The Dooryard

I'll stick with myphone

I am so over the iphone. The hype is out of control. I can't escape it on the radio, on blogs, on youtube. I couldn't care less about some $600 phone that costs $100 a month to have. But, I've never been one of those people who desperately needs to own status symbols.

I completely understand gadget geeks getting excited about the phone, just like movie fanatics wait in line for 24 hours (or more) to get into the opening night of a movie. But the hype for the iphone isn't being driven by gadget geeks, it's being driven by people dying to have the latest status symbol. A friend of ours is delaying his trip to Provincetown this weekend to wait in line to get the iphone on Friday. Why? While he won't say it, it's so he can walk up and down Commercial Street holding an iphone and have people stop him and ask him to see it.

I have no doubt it will be cool. It looks like it has a true internet browser, which is great. If it accesses the internet with any kind of speed, that'll be awesome. And once the hype has settled and the cost has come down, I could definitely see myself getting one if it lives up to half of the hype it has garnered. But the need to wait in line, postpone trips and shell out a couple thousand dollars over the next year for it? Come on.

774-253-1962

A while ago a kid named Ryan in Massachusetts posted this Youtube video (left). It's just him asking people to call his phone number. I didn't think much of it until I saw his second video (below), in which he talks about some of the people who have called him. Some people are claiming that he's received over 100,000 calls.

I can't claim to have some intimate knowledge about his reasons for doing this. It seems kind of crazy. But, I can't help but think I wish I thought of it first. The idea of people just calling to say hello, ask your advice - the opportunity to help other people and make the whole world feel a little bit smaller. That's the beauty of media and mass media. And I think it's really neat that Ryan has decided to do this.

Some people are saying it's a scam. It doesn't feel like it to me. I suppose it could be. I called the number and it rang once and went to a very nice voicemail, asking me to call back. If you've got a problem, might as well call. It can't hurt.

Cell phone etiquette

I was in the elevator this afternoon when someone got in talking on their cell phone. He talked and kept talking until the door opened and, as we got out, he got off the call.

Cell phones and PDAs are great (I love my Blackberry 7105t, left). I think the more we can communicate with one another the better. But courtesy and presence have suffered quite a bit for it. It is important to me to find a balance between staying in touch with our own world (and by "our own world" I mean the community each of us fashions for ourselves) and being respectful of the people who are physically around us.

To that end, I'm linking to several articles about cell phone etiquette that I've found thoughtful, and that I hope you'll take to heart.

From Geek.com, PDA and cell phone etiquette tips
From Wired.com, the miss manners of cell phones
From Inforworld, the Ten Commandments of cell phone etiquette

Cowardice

Please, if you're going to post comments on this blog, don't do so anonymously. You'll find that, if you have to put your name on your comments, you'll actually force yourself to make better arguments and you might not sound like a complete lunatic.

Sitting upright turned on its head

I have suffered from lower back pain since an Ultimate Frisbee injury my freshman year in college. It has been exacerbated by my work that generally entails long hours of sitting in a chair. A new study has now come out that turns the old "sit up straight" theory on it's head. The study says that a more reclined position is ideal for the back.

"A 135-degree body-thigh sitting posture was demonstrated to be the best biomechanical sitting position, as opposed to a 90-degree posture, which most people consider normal," study author, Waseem Amir Bashir, a researcher at the University of Alberta Hospital in Canada, told LiveScience.com.

I have actually thought that for years, but I always figured I was crazy or doing real damage to my back. When you're upright, your spine and back muscles are working overtime; but when you're leaning back, it's your abs that get the workout. And that can't be a bad thing!

Words that drive me crazy

I'm innocently sitting at my desk editing an interview that someone else did, and I come across this word: "optionality." As in, "there's a lot of optionality." This drives me bananas. People seem to have completely forgotten how to speak, making up ridiculous words that either aren't words or shouldn't be words. What the person meant was "options" - instead, he came up with "optionality." Oh, brother.

Another one I can't stand is "historical." "Historic" is all you need - the "-al" at the end of the word does nothing to the word, except to make the person using it sound stupid. Yes, historical is a word - but, it's a bad word, just like optionality.

Please, people, let's start talking with intelligently and concisely. We rip various people in the media spotlight for sounding less-than-genius when they talk; let's start living by our own criticism.