It's been dawning on me lately that simple things might actually work better. I believe the exact moment of this epiphany was when I was trying to build an Asterix box for the house. Our 2.4GHz cordless phones (or our neighbors) were knocking out the linksys WRT54G wireless routers I have scattered around. Something called "Asterix @ Home" (now called trixbox ) beckoned. Our home would have it's own multi-line VOIP server connecting us to the world. I just needed a Plain old phone to test some wiring. A trip to Family Dollar and $7 later and I had a working phone that sported a callerID display and a bunch of programmable buttons. That's when it hit me: My little family dollar phone had no power supply, no configuring, no patches, no upgrades, and unlike the VOIP box, it got a dial tone. A miracle, and for less that 10 bucks. Now I've freed up another machine to try to install Ubuntu on. No, wait.

Our new house has a postage stamp sized lawn. My move to simplicity really started a a bit over a year ago, a couple weeks after we moved in. The grass was growing. Not wanting to be the scourge of the neighborhood I set out to find a lawnmower. I would also need a gas can. Since, we don't have a garage, we'd need a shed to store the mower and the gas can. There were some very cool shed designs in an old issue of popular mechanics at the library, but the grass was really getting up there.

I'm now the proud owner of a 1930's vintage Montgomery Ward Reel lawnmower. It's been lovingly cared for by my 90 year old neighbor since it's original purchase, and since he has three others he thought $30 was a fair price. The lawn looks great. It takes about 10 minutes to cut. The mower fits nicely under the porch wrapped in garbage bags. Spray the blades of a reel mower with Pledge furniture polish, not 10W40 and the grass won't stick. It's simple. It was cheap. It works as well or better that its complicated cousins.

That brings me back to pepper. I've always loved the stuff. As a kid I thought it was great when waiters in restaurants would come around with giant pepper grinders. Great fun. I've had a succession of cool looking grinders, all of which disappeared during the move. A crisis. Must. Have. Pepper. This lead to the $1.39 cent purchase of the above picture "Best Yet" pepper. Amazingly enough, this stuff comes pre ground ! And ground to a powdery fine wonderful consistency never attained by any of my fancy grinders. And the taste…who knew? Chicken soup suddenly tastes like Grandma's.

I'm sold. Simple is the way it should be.

Drupalcon in Boston was fantastic, but it left me with a big case of iPhone envy. My old LineSight buddy John Jones (who’s now drupaling away at ESSDACK ) flaunted his slick new phone all over town — the GPS even saved us from my inability to quickly exit while driving in one of the cities damn underground highways.

But alas, while Aisle8′s new corporate digs in Delhi NY offer many things, iPhone cell reception is not to be. The prospect of picking one up just doesnt make sense. To quell my gadget fix I convinced our CFO that a little R&D (or was it marketing?) budget needed to be liberated. The result is a shiny new Nintendo DS Lite “Web Appliance”.

Until recently I thought the DS was an also ran in the handheld game market, something to get your 13 year old nephew for Christmas, but Jeroen (the King of Podcasting) over at AnyRate.com has been Skyping me incessantly about this little $125 wonder. He says that just ain’t so. I’m beginning to agree.

Lets see… Its got a split screen display, the bottom screen is can be written on with a stylus palm-style, stereo speakers, a microphone, and built in WIFI. Hmmm. (That sounds like VOIP to me. ) A little searching on Amazon.com turned up a the “Nintendo DS browser“-basically Opera on a chip, with a little split screen magic thrown it.

10 minutes out of the box I was on-line. Most of that time was spent trying to find the WEP key for our wireless router. Key in hand the DS connected with no problems.

This post was done through the DS while wandering around Aisle8 central.

This is a cool little hunk of hardware. It will even run linux. Who knew?

(Note: This was originally published on April 1, 2008 by me on the Aisle8, Inc blog. Head over to the Aisle8, Inc blog for my “corporate” musings on OpenBlueDragon, ColdFusion, Drupal, and all things business-y)