I just cleaned a thick layer of dust off my external floppy disk drive at home today. When was the last time I used a floppy disk? I have no idea, but certainly not recently.

It’s strange how technologies quietly slip into the past like that, forgotten — until that time in the future when you want to get something off an old floppy disk, only to discover that you have absolutely no way of reading it any more and you may as well drop all the disks into a landfill somewhere.

At the risk of sounding like a total nerd, I just bought a new Nokia 6101 mobile ‘phone off eBay for under $120, and so far I’m really impressed with it. It’s small and light, it has the practical clamshell design I like (and which for some insane reason Nokia resisted for years), and it came unlocked, so it just started working as soon as I put my existing SIM card in it. Plus it reaffirms what I always suspected — that Nokia’s user interface is by far the most user-friendly and intuitive of any mobile ‘phone.

But perhaps the coolest part is that Nokia provides a free suite of PC connectivity software, and I just painlessly copied all of my personal information — contacts, calendar, to do’s etc. — from Lotus Organizer on my laptop onto the ‘phone. This might not sound like such a big deal, but I’ve been waiting for this kind of connectivity/interoperability for years.

I visited my friend Amy Stein in Vancouver last weekend, and we went snowboarding up at Whistler/Blackcomb, a great 2-mountain resort in beautiful British Columbia that’s an easy 2-hour drive north out of Vancouver.

We stayed in a big shared cabin with a hot tub and sauna along with a bunch of other folks, and it snowed every day, so the conditions both on and off the mountain were fantastic.

Amy & I at the top of Blackcomb Mountain in British Columbia, 4 March 2006