A Splintered Mind

When I made the transition from paper to digital back in the 90s when Palm Pilots still roamed the earth and Man was preparing for the impending Y2K apocalypse, I said good-bye to that trusty old standby for ToDo lists: the pen & paper. It was all digital for me, and I was prepared to spend as much time as was required to get my very complicated repeating ToDos to beep on cue and sync with the desktop for security. It may have occasionally required hours to bang out syncing bugs, but I was living in the future, baby! Now that I'm older and wiser and finished selling a box of old Palm Pilots and Sony Cliés on eBay for $20, I realize digital isn't always better, and I keep a pen & paper handy just in case. But I still love living in the future. I'm just smarter about it. One smart trick I've come up with is to create fast ToDo lists by using my iPhone's camera when I don't have time to write items down. iPhones, smartphones, and most plain vanilla...

Today I almost invited a girl to a play. Fortunately, I came to my senses. Not yet. Way too soon. There are a few things I need to get in order in my life before I start making room for somebody new. Here’s a sample of the list: Achieve a gold platinum album with me playing favorite movie tunes on a penny whistle. Pan pipes optional. Become a rich land magnate on the Moon, with virally bad YouTube infomercials. Become translated. ¹ Learn how to take a serious photograph. Not necessarily in this order. I must admit it is a work in progress, especially that translated part. Hooboy, will I get heat for my brony review . I have yet to see the fallout over that one. So instead of an awkward night on the town, I'll be watching "Arsenic and Old Lace" with my 13 year old. I couldn't be happier. And then I can focus on why I'm really there: to show my support for my friend, Heather Monson, one of the murderous old biddies. As I struggle with Depression today,...

Reminder utilizes iOS' notification system" width="470" height="704"> How many times have you driven out to do errands and forgotten to get something? It might be strawberries at the grocer while they are in season, or the paperwork from the school, or maybe you forgot to drop off something like the library books that are knocking around in your car. For me it was forgetting to check my blood pressure at the grocers every time I went there. Need milk? Off I went. Back I came. No blood pressure checked.  Need diapers? Same story. Time and time again I would head out to the grocers and return without a reading. Somehow I never remembered to add it to the shopping list, or I didn't check the list it was on when I was shopping.  Assuming you aren't trying to avoid the task, sometimes it would be helpful if something could interrupt your reverie right about the time you were nearby. That's where Apple's Reminder comes in. First the bad news:...

With the launch of Path2.0 last December, I discovered a new love. Many tools have come out that allow one to crosspost to Twitter and Facebook, but they all felt a bit kludgy to me. Path had elegance and style, plus some flashy "Gee whiz!" features I absolutely loved. The need to share feeds has been strong since Twitter came on the scene in 2006. After all, who has time to visit each social network? What? You do it anyway? Yeah, me, too. But we shouldn't. Haven't you heard? Time is precious. There are many very stable and convenient ways to crosspost. Selective Tweets allows us to post to Twitter and share to Facebook with the simple #fb hashtag, but it steals four characters. Hootsuite is powerful but as user friendly as a Doc Smith's mind reading helmet. Better were tools like Twittelator that had a friendlier, more iPhone-like style. But all of them had one flaw for my ADHD brain: They were full fledged Twitter clients. Sure I could crosspost. I could...