That column was on the verge of becoming a tradition. Readers enjoyed the hijinks of me and my family rubber-rafting the Colorado with our laptops. It gave me a chance to visit some vacation spot, write off the expenses, and annoy other vacationers.

Well, it didn't happen this summer. The family started a great vacation at a resort on Sunset Lake near Eagle River, Wisconsin.

But while rollerblading down a steepish hill with my son Jonathan, I encountered the limits of that technology. I was suddenly faced with the choice between wiping out gradually at about 15 mph on blacktop or wiping out instantly on a shoulder of gravel and deep weeds.

I chose the latter, fell badly, and wound up with a slightly broken wrist, some ugly scrapes and bruises, and a grievous wound in my hip called a hemotoma. The hematoma was like a grapefruit of blood bulging from under the skin. It was a constant source of pressure and pain, and made sitting for more than half a minute impossible.

It not only cut short what could have been a hilarious, techno-crazed vacation, but caused me to endure all of July and half of August hopping around my house, popping Advil like Necco Wafers, and snarling at my offspring.

I spent the better part of the first week at home waxing wroth with my computer and with my body. I have been pretty lucky in my computing life, managing to avoid serious repetitive stress problems. So this frustration was unnerving. I was hurting, and I wasn't getting my work done.

The summer eventually taught me a lot about making adaptations. I began by setting up a computing podium in my office, stacking two file boxes on a wooden chair, and placing my keyboard atop that. So I computed standing up.

I re-set my stylesheets so that everything I composed was in extra-large 14 pt. type, because my eyes were now three feet from the monitor. It never looked or felt quite natural, but I got by.

What I had made was a bully pulpit, and I found that I wrote differently standing up and in pain. Each sentence had a certain immediacy. Adjectives were few and far between. Posture, I have come to believe, affects style. You can say "I surrender," but if you have your hands on your hips when you say it, you don't.

Since my right wrist was broken, I had to expect less from that hand. Fortunately, I have never been a touch-typist -- much to the amusement, over the years, of tour groups at my international headquarters. It is not a major upheaval for a hand usually assigned the forty or fifty rightmost keys on the keyboard to content itself with the ENTER key, numeric keypad, and a few arrow keys. And it saved me from punching myself in the mouth with my cast.

Dialing the phone was a minor adventure. I learned to do it all left-handed. In the quiet composure of a Sunday afternoon this was easy. On a busy deadline day, though, with calls coming in one on top of another, I was a thrashing mess, setting down the receiver, putting one party on hold, switching to another, picking up the receiver, greeting the caller in the calmest receptionist voice I could summon under the circumstances, discovering it was some bogus Minnesota lawmen's and firefighters fundraising entity ("Won't you help by placing an ad in our publication fighting drugs?"), gently slamming the receiver down, remembering I was in mid-interview with some CEO on line two, fumbling for the receiver, apologizing fatuously, etc.

I could have eased this chaos a bit by using a telephone headset. I even have one somewhere in my house. But they are best for people who spend hours at a time on the phone. My phone use is more sporadic. I can go hours without a call, then get five in a row, boxcar-style. It's too much trouble to wear a fixed headset all day long (effectively sewing your head to your telephone) for a handful of calls.

I'm not suggesting my adaptations were heroic. I've seen a lot of people with much more serious. much less temporary problems, coming up with far more creative solutions in order to connect with other people and say what is on their minds.

But for me, this past summer brought out hidden reserves of versatility in me, and some good ideas on how to use the machines at my disposal to better advantage.

And the great news is, I'm better. A doctor put a big giant needle in my hematoma and extracted enough collected blood to fill a soy sauce bottle. After that, I was able to sit, stand, the works. And the wrist slowly knit itself back together.

The net result of all this healing is that I am phoning this column in from the parking lot of Dell Computer's corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas.

Yes, we took the kids out of school for a couple of weeks are only on the first leg of a barnstorming tour of the south.

What I am learning is that people in the southern states are simple, hearty people who are easily awed by newfangled gadgets like the ones in my portmanteau.

Wait -- the local sheriff is sauntering toward my van. He's probably heard all about my wireless faxmodem and wants to see for himself "how that crazy thing works." Or maybe he wants to check out firsthand the puppet show the kids told me they're putting on in the back window. Great people here in the south. I gotta go.

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