It’s incredible how attractive the constant connectivity is. It’s phenomenal what you can do with it. You can be in contact with people thousands of miles away as if you were face to face. Any time of the day or night. Across timezones and borders and space itself.
Yet while connected at all moments possible it is still possible to have that void. That absence. That bizarre ability to feel unloved or alone in a crowded place or at least a place where you are in fact not alone.
Not physically alone.
I thought as I wrote this that it is foolish to seek such connectivity if some part of your brain tells you that there is no one to talk to. But then I realized well, well that’s just it isn’t it. To have new and convenient and present ways to reach out and to be reached feeds a need or a wish to eventually fill the gap and find whoever it is you’re looking for.
And then that tiny, all too legitimate voice pipes up from the far corners – it says if you are alone when you are not alone, no matter how many connections you have you will never connect, will you?
But I don’t know if that is totally true or not. I can’t tell anymore. I question everything and then wonder why I’m doing that.
What I do know is this.
I have to find out if that wheel can be oiled somehow.
Ironic
The Greatest Show on Earth
Well. What I’m thinking is that certain kinds of shows on television work. Maybe not for you, maybe not for me, but for someone, and a lot of someones at that.
We’ve got the new wave of vampire shows/movies. There’s the crime dramas and the cop mysteries, there’s the hospital dramas, and even a hospital mystery, maybe two, I’m not sure. There’s also more reality shows than should be allowed which are primarily competitions and sometimes just about interactions between people. Recently there have also been some shows just pretty much about blowing shit up.
The key to the next great thing? A page from every book.
The way I see it – we’ll have a handsome but moody and distant vampire who is also a doctor and deals with attempting to distance himself from women who love him as well as the woman he loves while working with his patients who suffer from diseases no one else understands and alternately gruesome acts of violence that the police can’t wrap their minds around. In the pursuit of the antagonists and/or answers, shit blows up. He’s probably got a cop friend that keeps him at arms length because he’s wary and, spoiler alert, things just get worse when he finds out he’s a vampire and, hey, why is a vampire a doctor if he’s not cashing in on the convenient position of being a doctor with access to all that blood?
He’s got his soul, of course. Come on, that should have been obvious.
iPhone 3GS
I am forced to reconstruct this anecdotal review due to an ironic failure of software. Such is life.
About two days ago now I remembered I was to be eligible for an ‘incentive pricing’ deal on a new AT&T phone because apparently that avenue opens after one year of a contract. Indeed, I had been eligible for two days at that time and naturally I couldn’t wait for one more minute after this revelation and darted down to the AT&T store and snapped up a new iPhone 3GS.
Did I have an iPhone 3G already? Certainly.
Was it an almost completely integral part of my daily life? Oh yes.
Was I desperate for the massive gains provided by the new hardware? Absolutely.
I do love my iPhone, which is a 3G, but it had been proving too pokey for my tastes. Internet at my fingertips was just not good enough for this technology whore. It had to be at hand faster.
So now there’s a 3GS by my side. I’ve heard the reviews – an average of a 50% speed gain and make no mistake, that is a substantial number to be taken in a positive light.
And it’s true! I haven’t run quantifiable tests but I can tell it’s fast. Fast enough to keep up with me. And that’s a literal statement.
I would find that I could launch, for example, the Messages app for text messaging, and pick the contact of my choosing, and then proceed to type, typically, almost my entire message before the phone caught up and even started displaying the letters.
On the new phone? Not so! It keeps up just like it should. Which, to make a long review less long, is essentially how I feel about the phone. It is good. It is the way the iPhone should be – from a hardware standpoint.
Will there be a new one that’s arguably better one year from now? Yes, most likely. Who knows what it will be capable of! Possibly that video chatting feature fans and speculators alike have been fiending for. We can only hope.
Because despite the fact that I deem myself far too visually unpleasant to appear on video chats, damn it all the feature is terribly tempting.
But as it is, can I now use a compass in conjunction with Google Maps and GPS or just on its own for the hell of it? Yes I can and it’s halfway accurate to boot! Can I now record passable casual video? Yup. Far superior still shots? Yup. Voice commands? Sure can, if I figure out what it actually accepts.
I’m a big fan of the iPhone. AT&T’s service occasionally leaves things to be desired but in this populous area I live in, service is almost always just fine. So hey, good times.
Social Networking
I noted a tweet from Blaise (I know a guy named Blaise, how cool is that?) and he implored the interet to create one social networking site to rule them all. It’s true – it’s out of control. I only use a few of the ones out there and I pretty much ignore them becaues it’s tedious and I’m fairly certain no one gives a rip and will even less if they’re on all of them and then see the same info a ton of times.
So. I suggested that Blaise embrace the fact that Twitter can cross post to Facebook and MySpace. There are applications such as Monitor on the Mac and TweetDeck on multiple platforms that kind of aggregate these things and make them more accessible but there’s still the matter of posting to the individual sites.
There’s also the site I’ve found recently called Hi, I’m. http://hi.im/ It pulls all of your social networking into one central place – they describe it as your name tag on the internet. I haven’t used it myself yet but I do believe it looks promising.
That’s all I have for now, but in this world of excessive diversity splintering one’s single (an assumption) personality across so many sites, integration could be a welcome change.
We'll see how this goes…
So it’s hardly a week goes by where someone doesn’t tell me that I should be in standup comedy or be on Saturday Night Live or do an open mic night or have my own show or my own sitcom or movie or youtube or whatever. Why? Well because I’m so fucking funny of course.
These things, the fame or infamy or whatever, it’s just never appealed to me. I would regret nothing more than to lose the option of privacy. That roundly rules out any kind of notoriety.
However, my therapist of all people, thinks I’m funny as shit and while that is questionably good, I decided that one of the things I told him bore repeating to an audience.
I was telling him about work and how I know what I’m doing and it’s pretty good and all but sometimes things go over my head. Or whatever.
So I’m scanning bits out of a book (the author told me to so it’s cool) and I have to go a page at a time because it’s a book and a flatbed scanner. However it’s nice because the scanner automatically sends the document to the specified computer and you don’t have to move from the scanner back to the desk and back again over and over and over. I mean, the office is almost 29 feet long, come on! I sit in the middle and the scanner is ALL THE WAY at one side. Gawd!
Anyway I’m scanning and sending a page at a time and everything is fine for about seven or eight pages and then, out of no where, something changes. I go ahead and scan the next page and the scanner says “Oops, what are you doing?”
So I say “What?”
Scanner says “What are you doing?” I mean, not really but you get the idea.
I reply – “I’m sending this page to my computer”. Scanner asks what computers I think I’m sending this to. I explain that it’s the same computer I’ve been sending the past pages to and it says it knows nothing about this and doesn’t have a clue what computers I could possibly be talking about. “Well it’s my computer!”
“I don’t see any computers.”
“WTF??? It’s right there! I just scanned eight pages to it! Nothing’s changed! What the hell happened?”
The scanner insisted it had no idea. So I went over to the computer and told the computer to pull a scan from the scanner. Computer taps the scanner on the shoulder and says “Hey, sup?”
“O hai!” says scanner, promptly feeding the image to the computer.
I’m like “What the hell just happened?” and everything was fine from there.
….
Listen, the therapist was rofl. Seriously. I mean, not literally. But seriously.