Umbral Echoes Blog

• 17:06 Heading to the woods of KY this weekend for a game, won’t have cell/Internet. #

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• 08:58 Not handling today as well as I’d hoped. Will likely be on radio silence all day. #

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• 19:37 Cincinnati is pretty at night. snipurl.com/498as #

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• 19:54 Convinced my management training class to go out for drinks at Brickstore Pub tomorrow after class. Now I shall see the teacher drunk! #

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• 09:49 Haven’t been in a fire drill since I was in school. snipurl.com/45cdj #

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• 18:01 Greek Festival, ho! #

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• 18:58 Roommate is taking me out to Top Spice, which is apparently an extra-spicy Thai and Malaysian place. #
• 22:43 Top Spice was not incredibly spicy, but was incredibly good nonetheless. I will have to go back there sometime. #

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• 18:25 Hiking back down Stone Mountain. snipurl.com/3w9nn #

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• 18:09 Dinner and St. Bernardus at the Brickstore Pub. If you’re in Altlanta, get your ass down here! #
• 21:08 Ideas for a presidential debate drinking game? Every time one candidate takes a shot at the other, drink? #

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Let it never be said that I’m not willing to try new things, and change my opinions.

Many moons ago, before I discovered this magical nugget called the iPhone, I thought that texting was pretty silly.  Why take 30 seconds writing something out when you could call someone and say it in a fraction of that time?  The phone companies charge extra money to add text messaging to your plan (though I’ll be damned if I know why, other than “because we can”), it’s cumbersome, and impersonal.

Well, recently I’ve discovered that text messaging does have a few good uses.

• At work — When at work, or other places you can’t have a voice conversation, text messaging lets you keep in touch with people.
• Noisy environments — When you’re at a concert, it’s sort of a pain to yell into the phone to tell your friend to shave and queue up the porn for some dirty fun later on.
• Low signal areas — I’ve been in several places where you can’t get enough reception to talk, but there’s still enough of that magical digital bandwidth to push a few characters through.
• When you don’t want to interrupt — Need to ask someone something, but it’s not really that high priority, and they might be in the middle of something more important?  A text works nicely.

I find that I articulate myself better in writing than in speaking anyway — or at least, I think I do.  And as much of an IM junkie as I’ve been over the years, it feels pretty natural to communicate in that way.

However, after exchanging 3 or 4 texts with the same person, I’ll generally just dial their ass.  At that point, you’re both just wasting time typing things out.  Texting is also impersonal, which in some cases is appropriate.  But I find that people over-use it as a means of communication.  Which I’m sure the phone companies are loving.  Damn you Apple!  Come out with your push IM service faster, so I can ditch this damn texting plan and just use AIM or Yahoo to text people.  Biggest annoyance with this phone is that when the screen goes off, you’re also signed off instant messengers and don’t get notified of new messages.

And now I’ll stop this before it becomes any more of a tech rant.