But while surfing the site, I came across "The Tide Stain Detective for the Palm Connected Organizer." Really. It's available at http://www.tide.com/stainDet/palmdownload.html.

I'm betting that this program was written for folks like my dorm roommate from my freshman year, a guy who was a whiz at math and computers but so slovenly that we once found one of his gym socks in a pizza box. No one has ever disproved my theory that he ate the other one. It's just possible that by having the Tide Stain Detective at his fingertips EVERY WAKING MOMENT he may no longer resemble Pigpen. But I doubt it.

Yes, yes, I'm getting to the point, which is that the hype is true. There really are thousands upon thousands of applications for Palm organizers. The Tide Stain Detective is just the tip of the iceberg. You say you want a better calculator than the one your Palm organizer came with? How about a financial calculator? A graphing calculator? An algebraic calculator? A pregnancy timetable calculator? A reverse Polish notation (if you don't know, ask my college roommate -- no, no, don't bother) calculator? A Celsius-to-Fahrenheit conversion plug -- in module for a reverse Polish notation calculator?

The problem for us regular folks (who want to use their Palm organizers to get organized, not clean their clothes) is that what the great Einstein told us is also true: ninety percent of everything is bunk. Or was it the great Edison? I should look it up. And I will, as soon as I finish this column.

So, I've decided that, in my Technology Skeptic column, I'll occasionally write about software that the rest of us might want to actually use, rather than show off to our friends to demonstrate our technological know-how and prove that we have way too much time on our hands. I'll be focusing on programs that are free because…well, okay, because I'm a cheapskate. But it's also hard for me to imagine spending forty or fifty bucks on a program for an organizer that, like the newly reduced Palm IIIe, can cost less than $150.

Document readers
I've said it before. You shouldn't have to use one of these. A Palm organizer is supposed to help you get organized, and that should include being able to carry around a document that's more than 4,000 characters long. But the Memo Pad on your organizer won't permit anything longer than that. Maybe someday Palm Computing will fix this. Until then, if you want to read anything longer, you'll need a program called a "document reader." These programs allow you to download and view large documents on your Palm device. (I've heard that even the Bible is only about one megabyte on your Palm organizer, so you can store documents of virtually any size.) Keep in mind, though, that they're for exactly what they say. By this I mean that they're for reading, not writing. While there are "document editors" for your Palm unit, I have yet to find one that's easy enough to use to deserve memory space on my Palm organizer.