Doreen Emery On Becoming A Palm Head This site is setup for easy viewing with a Palm product.

Updates
December 15th, 2000	How I Win Contests - Jan 6th, 2001 Updated Feb 19th, 2001	A Page that will help you convert between timezones in Canada - Jan 9th Requires A JavaScript Enabled Browser
Books On Palm's! - Feb 12th, 2001	Some Palm Gizmos from Amazon.Com - Feb 16th, 2001	Using a Computer's (Internal) Modem as the Palm's Modem - Feb 27th
Contests With Short Ending Dates (Daily Draws) and Why To Get the Skill Testing Question Right. March 6th	How To Search For Postings on the Contest Canada Mailing List	Tips About The Contest Canada Mailing List and Mailing Lists In General March 13
The Trip To Alaska May 12th, 2001

In the fall of 2000 I won a Palm IIIe from Nestle! So my introduction to computing has started.

Initially, we setup an e-mail account setup with the mail service at mail.yahoo.com. Also I became a member of the Canada Contest mailing list operated by Egroups.com. That too has been a help!

For the first month of using the hand held computer we transferred messages from my son's computer using Eurdora and the HotSync cable and software that was packaged with the Palm.

There had to be a better way to do this!

Well,... after surfing around a bit,... we came across information on how to connect the HotSync cable to an external modem. (It's at http://www.geocities.com/daveinfopage/palm_modem.html if you are interested.)

The work in getting the Palm connected is outlined as follows:

• One quick trip to Radio Shack for a 9-pin null modem - their part number 26-264 and change back from a $10 bill!

• Dig up an external modem. This was probably the most challenging part. My son had an old Cardinal 2400 bps modem. After about 10 years of being covered in dust and about 10 seconds of being sprayed with Windex it worked!

• Next the testing phase,... we decided to see if the Palm and modem would do a HotSync over the phone line. Sure enough it did. We did have to play with the modem settings a wee bit - the term "a wee bit" means about 3 hours.

  The sticky point with the modem was the Flow Control configuration.

• After everyone else went to bed my son stayed up and tried to configure the Palm to connect to the internet directly - At 2400 bps - he figured he was in for a rough ride,... but....

  He copied the TCP/IP settings from his own machine. Setup Eudora to connect to the right pop and smtp servers. (The machines on the internet that handle mail.) Sure enough -- Everything worked and worked properly.

• Then he got daring and used the Palm Eudora web browser to display CNN's web page. Sure enough the darn thing was done in less than one minute. Fortunately the web browser doesn't display graphics,... and it doesn't waste time downloading them from the internet,... At 2400 bps it's a good thing... Smiles

  Well, the next morning a phone call was placed to the internet service provider, Odyssey Networks Inc, we tested the Palm with.

  The fellow on the telephone was a little surprised to learn that the 2400 bps modem was functional. But he was cool and setup a login for me :)

Life Continues!

Feb 27th - As noted above: My son wrote a program that will let me use a PC's modem as the Palm's modem -- there's information regarding such here.