It's just the sort of day you want to launch a new magazine.

It all began last November. Around the middle of the month, less than a year ago. I was hunched over my computer, the Quasimodo of the keys, doing what I did every month about that time: reading, editing, and yearning to read and edit something else, anything else.

Winter was soon to be upon us, the cold, the gray, the dampness that lasted a full season and never seemed to lift. It was a perfect mirror for my mood, dreary, bored, and gray, as gray as the soot inside the muffler of a 1985 Pontiac 1000, a car so slow that it'd often lose a race with old ladies in their 1980 Ford Pintos.

I was reading and editing what was to be the next issue of PalmPower, once the flagship publication in a great fleet (great fleet, in this case, meaning PalmPower and three other magazines, including PalmPower's Enterprise Edition, a magazine devoted to singing the praises of handhelds in the corporate world.)

Back in November, singing the praises of anything Palm was quite the challenge. Palm had come off a nine month anti-binge characterized by floundering stock prices, floundering product sales, bad press from bad moves, and products so incomprehensibly boring that the best thing to be said about them was they had the name "Palm" tatooed on their plastic foreheads.

Meanwhile, I was dreaming of the newly announced Tablet PC. This was the laptop I'd dreamed of all my life. You could use it like a regular laptop, or you could twist the screen around, flop it down, and use it as a tablet, writing on the screen's surface. I wanted a Tablet PC. I yearned for a Tablet PC. I lusted in an unhealthy and slightly creepy way for a Tablet PC. And I got me a Tablet PC.

It had been a long, long time since I lusted for anything containing those four magic letters: P-A-L-M.

As PalmPower's Editor-in-Chief, I'd had the sometimes great but, more recently, dubious pleasure of regularly speaking with key Palm personnel. Back when Jeff Hawkins ran the company, it was a pleasure. This guy was an innovator. Even after Jeff left to do his own thing, talking to many of the professionals on Palm's hard-working team was a joy. But then came the layoffs. And more layoffs. And even more layoffs. And talking to Palm's leftovers began to feel like eating that green, fuzzy stuff in the back of the refrigerator, stuff you could have sworn was once a color other than green, and probably didn't begin life with fur.