The text-based life

As I’m working through the droidification of my life, I’m struck by two truisms… First, the auto-substitution give and the auto-substitution take away even as it slowly learns that words like ‘droidification’ should not be rendered as ‘driving fiction’.

Secondly, I realized as I was pondering my bill this month, that I live a predominantly text-based existence, for a geek. I am an Infocom game running on a Warcraft engine… a lot of power for text adventures.

Still, recognition is the first step for recovery. it isn’t so much about me needing to change my lifestyle because I bout a phone… its actually a professional consideration. Increasingly a large number of projects are encompassing the mobile space, so I need to immerse myself in the lifestyle as far as I can. My thumb speed is already improving, and I’ve started taking some interesting photos pc my daily life. I just haven’t started uploading or sharing them all that much yet. Small things like that are part of what I mean.

One thing I did find today….GDOC. It’s an app that will let me edit Google Docs from my Droid. See? Text-based little ole me.

Felicitactiones a los mineros Chilenos

I want to express my own joy and best wishes to the Chilean miners rescued today. Welcome back from the underworld, guys.

Examining my mobile use

After my last post about Providing my life I took a look at what my actual usage patterns on the phone actually are. I realized that it isn’t so Mich a question of whether or not I’m usually.g the smartphone or not, its more a question of the kinds of things I’m actually using it for.

In the past few days I have:
– Finished reading Ken Collect’s novel Deadly Fortune via the Kindle app for Droid, even though I don’t have a Kindle. Then I downloaded Machiavelli’s The Prince and Sun Tzu’s Art of War to have on hand in the office.

– I downloaded Florence + The Machine and have played it until I’ve got the music stuck in my dreams.

– If you count my last post and this one I’ve blogged from the phone (trying to ramp up thumb typing proficiency and seed the Droid auto-replace library with my own language patterns.

– I’ve had sms conversations wih lots of folks.

– took pictures of my workday scenery for later editing and sharing on Flickr.

– counted calories

I suppose given all of that I’ve been getting along well, and I’m already Droidifying nicely. I’m convinced that there’s more I can be doing or getting out of this phone.

One thing I’m planning on doing next is working more on setting up the various user spaces to organize
my apps a bit more logically to me. From there we’ll see about adding photos to the flogging. And learning more about the PhotoShop express app and what it can do.

Droiding My Life

In July I finally made the step up into the world of smartphones and purchased a Droid Incredible for me and my partner. It was super cool, and having a smartphone finally gave me the context for a lot of my old grad school classes which just wasn’t possible before.

Recent work conversations about mobile made me take a look at my pattern of usage with the Droid, and I came to realize that aside from using the Droid like an iPod (another item I never owned) and taking a couple of 8Mpx snaps that essentially, I’ve been using the Droid the exact same way I had used my old flip phone.  For the price of a Smartphone, not exactly good use of my money.

I’ve decided, therefore, to start Droiding my life.

I want to start putting the phone through its paces and see what I can really do with it. It’s going to be a bit of a lifestyle adjustment, but I’ve already made the investment in materials, so now I need to make the investment in time.

For the next six months, over the winter, I’m going to be trying out new things to see how I can really get the most out of my Droid. It means some conscious decisions about my other online patterns as well. For example, do I want to spend more time taking and manipulating photos for Flickr and become active as a digital artist there, or should I work within Facebook more via mobile? Do I *really* want to bother with Twitter? That kind of thing.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress.