More on technology, this time with favour

"It's my memory. I call it my other brain," said Ms. Walmsley. "It's not a cool gadget. It's my lifeline."

So says a diagnosed amnesia sufferer, referencing her smartphone.

While many of us here at the Lair don't suffer from amnesia (well, let's just say we've not been diagnosed), I think we can identify with that. In fact, I remember a contributor of many a fine morsel at the Lair stating boldly in reference to one such device/program: "It basically runs my life."

I have to say that, as a late adopter, and as one who suffers from amnesia of a certain variety (My beloved prefers to call it squirrel syndrome), such little devices have dramatically improved my life. I'm serious. If I had a blackberry with outlook earlier in my life, I would have avoided much heartache. I'm assuming a hearty "hear hear" from the readers here familiar with my past ways.

Does anyone at the Lair have any examples of technology that has significantly improved their lives?

For the tech addicts among us.

“Did you know that now, thanks to iPhone, you can use location services to tell your friends where are you are at any given moment, and if they’re on iPhone and have that same app they can find you, and then you can then ask iPhone to tell you if there are any Tex-Mex restaurants within a five-block radius, and what movies are playing at the nearest cinema? Then you can use Twitter (or, rather, one of the 14,000 Twitter apps) to tell your followers what you’re up to, and automatically feed that into your Facebook page so that your Facebook friends can comment on your movie plans, and advertisers can scour your personal messages and use keyword searches to send target messages to each of you, and deep thinkers like Robert Scoble and Chris Anderson will reassure you that you are not just getting sucked into the maw of the brain-killing machine, and this is not just mindless time-wasting twattle but is in fact extremely profound and revolutionary and important and intellectually challenging. Because in the old days you just read books and that was so passive, but now you’re so engaged and interactive, you’re not just a media consumer but you’re also a media creator — why, in fact, you’re a public intellectual — and if you don’t fully immerse yourself in every last bit of this shit then you will no longer be participating in your culture which means you will lose your job and everyone will laugh at you because you just don’t get it and you might as well be some 90-year-old dude sitting in a pee-stained bathrobe drooling.”

Thanks to Alan Jacobs for this.

Technical Fixes

Friends, you will find the Contributor profiles removed on the left. If you wish to remain anonymous in posting, you will want to change your "Display Name" in blogger profiles. Beyond that, you should no longer find any technical links to your blogger profile. Pax, Adunare.