paragraph like this: "Vocabulary is all about words. Words make up a vocabulary, which, as I wrote above, is all about words. Yep, words is what it’s all about. Lots of words. Words, words, words. Shakespeare wrote a soliloquy about words in Hamlet. Say, I introduced a Shakespearean non-sequitor into a book on vocabulary! Am I cute enough to kiss or what?" and so on.)

And so yesterday I figured out how to write and compile a nice inoffensive "Hello World" program in C for the Palm Pilot; I plugged it in to Code Warrior, compiled the program and linked it, debugged it in the Palm OS Emulator, and figured I was good to go. So I set my Palm Pilot in console mode, switched the target settings in Code Warrior to target my device instead of the emulator, and clicked "compile."

"Fatal Exception", my Palm Pilot told me. Even after I hit the reset button. Several times.

That’s when I started feeling that strange cold lump in my chest, the same sort of feeling that I get when my mother tells me that she’s had another wonderful idea for the wedding.

With some help from Palm, Inc., and some folks in our office, I was able to get my Palm Pilot functioning again. But one of the developers up in Portland asked me what, precisely, it was I was trying to do.

"Well," I said, "I’m trying to learn enough C/C++ to get up and running with the PDA project."

"Aren’t you already taking a class in Java?" he asked me.

"Well, yes."

"And talking to one of the other developers up here about XML?"

"Um."

"And giving a presentation about PHP and access to Oracle in Portland in August?"

"What’s your point?"

"Well, don’t you think you’re sort of biting off a bit more than you can chew?"

Well, okay, maybe I am. But I think about it in this way: all that they’ve got me doing these days at work is HTML encoding (my co-worker and I have become maniacs at making sure that every HTML document we create fully validates, simply because there isn’t much else to do). Because I haven’t been involved in any PHP development at work anymore (that particular project has been handed off to someone else entirely), it’s unlikely that I’ll be giving my presentation in August after all. And when I spoke with B– this afternoon, he was pessimistic about the possibility that there would actually be any Palm development done at all in California for our company; the development manager up in Portland is continuing to consolidate all aspects of development up there. So there really isn’t all that much for me to do; encoding an HTML document takes very little time at all, even if you code it to XHTML 1.1 standards.

So I sit at my computer at work and play with Java and C/C++ and CodeWarrior and occasionally make a phone call or send an e-mail or an Instant Message to another developer up in Portland, asking to be involved in some project or another. My boss has been working on this as well, knowing that my fellow developer and I are starting to become frustrated, but he is unable to do much more than get us more HTML coding projects. When I told him last week that it was looking like my own career advancement probably lay outside the company, he looked disappointed but unsurprised.

Meanwhile, my Palm Pilot sits next to my computer, nestled in its cradle, seeming almost to glare at me cautiously with the glowing green charge indicator. "No more," it whispers fearfully. "Do what you want to the computer, but please, leave me alone."

Ha, I laugh to myself, and I launch another Code Warrior instance, preparing to write code that will beat my little Palm Pilot further into submission.