Date:         Mon, 7 May 2001 08:47:30 -0400
Reply-To:     Maryland Birds & Birding <MDOSPREY@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM>
Sender:       Maryland Birds & Birding <MDOSPREY@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM>
From:         "Wilkerson, Jordan T." <Jordan.Wilkerson@JHUAPL.EDU>
Subject:      Re: hand held computers
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Joe Halpin Wrote:
When I was in California last week I met someone who was using a hand
held computer to keep his sighting records.  When I inquired about what
he had, he showed me that this system was capable of keeping daily,
weekly, yearly and life records of his birding to include whether the
bird was only heard or seen or both and the other details of the
sighting.  Moreoever, this sytem could play the bird sonds/calls.  The
computer was a Compaq (costing less than $200) but, unfortunately, I do
not remember the model number or the software that he was using.  But one
of the things this system could do was to download songs/calls from his
desktop computer and using that system compose a file of those species
that might be the targets for a particular trip, loading them on a 15MB
plug in memory chip.

Is anyone using such a setup or familiar with the hardware and software
for doing these tasks?

Joe,

Is it possible he was using a generic spreadsheet package that he set up
himself?  That way it would not need to be specific for birding, nor would
it be too limited by the programmers ideas.

Karen and I generally jot our sightings down in our Palm handheld in stead
of hand-writing in a field notebook.  If I need to sketch, I'll pull out the
notebook, but in I'm just going to write the sighting down, then why write
it once in the notebook then again in the computer?  Since I can synchronize
my handheld with the computer I can just copy and paste my sightings into
our database; or any other application.  The only draw back to this is in
the case of a corrupted or deleted file.  We avoid this unfortunate loss by
backing up our database file about every month.

Jordan,
Cloverly, MD

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