We got home late last night and after a cuppa headed off to bed for what was the most comfortable nights sleep I’ve had in two weeks.
I have over 2000 unread items in Google Reader (I’ve been cropping it 25 items at a time using the iPhone offline Reader client, Byline) and heaps more Starred for later consideration so I’ll be busy every evening churning out some thoughts based on them. Byline, by the way, is an essential tool if you like reading blogs and can make use of the offline reading (yes, it’s also an offline web browser). And yes, it would be even better if you could dial up the number of articles it downloaded (say, 100?) and when you Star an item it should ask you for a ‘tag’ or reason why you starred it. But even with this, it’s a fabulous application that has never crashed (though Google has sent it some odd errors) and always delivers. Bravo!
Today however is set for preparing for the new job tomorrow (when I’ve been wearing very casual clothes for the last two weeks it’s a bit of an adjustment). And dropping off pressies and saying Hi to family.
Being out of the loop for two weeks feels like being cut off completely. And yes, though I was able to read headlines and skim the odd article, it’s a weird feeling when every part of your daily feed comes through a tiny handheld and your ‘edit/upload’ capabilities are severely curtailed due to the tools you have. I empathise a little with Manfred Macx, the protagonist at the start of Accelerando, when he loses his identity a little when his glasses and backup memory are stolen. I’m not yet at the stage where I’m backing up memories (4 months per Terabyte) but bloggers often put things in their blogs (public or private) which are meant as reminders. We tag them for easy retrieval. I’ve certainly used the blogs I run to capture ‘state’ by writing private posts which indicate the mood I was in, the things that were happening around me.
Right now, I’m off to grab my laptop from the secure storage 🙂