Jul 16th, 2010
Tech talk
Around the end of June, my tech life changed dramatically in two ways.
First, I became the owner of an iPhone 3G. Jan bought this two years ago and has used it pretty much nonstop every since. (We joke that it is his “auxiliary brain.”) When the iPhone 4 came out last month, he preordered one; it arrived (and was immediately activated) the day before it would have been available in stores.
Then the 3G became mine. I’m not using it as a phone, though. My cell phone use doesn’t justify this expensive; it currently amounts to about 400 minutes per year–so I use T-Mobile’s prepaid 1000 minutes good for one year for $100 deal. So the old iPhone is functioning as an iPod Touch*, which means I have Internet access whenever I have a WiFi connection.
So what am I doing with the 3G? Mostly gaming. It’s very handy for playing an asynchronous Scrabble-like game with friends, as well as Carcassonne. (If Settlers of Catan ever comes out for the iPhone, I will probably disappear for a while…) I’m also having loads of fun with Plants versus Zombies, which is exactly what it sounds like (and available for many platforms, for non-iPhone users out there).
The other big change is that I have pretty much stopped using Facebook in the past few weeks. I ranted here about Facebook several months ago, but ultimately still found it a useful place to keep in touch with people. But lately, I find that reading Facebook just annoys me: too much passive-aggression, too many “let me say something vague and negative so lots of people will ask me ‘what’s wrong?’” status updates, too much inanity. I started hiding people from my feed, and when I realized that I was hiding most people, I knew it was time to go. Oh, and there’s also that whole thing about how Facebook completely ignores any privacy concerns and aggressive markets users’ information to other vendors. Yeah, that.
(I haven’t nuked my Facebook account–still on the fence about that–but I’ve removed most of my personal information from there.)
So, aside from the blogosphere, where am I hanging out these days online? Believe it or not, Twitter, where I’m First Things; you can find me here. I’ve been active there only for a couple of weeks now, and so far it’s been…interesting. More on that later, though.
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*What a lame name. Seriously, Steve Jobs: Apple has excelled in the design and marketing department for some time now. This was the best you guys could come up with?




