Let’s get this out of the way first: way too many people are going fuss-fuss-fuss and gabba-gabba-gabba over Michael Jackson and I’m already sick of it, just as I was sick of Jackson himself back by 87. He’s been irrelevant for a very very long time, perhaps since “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough,” and all the MTV-age wailing over his tragic life and death is really just self-involved noodling from yet another generation that thought they were never going to die but now are realizing otherwise. End of story.
(For the purposes of this discussion I'm leaving out his work with the Jackson 5ive, which IMO is still one of the Seven Wonders of the Recorded World.)
If this sounds callous it might be that I didn’t grow up with MTV and consequently even in his 1983 heyday Jacko solo was barely more than a blip the size of Billy Jean’s first-trimester fetus on my cultural radar; too busy wearing out the grooves on Murmur and Days of Wine and Roses. I’ll grieve when Neil Young or Pete Townshend, or Michael Stipe or Mick Jones or Ian McCulloch, finally kick off. That will be true loss far as I’m concerned. McCulloch used to introduce himself with “you can call me God” but he never expected to be taken seriously the way Jackson did with his self-appointed King Of Pop bullshit.
Okay. On to other things.
It hasn’t been much of a week for updating, or doing my regular job for that matter, because all I’ve cared about during my waking hours is Evernote and getting all my various bits and pieces into it. I’m just totally geeking out with this stuff in a way I never did with Google Docs or even iTunes. Now if I want, say, a copy of the last blood test results the doctor gave me, I don’t have to wait until I get to my desk at home. Nor once there shuffle with increasing aggravation through the papers on it for the proverbial needle in a stack of needles (because I’m still nowhere near as organized as I’d have you believe).
Nope: it’s all in the cloud now, the PDF of that test and my flight itinerary for the CA trip and the piece I wrote seven years ago about how I should have known Angela wasn’t the one for me when she said my plate of bulgoki smelled funny and that NYT article from 2006 on members-only libraries (because you never know when you might want to join one). And so on. Every-damn-thing, all at my fingertips. This is one application, I’m happy to say, with the potential for a lot of abuse.
Though that depends on what you consider abuse, of course. It could be that up until now I’ve been abusing myself with my regular methods of data-collection and –retention. The other day I sat down and made a list of all the tools I use to pile up and track data and it eventually numbered 18 items, from scraps of paper and iCal to Google Docs and my list of passwords on a flash drive. Backup drives, on-site and off-. To-do lists on Things and my iGoogle page. Even Ear counts for this purpose, because in essence what else what do you do in a blog but collect data?
If I’ve got it right, Evernote won’t replace most if any of these 18 tools for the collection part. All it means is I won’t have to look afterwards for a particular piece of data in one or more of 18 different places using search tools that range from the barely adequate (Word’s “find” function) to the outright inefficient (my own failing eyes and wandering attention). Translated: this is a huge step forward.
And it’ll never go away as long as I have access to a web browser. Once again I'm prompted to exclaim: what a great time this is to live in!
Two tools not on the list are the Notes and Voice Memo functions on my iPod touch. Notes I’ve just been too pen-and-paper-centric to try so far, and Voice Memo is new with last week’s iPhone 3.0 release. However, I wasted no time in ordering the plug-in microphone required for the touch. It arrived today and I’m very much looking forward to giving Voice Memo a test-drive (though if I do on the bus I hope I can refrain from looking too gabbler-like, seemingly mumbling to myself in the backseats).
I do love my technology, especially the handheld variety. When I bought this touch I never thought it’d prove as useful as it already has. Better yet, in spite of the butter-fingered odds I’ve only dropped it once in nine months. The Apple-god has been merciful to me thus far.
So have the Evernote engineers. A major bonus is its desk-client interface looks enough like OS X Mail's, something I already use all day, that I could conceivably work on Evernote all day instead and no casual visitor to my office would ever know the difference. Actually, no conceivably about it since that’s what I did yesterday and part of Wednesday too. The other part of Wednesday I got to go up to the main building for a meeting in the swanky-swank library of the UT president’s office, though more on that at a later time. For now all I want to do is see how hard I can drive my new software and what, in relation to it, “potential for abuse” really means.
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