My most useful Christmas gift

Happy holidays to all! I hope Santa treated you well this Christmas. Santa gave me exactly what I asked for: an HP 49G+ graphing calculator! It's my third HP calculator since 1996, when I upgraded from a Sharp EL-9200 (bleh!) to an HP 48GX. (I thought I was buying an HP 48G, but the person behind the counter at Service Merchandise inadvertently gave me the better version. Since they had already treated me and my parents poorly, I took it. I know, I'm a bastard, but I'm a bastard who got a $200 calculator for $100.)

One of the reasons that I stick with Hewlett-Packard's calculators is Reverse-Polish notation. I love it because it makes plugging in complicated calculations easier and more accurate. It's truly a geek-oriented way of thinking about math! In addition, HP calculators do calculus and linear algebra extremely well.

My only complaint about my new calculator is that there are no Mac drivers for it -- if I want to update the flash ROM or upload new programs to my calculator, I have to use my mother's PC. :( I'm hoping someone out there has my particular model of calculator and an intimate knowledge of IOKit, because a well-written OS X connectivity client would be worth some money to me.

But the chances of that are slim -- I guess I'll just sit down with some documentation sometime this year and try to hack together a solution for myself. After all, that's why Apple includes a development environment free with Mac OS X!