In the age of space flight, nuclear fission and nanotechnology, no one has yet been able to invent a battery that will just go on and on and on. Instead, our talk-time on cellphones is limited to a few hours, and playing Bejewelled on an iPod Touch will make the battery strength disappear faster than lobsters at a buffet.

How many times have we run out of battery just when that perfect picture was there for the taking? And how often have we gone around the office begging for a charger because the battery in our cellphone was flat?

I was once cycling around Rottnest Island - one of those back-to-nature spots - in Australia, and the views of the ocean were stunning. Fishing out my digital camera, which used normal AA batteries, I was ready to snap a gorgeous picture of crashing waves from atop a cliff, but then the dreaded words showed up: LOW BATT. There was no shop in sight, and the visitors' centre was more than two hours away by bicycle. And guess who forgot to bring spare batteries.

I also take my portable DVD player to the gym so I can watch dramas and distract my mind from the pain and monotony of pounding away on a treadmill. I have lost count of the times I have forgotten to charge the player the night before, and then face the dreaded words LOW BATT as I am sweating and struggling to make it to 45 minutes on the treadmill.

Needless to say, the exercising stops when the battery does.

My Dustbuster handheld vacuum does not last more than 10 minutes on a full charge, the cordless phone has often cut-off when my wife is on her marathon sessions with her best friend and I have had to stop work because my laptop battery could not keep up with me.

A pastor told this joke about how when he had asked a youth to read the Bible out loud at a meeting, he was told: "Cannot pastor. LOW BATT."

As our lives become more enmeshed with technology and gadgets rule our days, I wish tech companies would forget about developing the next challenger to blu-ray or a new camera that packs more megapixels, and instead go back to the heart of all gadgets - its power source.

Just imagine what a super battery - which of course should be smaller than the size of a car - can do for our gadget-loving society. Anyone willing to take this project up, please, please, please?

Over the years, his career took off. It was a surprise to me that the Senator from a state with only 750,000 people was first named as Senate Minority Leader in 1994, and then as Senate Majority Leader from 2001 to early 2003. It was an example of how much clout this politician from an agricultural state had in Congress.

But his fall began in 2004, when he lost re-election to Republican John Thune. The final nail in the coffin of his career came on Tuesday, when he had to pull out over a tax scandal after being nominated by President Barack Obama for the post of Secretary of Health and Human Services.

I first met him in 1986, when I was the state and local news editor of the student newspaper at his alma mater, South Dakota State University. He was campaigning for the Senate on campus and had come down to the office for a one-on-one interview.

The first thing that struck me was how short he was, by American standards. He was about my height, barely topping 5' 8", and in a country where 60 million of the population suffer from obesity, he was slight. His photos just didn't attest to how "normal" he looked.

He was unassuming, patiently answering my questions about what he intended to do for young Americans - despite me being a foreign student - and why college kids should send him to the Senate. This was my first brush with a national politician - having only interviewed the state governor and politicians before this - and I was very impressed by how humble he was. Late that year, he was elected to the Senate.

The following year, I had another interview with him after I took over the editorship of the student newspaper. He was brimming with ideas for the state, and I could sense that great things awaited this junior senator from South Dakota.

After I graduated in 1987, I joined the newspaper in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as a copy editor. After three years, my company had wanted to keep me on, but my H-1 work visa was ending. The company had set my Green Card application in motion, but after being rejected, Daschle's office in South Dakota tried to help out.

The Senator wrote an appeal letter on my behalf to the US Labour Department, and from what I heard from a friend of mine who was working in his office, even offered to call on my behalf. Needless to say, I was quite surprised by how far he was willing to go for someone. Unfortunately, his appeal didn't work, and I came to join The Straits Times instead in 1991.

Over the years, I have been following his rise to greater power in Washington, and was shocked when he lost the re-election. Talking to my friends in South Dakota, they say that the people in the state still hold him in high regard, almost as revered as George McGovern, the South Dakotan who lost to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election.

Daschle would probably have made a good Secretary of Health and Human Services, I think - if he had not fallen victim to politics in this latest tax scandal.