Survey: Cellphones vs. Sex from Mashable

via Mashable

I find this infographic posted on Mashable quite amusing and scary at the same time. It’s spot on with what’s current in our society, and I know this HOW? Because it’s what goes on in our VERY home.

First it was me, being all in love with my MacBook, then my Android smartphone (LG Shine Plus from Telus, which I would not recommend anymore to anyone: both the phone and the carrier, but that’s another story for another day), then my iPod Touch, and mon Mari was very accommodating.

And then HE got a spanking new Samsung Galaxy S2 as soon as it was launched in Canada and now I’m on the other end of tech-addicted behavior around our house.

Some of the stats on the infographic are totally reflective of what goes on at our place: sleeping with the phone? check. Checking phone during movie? check. Checking phone during dinner? check

But we do have a toddler who needs his mama’s and papa’s undivided attention so we do make concerted efforts to put our gadgets down, get off our social networks and the internet and focus ONLY on activities with  le Petit. I’m pretty good at NOT bringing gadgets to the table during any meal or snack times.  It’s learning to integrate the devices into our lives without letting them take over. We are actually having to LEARN and intentionally practice tech etiquette in our personal lives. I think that’s a good thing and something we can then teach le Petit, but it really does say something about our society that we need to develop a new set of behaviors around normalizing our interactions with technology in our private and public lives.

As for going without …  for a week? Yes, I have given up shoes, exercise (to my dismay), caffeine, chocolate and alcohol to be with my smartphone and iPod Touch.  But I wouldn’t give up the other things.

Tags: gadget

Inspiration to last all year round

via thecitrusreport

This is one of the most motivating posters I’ve read, anywhere.

Tags: design, inspiration

‪A New York sketchbook‏

via pajareandoencolores on YouTube

I’m newly obsessed with expensive (or expensive-looking) black notebooks, and stumbled on this total gem on moleskinerie, a neat website about Moleskine “Legends and stories”.

It’s one uber-talented artist’s creative rendering of New York, all poured into the pages of one Moleskine notebook.

Seeing & cameras

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” – Dorothea Lange

via minimalmac.com

True that.

Now when I walk anywhere, I look. I LOOK. Things look differently to me than before the era of our smartphone. Now, particular angles and objects leap into view and get mentally reframed in a rectangular or square outline. If it’s handy, I’ll grab my smartphone or iPod Touch and snap.

Kudos to le Mari for having patience for regular interruptions on our way to places while I stop and shoot.

Tags: photography

“Get Focused – Read Books”

…I don’t think only paper book can bring salvation. In my opinion it’s any book, in any form. You can reach for a paperback or an enhanced ebook or an audiobook. Some better than the others, but they will all reduce this annoying feeling of distraction. You’re not in the endless abyss of the Internet any more, you’re in a fully formed world, following its story at the speed you choose.

You can say “yeah, but sometimes I’m distracted so deeply, that I can’t imagine myself reading a book.”

You’re right, I experience it every day. Among so many skills we learn to keep up with changes, we have to add one more – how to turn into a reading mood after a busy day full of multiple streams of information, smartphone rings, push notification beeps and nervous location check-ins.

It’s doable…

via Password Incorrect

I came across this post today and it totally reinforces what’s been going on my own life lately: not only getting back into writing but more importantly, READING. Ah, one of my earliest loves. It’s not that I’m NOT reading lately, but that I’ve read MUCH less of whole books, as opposed to snippets, posts, articles, post – all good, but quite different from the experience of immersing myself in a book.

Three weeks ago I went on a vacation to interior BC, hung out at some Rocky Mountain hot springs, and just READ. It was amazing, so much so, that I am determined not to neglect the practice. I’m going to be intentional about spending a solid hour or 2 at least twice a week (probably before sleep) just getting into a book. This means choosing to get OFF the MacBook and to not catch up on feeds, fanfic and links, and instead getting that tea or wine or water and sitting down and cracking open the pages.

More recently, though, I should say that turning on my newly purchased Kobo ereader is more commonplace than actually opening the pages.  It’s been incredibly convenient since I was able to load up the books I already have and read them on a good size device rather than my phone or iPod Touch (which, while convenient, never provided an immersive experience).  Two weeks in, I am loving it and have finished 3 books, and working through another two.  It’s great to get back into an old-but-not-forgotten love.

Tags: inspiration

For the love of pen and paper

A neat irony has recently sprung up in my life. It is that just as my commitment to blogging more on hopefully one (of 3) internet blogging platforms has been revitalized, so has an obsession in analog tools been stirred up anew. (What I’ve written below is taken word-for-word from another post of mine.)

I don’t know if it’s because I’m in the “going back to school” mindset (it’s only been, what, 11 years…) but lately I’ve been fascinated by old-fashioned pen-and-paper notetaking. I was in Invermere, BC last week and stumbled into a store that had Rhodia notebooks, and Chapters recently restocked the Moleskine line of 18-month calendar agendas with their classic hardbound, gorgeous black covers and elastic – just the feel of these quality notebooks in my hands has revived an old feeling in me.

Although most of my journalling and notetaking over the past 2 years has been electronic (MacJournal, Evernote, and prior to that on a PC, in MS OneNote), a recent search for old university papers uncovered boxes, literally 3 boxes, of my collected journals/writings/scribbles/doodles.

I had forgotten how colourful journalling could be. The freedom of lined/unlined/graph paper, to doodle here or sketch something there, the power of freehand writing and a thousand other things I was able to do by hand that I haven’t really done on my laptop – these things I’ve missed over the past few years.

So I was pleased to stumble upon this post in the Telegraph from last year about a mini-revival of “analog” note-taking that has emerged recently. Angela Webb of the National Handwriting Association is quoted:

We’ve seen a reverse of the trend in the last two to three years, and people are much more keen to handwrite now. Research is coming though from skilled authors who use handwriting to get ideas flowing and then move to the keyboard to develop them.

This jibes with what readers and writers from a couple of my favorite websites, Lifehacker and GearFire Productivity, have mentioned over and over: brainstorm and jot by hand, shape and finalize by type.

Anyway, it’s been a neglected art in my house, and I think it’s something I look forward to bringing back over the next year.

Now: I’m going to go out and hunt out a fresh, pristine, empty notebook that will be my companion for the next few months.

(Yesterday, I think I found a potential candidate: this Japanese import, Maruman Mnemosyne notebook from Jetpens.com.)

Tags: writing