dreaming@echonyc.com

i finally brought my palm pilot out of the mothballs for the first time since i got my new computer. you should know that my pilot dates back to 1998; it's practically a clay tablet to be scratched with a sharp twig.

the cradle has a serial connector, but because my computer was made this century, it includes usb and firewire, with no serial ports. this didn't seem to be a problem, as the fine folks at keyspan had anticipated my problem by making serial-to-usb adapters.

i know what you're thinking: yeah, but i bet she found a way to fuck it up. indeed i did.

first i ordered the wrong adapter from amazon. then i borrowed paul's, a solution that worked but not a permanent one. finally paul went to smalldog and bought an adapter just for me — greater love, etc.

just one problem. the adapter has ports for round serial connectors, not the small rectangular 9-pin ones. and amid all our cables, we couldn't find a round-to-9-pin adapter. behold, then, the birth of frankencable.

that's right. 9-pin to 25-pin; 25-pin to round; round to serial-to-usb adaptor. it was going to be a miracle if this actually worked — which of course it did not.

i tried everything i knew to get my computer to talk to my pilot, but the pilot kept bleating, "unable to establish a connection with your computer." i checked all the connections between the various parts of frankencable, and they seemed tight. it wasn't until i'd tried to sync two or three times that i realized...

...i hadn't actually plugged the usb adapter into the computer.