I don’t know. Maybe I’m tired. The question is whether I’m “tired” or I’m “just tired.”

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

food made me brilliant; drink made me brilliant; sleep made me brilliant; wakefulness made me brilliant; day made me brilliant and night made me brilliant; the silent phenomenal roar of winter made me brilliant and the lazy transparency of summer made me brilliant.

Now, none of these things make me brilliant.

I wonder, at times, whether I have remaining today any real thoughts at all. Yes, yes, a times they appear to jump out at me and I whip out whatever phone device I am tethered to at the current moment in my life in order to pick out a note on the keyboard, but the thoughts that I have this way are today pedestrian and often more at the level of needing recording simply so that they don’t disappear on me later on (since my memory can and will no doubt not retain a thought for long), not at the level of being so brilliant that it demands a written accounting.

Analysis, synthesis, exegesis, none of it happens for me any longer. More and more I literally push paper around. From this pile to that; then back again. To do so feels like accomplishment, like work (not merely labor). It feels critically important sometimes that I . get . all . of . the . items . from . this . pile . into . that . pile . goddammit, and not at all as though my time might be better spend actually having, say, a thought.

Perhaps it’s intellectual laziness. But there is no doubt a physiological point at which laziness and incapacity converge; this is a well-known fact along a number of other avenues of practice (fitness and kinetics, for example) and is no different in the cognitive realm.

Above all, I am simply at a loss, and this blog post is evidence of that.

“Just do it,” everyone says, “just be brilliant and write and continue and write a smashing good Ph.D. and publish umpteen methodologically and intellectually sound works. Be prolific; why are you so damned lazy right now?”

That amounts to the same thing as saying “Fly, goddammit, you worthless lazy ape. Flap your fucking arms and sail away already, you insufferable waste of hair and skin. FLY! FFFFLLLLLLLLYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!”

Just a week with the iPhone so far but it’s been a hell of a busy week and the iPhone has definitely been put through it’s paces. Apparently it takes about a week when I switch primary communication devices to shift the relevant data sources and practices to integrate the new device into day-to-day life.

Biggest thing I’ve noticed so far versus the Palm phones that I’ve used in the past: the iPhone ecosystem and feature set is much more like a PC replacement than other devices. Time spent at my PC has radically declined in favor of the always-ready-to-hand iPhone. It’s capable enough that “I need a PC for that” moments are few and far between.

Another observation: for they value they provide, apps are ridiculously cheap. As a value proposition, the iPhone really exemplifies the power of crowdsourcing, communities, and economies of scale.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

is indeed an interminable and exhausting process. I’ve effectively been working on his since my first round of graduate school applications in 2002.

Seven years.

It will be at least another year-and-a-half until the whole thing is settled. Basically a decade, give or take. By the time I’m done I’ll have spent more than two decades of my life as a college student. If all goes according to plan, I’ll then get a job on a college campus somewhere (more permanent and predictable than he ones I already have).

No wonder academics have a tendency to become disconnected from the general population. To succeed as an academic is essentially to crawl inside a bubble as a very young person with the intention of staying there for the duration of your life in every facet of it.

There must be a better way to organize the social production of knowledge.

— Posted from my iPhone

In the interest of a more digital and interconnected life, I’m posting a blog entry with iPhone integration and Twitter integration. Here goes nothing!

— Posted from my iPhone

and partially from academic and theoretical curiosity as someone who claims to be a sociologist of technology and media, I finally acquired an iPhone 3GS this week via AT&T upgrade.

I’m shocked and I should have done this sooner, frankly.

Here’s the thing that becomes clear after a couple of days with this device, keeping in mind that I’m a longtime smartphone user who has used them deeply, including the mobile web, calendaring, Bluetooth communication, and so on:

This is a sea change, a new type of device (well, forgetting for a moment that it’s actually years old and I just couldn’t be bothered to seriously look into it until now).

The change from a Palm or Blackberry to an iPhone is like the change from Gopher to HTTP or for people who have no idea about what that meant, it’s as big as would be a jump from AM radio to color HDTV in one step.

This is the first absolutely viable “palm computer” I’ve ever used, as fast as a desktop, with user interface absolutely unhobbled by and transparent despite its tiny screen, absolutely intrinsic connectivity via Edge/3G, 802.11 WiFi, and a pile of apps that are network-aware.

This is a device that feels absolutely unhobbled, without excuses, as though someone finally sat down with a nice low-power, high-speed non-x86 CPU and said “let’s put a real operating system on this thing and give it a user interface appropriate to its size.”

The next closes thing I can think of is Apple’s own Newton, back in the day. This is, in fact, the successor to the Newton in almost every way apart from input method, and with its built in accelerometer and compass, it’s software and hardware capabilities are similarly revolutionary, now transparently mediating between yourself and your environment not as a matter of symbolics or gestures, but as a matter of bodily kinetics.

Crazy cool.

—

I gotta get my early adopter mojo back. I am tremendously embarrassed not to have had a serious handle on this thing sooner. This really does change everything. I wonder if Android phones are similarly endowed.

No, really tired. Like, I’m falling asleep right now. I want to lay down on the conference table I’m sitting at and call it a day.

Unfortunately there’s one more class today. I’m a bit behind in grading/evaluation type stuff, too. I should be doing that. But instead I’m posting here and thinking about how very, very tired I am.

routinely call those that they belittle and negate ‘whiners,’ ‘weak,’ etc.