The Grouch has been a member of the jet set for some time now, flying hither and thither for the odd concert, social gala, or fine meal. But this past weekend, he tried something new: flying in an ultralight.

For those of you not familiar with advances in aviation technology, an ultralight is essentially a hang-glider with seat and a motor. It feels more like a motorcycle with wings. John Denver died when one that he was flying crashed into the ocean off of California.

In the United States and most parts of Europe, one does not need a pilot"s license to fly these things. Buy the kit, hook it up, and you"re flying...kind of like an Apple product.

Anyway, the Grouch was struck by the simplicity of this craft. Start the propeller, roll out onto the grass and earth runway, throttle up and in moments you"re as high as Victoria Peak.

This got the Grouch to thinking: why not keep it simple? The Grouch"s iPod Shuffle is perfect. Having owned at least one variation of the Pod since it appeared on the market in 2001, this latest incarnation is so light and simple that it compels you to have music no matter where you go. MTR? Yep. Walking down the street to buy a carton of soy milk? Yeah. Heading back to the office after a meeting? Uh-huh.

There"s a lot to be said for designing a device that is, essentially, a USB key with headphones. It has three settings, one of which is "off." It"s about the same weight as the keys to the Grouchapartment. And frankly, using the Shuffle and allowing it to auto-fill (using Apple"s iTunes software) takes the user into new corners of a large music collection-if nothing else, it"ll remind you to delete those Don Ho tracks you"ve forgotten.

The Grouchmind continued to wonder, to one of the few pieces of software that"s used by both professionals and amateurs that actually has not a deluxe version, but a "light" edition: Adobe Photoshop, and its simpler sibling, Photoshop Elements.

For the non-photo-bug, Photoshop allows photographs and other digital images to be manipulated, essentially the way airbrushing once removed the imperfections of celebrities and married couples.

However, the original software (the new version of which, Photoshop CS, was just released) is so large and powerful that the learning curve can be daunting for beginners. Adobe, realizing this, put out a reduced-feature, lower-priced edition for people who didn"t need to be able to remove whole people from photos and just needed to delete the occasional stray nose hair.

Frankly, the Grouch wishes most of the software he bought were like that. This document is currently being written in Microsoft Word for Mac OS X. What he really misses is Mac OS 9"s SimpleText. It was everything it was: a simple text editor. Highlight text on a Web page, in a document, just about anywhere, hit copy, hit paste, there it was. Later versions also allowed the text to be read aloud. The OS X version, TextEdit, just isn"t as good.

Far be it from the Grouch to ever oppose progress. The Grouch is not one of these backward-looking, yesterday-was-better kind of guys. Vinyl records were not, are not, and never will be better than CDs or digital music. But a measure of progress need not be complicated.

Once again, the Grouch points to the example of Chinese ISPs that require no registration. Simply dial-up, input the designated user name and password, and pay for the service via the phone line. Simple, easy, convenient, useful. Try that while you"re staying at the Park Lane. And is it generating more revenue for them? You bet.

But then we come down to the enemies of the simple life: IT managers. Put in systems that are simple to use and simple to troubleshoot, and they"re out of work. And these people are making your IT purchasing decisions.

The Grouch always tries to give credit where it"s due, so we"ll conclude this month with kudos for the folks at Palm One. The GrouchTreo had been dropped too many times to count. When he called up the Palm folks regarding a service order, they very kindly directed him to their outsourced service center, aka the DHL counter in the Central MTR. He walked in, handed over his battered and bruised PDA, and was immediately handed a replacement Treo 600, which works like new because, well, it is new. Thanks Palm for remembering what customer service is all about.