All right, I’m still a little behind the curve on doing things I’m supposed to be doing, but there’s a meeting tonight and that should kick me back into gear. And then we’ll be TVFTing on Wednesday, which should help, if we can come up with an agenda. There’s also a speech workshop at the chez on Thursday, which should ignite the last of the rockets. And finally, if all else fails, tabbing with O’C at the Bobcat ought to do the trick. Otherwise I’ll just retire and take up fly fishing, although why people would want to fish for flies is beyond me. (As a matter of fact, over the break I had a whole conversation about why fish ought not be attracted to worms, given that there are no worms in the water naturally to give them a taste for the things, at which point we engaged in heated argument about whether fish could see colors. Since all one has to do is look it up on your handy dandy internet, we quickly got an answer. Who knew?)
While most of us are headed off to balmy Byram Hills this weekend, the Panivore is heading to frigid Florida. This is not right, but what are you going to do?
Meanwhile, you might be wondering how the addition of an iPhone to the life has changed things. A lot, as it turns out. First of all, since the iPhone is always in one’s pocket, it immediately becomes the central device for calendars and to-do notes and the like. Evernote allows those to to-do notes to spread among all the devices, which is important, because all the other devices save one are still all in play. As a result, the iPad retains all its uses except its calendar centrality. I’ve finally found myself digging into some games on it, especially since so many were on sale during the holidays. I’m sort of hooked on Chaos Rings, for some reason, although I did get some new games to keep my iPhone happy while I was at it. (It is worth remarking that, when all is said and done, it is Tetris that remains the undisputed timesucker for the ages. Pure elegance, pure addiction. All those Tetris-like games? They’re all not Tetris, when push comes to shove.) The camera in iPhone was kept happy with the Camera+ app, which includes all sorts of filters and whatnot for playing around; I’ve posted a bunch of these on Facebook if you’re interested. I do like having a camera in my pocket at all times. Flipbook on the iPad is improving, becoming a fun place to follow Twitter and Facebook in a browsing mode. Of course, internet access on the larger screen is the way to go, given a choice. So, iPhone changes things with the iPad, but hardly diminishes the thing’s usefulness and entertainment value. Meanwhile, the old Touch has been completely redefined into a single-functioned talk machine, i.e., audiobooks and podcasts. This means I don’t have to fill up the iPhone, which does have limits, which a lot of this extra stuff. I like to have, say, half a dozen audiobooks on deck, and a like number of podcasts, to soothe whatever taste arises at the moment. Perfect for the Touch, which can also add new episodes or books on the fly. Very neat. In the last six months my longer commute to the DJ has made me an audiobook addict, instead of just a social user. Podcasts remain the drug of choice for the exercise regimen (such as it is). Then there’s the 5th Gen, which remains the music machine for tournaments, where you want the most variety possible for two or three days of data entry. Which means that my original 2-gig Nano is, at long last, out of work. It has the virtue of incredible portability (it’s the size of two very skinny fingers) but not much versatility. It was, until recently, the dedicated podcast machine. Maybe I will eventually think of something to do with it. Maybe I’ll give it to the poor starving children in China. Hard to say. In any case, all of this ultimately demonstrates what can only be called an orgy of conspicuous (or occasionally inconspicuous) consumption of Apple products, and a pretty straightforward belying of any pretences on my part not to be an Apple fanboy, but it is what it is. On the bright side, I have no need for an Air (Vegas Elvis remains my main work machine) or an Apple TV (the Roku is enough, thank you very much). Thank God. If I had to figure out how to introduce even more toys into the toybox, I might actually run dry.
The moral of this enormously pretentious story is, do all your homework and eat your vegetables, and you too can grow up and get a DJ that pays you enough to buy all the crap your heart desires. Sometimes, yes, life is good, and toys are just what the doctor ordered.
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