This happened once before, a few months ago, and at the time it occured to me to let the battery run down and see if it would really reset itself. It has a remarkably long-lasting, built in lithium battery, and it took a day or so before it occured to me to take it out of the charging cradle; from that point, it was over a week before it wound down. In fact, I happened to check it when it was down to maybe 5% battery, and it had awoken from its mystery crash in order to announce that it was almost out of battery power. I promptly put it back in the cradle and all was fine.

So, if I didn't want to lose the notes I had taken on the trip, I would have to set it aside, but check it regularly, and hope to spot the window after the battery was low enough to trigger the warning that uncrashes it, but before it actually ran out of energy and erased itself. And hope that that was the problem, not something more serious.

In the meantime, I was going crazy without my Palm, so I got the cheapest new model, the Z22. It does everything that the Vx does, costs $100 new (my original V was about $300 in 1999; after I lost it 2001, I replaced it with a Vx that I bought used in Hong Kong for US$130), and has 32 Mb instead of 8, a color screen, and USB instead of serial. I considered the other, more expensive Palms, but they are all bigger and heavier, and do things I don't want my Palm to do, like take phone calls (no thanks), connect to the internet over wireless (too, too tempting), or play music (got a Shuffle for that).

After a few days, I reached my conclusion: I don't care for the Z22. The color screen is too bright in the dark and too dim in direct sunlight. There's no cover, so when you put it in your pocket it likes to wake itself up; keylock is a pain in the ass. Palm lost a lawsuit over Graffiti, and the new Graffiti 2 sucks in comparison. I followed some instructions to hack the old Graffiti on, and I like how it shows your strokes when you write in the main area, but it crashed whenever I wrote anything in the special writing area. The battery seemed to run down a lot faster than the Vx, as well. The Vx's screen is perfectly readable in direct sunlight and the Indiglo mode is sexy in the dark. Dropping the Vx into the cradle is much more satisfying than putting the Z22 on the desktop and plugging in a loose cable. And the Vx's thin, shiny aluminum shell is simply far more attractive than the Z22's mundane glossy plastic.

A week later, I put the Vx in the cradle for a few minutes, and it came back to life. I lost a few days of data from the trip, but I had my lovely machine back. The Z22 went back to Best Buy, unlamented.

And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-ons won't make us safer, either. It's not just that there are ways around the rules, it's that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition.

It's easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it's shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we've wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we've wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets -- stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security -- and too many ways to kill people.

Security measures that require us to guess correctly don't work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It's not security, it's security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.

Airport security is the last line of defense, and not a very good one at that. Sure, it'll catch the sloppy and the stupid -- and that's a good enough reason not to do away with it entirely -- but it won't catch a well-planned plot. We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly keep them off airplanes. —Schneier

And a cartoon