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,...

Here's a little story about distraction. Having ADHD means that I spend a lot of time getting distracted, then getting back on task. Some distractions turn out to be cool, like my current middle grade novelette about a kid detective, and some are not so cool, like the urge to organize my books by color into a giant color gradient. I have learned to suppress the not so cool urges. One urge I don't suppress is my occasional impulse to leave a cheeky app review on the iTunes App Store. I leave serious reviews for apps that impress me, but cheeky reviews for those that don't. I'm sure the app devs love them. My latest review was inspired by the petulant 1 star comments left on the My Little Pony interactive ebook. You may not be aware, but there is a large fan base of 20-somethings who enjoy the latest incarnation of My Little Pony , created by Powerpuff Girls story writer, Lauren Faust . These fans, usually guys, call themselves bronies . Not all bronies are unhinged cr...

Considering that I recently posted a glowing review about the iPhone app, Path , the other day , I felt it was important to address the recent security hullaballoo that they created, even if it does wander a bit away from my usual topics. There's a lot of FUD out there regarding Path. You can read the Gawker article on it where they set themselves up as bastions of integrity offended by the very existence of Path, or you can read the original blog article by Arun Thampi and Path's response . As far as I understand things, in order for Path to see if friends and family of yours are on Path, they need to cross reference your address book with their database. Phone numbers and email addresses are how they tell one John Smith apart from another. It's how they know which John Smith to recommend to you. Where Path erred was in not letting people know this was how they did their matching magic. Also, they used a built in iPhone developer command to download the entire addres...

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:...

I like to daydream a lot. Maybe too much. Where does the line blur between ADHD distraction and creative dreamer ? I've spent so much time in that blurry domain that you would think I would be an expert at understanding it. Sometimes daydreams can become nightmares when they turn into ruminations of worst case scenarios, but often they just take me away from the drab, dun colors of reality. I wish I spent more time daydreaming about my own writing. That's something I feel I should do more of. There are untold tales in my head that could be formed into compelling stories to be shared with others. That was what I was trying to do two weeks ago on a cold January night at 2:30am . There I was, hiking along in my own world, thinking about what project I should be working on next, when I noticed to my right a part of my shadow was moving independently of me. It seemed to roil and bubble out of the corner of my eye. Not missing a step, as I was walking briskly to a snappy J-...

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...