[kwlug disc.] 'Blackberries make you stupid!'

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

On Tuesday 27 February 2007 9:24 pm, Donald Tees wrote:
> I have neither,  but then I have no car or television, either. I work at
> home, over the net, so i am beside the phone all day, and on it a dozen
> times a day when I want to clarify something.  There is also ample time
> during compiles and such to check mail, though not always the time to
> write a full answer.

:-)  I learned several years ago one of the most productive things I could 
ever do was turn OFF the "new message" notification in my MUA.  I check it 
when I think of it, and sometimes that's once every three or four hours.  But 
guess what -- I am BUSY during those four hours.  If I had the thing pop up 
saying "you've got mail" I'd lose my train of thought, lose my focus and end 
up taking an hour to get OUT of my "mode" and into something capable of human 
communication, and then spend another good chunk of time getting back 
into "mode" to work.

It drives two of the managers crazy but screw 'em.  I'm management there too 
and they know I'm not screwing around.

> I had a cell for a period, and hated it.  Instead of being constantly
> interrupted for eight to ten hours a day, I was constantly interrupted
> twenty-four hours a day.  I got rid of it, and swore I'd never get another.

:-)  I've actually installed a bluetooth dongle in my Asterisk box such that 
when I get home and the phone's put somewhere in the front of the house, 
whether it be my coat pocket in the closet or on the little table with my 
wallet, the system "grabs" it and all my cell calls are routed to the normal 
phones, which ring using my clearly inferior ringing rules... at least until 
I can figure out how to interface the system to read my mental state and 
probability of wanting to pick up a call.  :-)

> Perhaps it is different, growing up in a more modern world, but when I
> was growing up (I was born in 1947), a phone was there so you could call
> a doctor in an emergency. If I want to talk to someone, then I go to
> their house, or invite them here.  I never use the telephone for "just
> talking" unless the person is at least a continent away.  Email, and
> Usenet, I have used extensively for years, but then I am text oriented.

I'm very text oriented too, and don't like phones much.  I don't use the phone 
for talking too much either, but from your description of yourself I'd say I 
use it a fair amount more just for friendly communication than you do, which 
is still a good sight less than my fiancee or many of the people I know.

> The little hand-helds never turned my crank. I always wanted my own
> mainframe.

While no desktop or cluster today has the I/O throughput of even an old 
mainframe, aren't we getting to the state where there's enough balls in some 
of these handheld processors to challenge some (older) mainframes on raw 
compute power, and clusters of commercial processors which are winning the 
top supercomputing prizes?

What's your draw to the big iron?  My brother's got a similar draw to the big 
iron of interconnects which is why he works at Bell, but what about you?

-A.