We were trapped in our cabin for the tenth straight day by what locals called the worst summer snow storm since June. We were huddled around the fireplace when someone outside pounded on the door.

My wife was uneasy. "Maybe it's a bear."

"Or cable modem," I reasoned. I opened the door, and in walked a man with more arctic gear than Siberia. He peeled off a few layers and…wouldn't you know it—it was my neighbor, Norman.

You remember Norman, don't you? President, CEO, CTO, and Director of Rodent Relationships (i.e., exterminator) for SoftPopDotCom.com. Just my luck it wasn't a bear.

"Hi, Lincoln," he said cheerfully as he dumped his outer clothing and a few tons of excess snow on the easy chair. "I thought I'd drop in and show you some of the exciting accessories coming from our new subsidiary, SoftPop Largely Operational Peripherals. Clever, huh? The domain name is splop.com, or would be if someone didn't beat us to it. So instead we're SoftPopLargelyOperationalPeripheralsDotCom—splop.net."

"Norman, my wife and I were just enjoying a…" That's when I realized that my wife was no longer in the room, and that the bathroom door was closed, locked, bolted, and probably welded shut. My wife knows Norman.

"We've got the latest and greatest in accessories for the digital lifestyle. For instance, where else can you buy a nifty, portable, pocket-sized MPEG 2 Player." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a gadget about the size of a deck of cards strapped to cigarette pack. "With the SPod, you can watch any MPEG 2 movie—the very format used for Hollywood's most popular DVDs."

"So, is this basically a portable DVD player?" I asked.

"No lasers here! Those things are dangerous! Haven't you seen Goldfinger? With the SPod, you can store your entertainment in 512MB of flash memory, enough for over 15 one-minute movies. If you want more, you can always buy our optional hard drive."

Pictures of Plenty

I had to get rid of him. "Norman, my wife and I are trying to have a vacation…"

"Exactly!" he exclaimed. "And what will you have when you're done with your vacation?"

"18,000 unread e-mail messages?"

"And almost as many digital photos. And that's why you'll need the SPLOP Digital Photo Album." He pulled out and handed me a large-format book with a fake leather cover and stiff, blank pages.

"Norman," I pointed out to him. "That looks like a normal, old-fashioned photo album. What makes it digital?"

"Technology! Say you come back from vacation with loads of digital photos. After you've printed them, you can glue them into your SPLOP Digital Photo Album."

"I could glue them into any photo album."

"Perhaps, but…This is a digital photo album."

"But wouldn't any photo album work just as well?"

He considered this for a moment. "Okay. Say you're taking pictures with your digital camera. They're not on film—they're, you know, digital. Wouldn't you rather glue them into a digital photo album?"

"But what makes this photo album digital?"

He stood quietly in thought for a moment, then he handed me a little tube with a USB connector on one end. "Let me show you our new FlashWOM drive."

Well, I admitted to myself, flash drives are always useful. "How much does it hold?" I asked.

"Twenty-eight terabytes."

I looked at him skeptically. "This little thing can hold 28 terabytes of flash RAM?" I asked.

"Flash WOM," he corrected me. "Write-Only Memory. There's no limit to how much data you can write to a chip if you don't expect to get it back."

I handed the keychain back to him. "Norman, would you consider wandering in the snow without a compass?"

He thought about that. "How about a cell phone with GPS capabilities?"

"I was hoping you wouldn't have that, either."

"Sorry, but I do," he added, pulling that very object out of his pocket. "I call it the SPLOPhone. The possibilities are endless," he cried out enthusiastically. "You drive by a McDonald's, and your phone rings with the appropriate motivational call. In fact, any time you walk into a restaurant or grocery store, we can remind you of how much happier you'd be at a McDonald's.

"And the SPLOPhone isn't just about GPS," he continued. "We monitor your conversations and use the information to make your lifestyle better. Imagine the comfort in knowing that SPLOP is always ready to point you in the best direction!"

"Norman, I think there's another technology journalist in the next cabin. Why don't you bother him?"

"Actually, it's a mafia hit man."

"All the better."

"Okay, just one more item." He pulled out a typical-looking palmtop. "It's the SPLOP PDE."

"PDE?"

"Personal Digital Everything. It's an MPEG 2 Player, a digital photo album, a FlashWOM drive, and a cell phone that brings you important messages from your favorite corporations. It also comes with tweezers, scissors, a corkscrew, and it even warns you via an impossible-to-ignore buzzer when you're getting overly annoyed. Why don't I just stay in your cabin for a couple of days and show you how it works?"

Just then the device in his hand went off, wailing like an ambulance trapped behind a fire truck. "Hey," he cried happily, "someone in this room is really annoyed!"

I have to admit that the alarm actually helped me with my anger. It gave me the strength to throw him out of the cabin. After that, my vacation didn't seem so bad.