Normally by this time of the day on a Monday afternoon, I would have read through many of the emails that came in overnight and sent several responses. I would have visited a couple hundred blogs, glancing at what was going on and perhaps added a few comments and I would have done a little programming, spoken with some clients, or done other business activities.

Yet today, I am distracted. The distraction started at about three A.M. when Fiona came into our bedroom. She had had a bad dream. She cuddled in the bed with us for a little while as she calmed back down and then went off to bed. However, my sleep was interrupted and I’m still tired.

Then, when it was time to go to school, she wasn’t feeling well, so she has stayed home, mostly sitting on the couch playing on a laptop, watching television, and from time to time asking me to get her a drink or something to eat.

I did glance at some of the emails today. One was from a cousin about my Aunt June. A little over a month ago, my brother wrote a great blog post about Aunt June. I also made a pilgrimage to Aunt June’s house soon after I was out of school; it wasn’t as striking a visit as my brothers, but it was meaningful.

The email my cousin sent says, “She is a hospice patient now and they are very good at maintaining comfortable care…Cards, prayers and meditations are more than welcome and I am sure she would want to know we all love her very much and are thinking of her.”

Distracted by tiredness, caring for a daughter home from school, and a dying aunt, I needed some other form of distraction and that has come today as well.

Kim and I decided that she would get me a Nokia N900 for Christmas. The plan is to replace my existing Motorola Razr V3xx cellphone with it. However, some N900 enthusiasts bristle when you talk about this as a cellphone. It is a mobile computing device.

Well, this morning, the N900 arrived. My initial thoughts have been to test it to make sure everything is working properly, and then decide whether to put it back in the box and use my Razr for another week and a half before switching over to using it as my primary device.

I did have a few difficulties getting going. On the first test, it didn’t manage to read my SIM card, so it only worked with the WiFi in the house. Yet after fiddling a little, the AT&T SIM card started working. Also, I took the microSD card from my Razr and put it into the Nokia. Media, like pictures, videos and audio that was on the Razr all shows up nicely on the Nokia.

I have run into various difficulties getting it to behave the way I want. It took a little while before I had ssh access to the device as well as root access. Of course the method for gaining this sort of access is described in detail on the Nokia website, so it was pretty easy to get going. Now, I can use ssh from any of my computers and access the N900 just like I would access any other computer. Slowly, I’m finding out what I can and can’t do with the cellphone. At times, I’m pleasantly surprised, at others I’m disappointed. Perhaps some of this should get saved for after Christmas, but today seems to be a day that the distractions of the new mobile device provide an important counterbalance to the other distractions of the day.