Digital Slob
Digital Slob
The true elite don’t
carry lots of gadgets
Continuing this week, "Digital Slob" takes a look at a few gadgets that are relatively cheap yet useful enough to still be respected in the morning. This week, it's digital voice recorders.Few things separate Digital Slobs and Respectable People more than how they organize their lives.
Digital Slobs rarely plan ahead. As a rule, we walk around the house in our underwear unless we expect company (within the hour).
Our "Hurricane Preparedness Kits" consist of rum, amaretto, orange juice, pineapple juice and grenadine.
On the other hand, PDA-packin' Respectable People hold a deep-seated belief that you can't call yourself important unless you can point your plastic stylus to the relevant downloaded calendars and prove it.
I would remind social-climbing gadget gluttons that from King George IV to George Bush II, the world's top movers and shakers have been identified by how little they carry. I've never seen the pope with a backpack, but I have seen homeless people push five times their body weight down the street in grocery carts.
The truly elite don't go wireless; they go unfettered, period. If you don't believe me, count the laptops and Palm Pilots in the audience on Oscar night.
Yet, unless you starred in "Chicago" (and at least a few of us didn't), you're likely in a lifelong entourage hiring freeze and need a better option than tying strings on your fingers to avert a crippling case of to-do list burnout, or TDLB.
If you often find yourself in Aisle 7 between frozen foods and peanut butter, indefinitely entranced by a flickering fluorescent light, and routinely return to Earth asking strangers what year it is, you suffer from TDLB.
But becoming a PDA cyborg is no guarantee your little Bridget will get a ride back from ballet class. Rather, all the bells and whistles in all-in-one devices can leave you with the concentration skills of a 4-year-old who's eaten three pieces of cake.
So, unless you need to listen to hip-hop during job interviews or peruse lewd spam in the loo, gadgets like the Olympus VN-1800 Digital Voice Recorder (about $60) could jolt your memory better than a PDA.
Digital voice recorders are tape recorders without the tape, and that's a lot more handy than it might first seem. Most, like the VN-1800, are not much bigger than a rabbit's foot and can easily anchor a key chain.
Also, they allow budding Hemingways to snare story ideas out of the ether when a keyboard isn't handy. I grab mine off the night stand when ideas hit me during dream time, though results can be murky. During one such stupor, I apparently thought "orange apple carts on a soccer field" was worth recording. I have no idea what it means, but I do recall it enchanted "Alias" actress Jennifer Garner as she fawned over me in a Jacuzzi. So, I include it here in the off chance it has some residual charm in the awake state. After all, Jennifer's no pushover.
Remembering to remember to use any new rememberer can be quite a trick at first. But if you possess the slightest narcissistic tendencies, hearing your own voice say, "Pick up your dry cleaning, you doofus," will transfix your attention at a visceral level to the point where you might actually do it. Also, since you can't play Tetris on them, digital voice recorders offer little beyond the healthy pill of simply commanding you to do what you told yourself to do.
Next week: Portable DVD players.
Curt Brandao is the Star-Bulletin's
production editor. Reach him at
at: cbrandao@starbulletin.com