We’ve been listening to Venetian Snares lately to see if we like them.

We don’t.
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Mark Evanier went through 24 hours without electrical power recently and experienced our worst nightmare:

While waiting for power to be restored, I mused on how much of my life — not just professionally but personally — is entwined with computers and how I have trouble functioning when I don’t have access to one. The battery on my laptop lasted only so long and after it went out, I was rather paralyzed. Never mind not being able to write all the scripts and assignments and e-mails I have to write. It was worse than that. A thought would come up and my first instinct would be to go Google the topic for further info and —

Whoops. Can’t do that. Can’t do a lot of things I need to do.


Evanier found solace in his Blackberry, something we have been resisting the idea of for a long time, but something we are considering as a stopgap until the iPhone comes out in a version we like. Is that just giving in to the devil?

UPDATE: Aaaaaand as if by magic…cheaper iPhones! Yeah!

1 COMMENT

  1. You have prepare yourself for this kind of thing. Once a month, you have to unplug. jack-out and see how what it takes to function. It takes some time to get used to it, but eventually, you start to appreciate what technology can do, and what it doesn’t have to do. I write everything, except blog comments, but including most emails, my last 2 novels, both graphic novels, both comic series, and all the poetry long-hand.

  3. “Is that just giving in to the devil?”

    I feel like it is, most of the time. I was one of the last generation of teenagers who grew up without the internet, and I’m grateful for that. Now everyone will talk to me on line, but I can’t get them to come and see me. I’ve been told by others that they have this problem, too.

  4. I’d say getting a BlackBerry is just giving in to the devil, but I understand that I’m in the minority in this.

    I truly detest my BlackBerry. It’s major strength isn’t that it does anything very well, but it does a mediocre job of doing a lot of things together. It does a less mediocre job than all of its competition and is the only one that does all of them, but that doesn’t make it a good device. It just means it sucked less than the equivalent offerings from Palm. This is the only explanation I have for its success.

    The only reason why I have one is that work forced one on me. They used it to replace an alphanumeric pager, and it does a crappy job of replacing the pager because all the models before the one I have now just weren’t loud enough to wake me up.

  5. The worst part of not having power was the lack of fans or air conditioning. A couple of nights it was still 100F at 11pm here in the San Gabriel valley.

    My skin crawled too because I couldn’t really do any lettering work.