Michael Simon, from MacLife, created a list of 25 things iPhones have rendered useless. I believe that these things have not only been rendered useles by iPhones, but by smart phones in general.

In a twisted way, I think my blackberry has become a very strange un-human best friend thing. It keeps all my secrets, reminds me of things I might have forgotten, it goes with me wherever I go, I fight with it, it stops speaking to me when I overload it with stuff, it wakes me up in the morning, it helps find my way when I’m lost, it explains things to me, it makes my life easier, I miss it terribly when it’s not around… and the list goes on.

It’s kind of scary how dependent I, and others around me too, can be of their phones. I know humans can most certainly live without their phones, they did it for most of their history. But I really don’t like that thought at all. Just imagine how tedious life would be!

Tags: best friend, blackberry, iPhone, MacLife, smart phones

After being in India for a couple of weeks, and taking more than my fair share of detours, I am now finally only one one-flight away from home.

I will eternally be in debt with my friend @devdovas for letting me spend 2 awesome weeks with her and such an exhilarating country.

I promise I will have more posts and photos up soon.

P.S.: According to most sources, including Wolfram Alpha, India is pretty far… It’s like going halfway around the world!

Tags: far far away, travel

My friend @irisoforion sent me this wonderful little Facebook song. Aside from the foul language, I must say some friend request have indeed made me feel this way.

Are You F*cking Kidding Me? (Facebook Song) LIVE

Tags: Facebook, social networks, songs

Before moving to Colombia, I used to wonder how to contact people without making their phones ring. Some messages were simply not urgent enough to require interrupting someone. Facebook messages, emails, direct messages on Twitter, and the like are intrinsically not very intrusive, but if your phone rings when you get them, somehow (in my mind) they are. As much as people’s phone settings vary, I always assumed when I was living in New York that my message might somehow be interrupting. (I guess that’s the beauty and danger of smart phones.)

Now that I’m in Colombia the opposite is true. I wish I were able to be more intrusive so that I could get quicker responses.

Since most people don’t have smart phones and prefer not to be in constant contact with everything at all times, life takes place at a very different pace. Many times I call land-lines, and most times I can send as many messages, in as many formats as I want, and will wait for hours, if not days, for a response. This creates in me a feeling that people have no respect for others’ time.

I guess the causes for this difference are obvious. There’s no real point in comparing developed nations with developing ones. But what is interesting is that although I am used to getting immediate responses, living here, I no longer need to.

I feel that quick responses to messages are useful in environments where life happens at quick pace. Here, I have no real need (just a simple desire created out of habit) for immediate responses.  Whereas while working in New York, I wished I could be less intrusive and was, here I wish I were able to be more intrusive and cannot.

So now I can’t help but wonder maybe a balance between the two is best.

Tags: contacting people, smart phones, time

I think the last time I wrote a personal blog post was over a year ago.

After graduating college, work got in the way of my blogging. Working long hours at a social media agency in New York City, as fun as it was, meant spending countless hours staring at a computer screen. Coming home to stare at a screen some more didn’t really appeal to me and was not recommended by my doctor. My ophthalmologist prescribed +1 readers because I needed to rest my eyes! And there I was thinking I would not have to worry about readers until I was 40.

In that sense, Twitter seemed to fit in better with my lifestyle.

Now, after having written my fair share of blog posts for others (some of which never actually got published), teaching others about blogs, and reading quite a few on a daily basis, I’ve decided to come back to blogging.

It feels good to start again. Wish me luck!

A new post coming soon….

Please forgive the low quality of my rather less than professional photographic skills, but I just needed to record this in some way and share it with you –Today on my way home from work I actually saw someone listening to a cassette tape on their walkman.

Yes, a cassette. I even saw it as he was putting it in to the device. I know the photo is really bad (imagine trying to take a picture of the man sitting in front of you without looking too conspicuous), but he is holding a walkman.

I guess that the iPod bug hasn’t infected everyone yet. And if there is a supply there must also be a demand.

I wonder if he gets his cassettes from that store in the Upper East Side…

Originally published on Our American Shelf Life on October 6, 2008

This may sound really silly, but today, I received an email from an old friend that made me think a lot about my online habits. My friend’s email curiously demonstrated that he knew a lot about what I’ve been up to lately. So, curious as I am, I asked how he knew about so many things that I was quiet sure I had not told him. His answer was simple, he had been reading my tweets.

Although he is not a twitter user, and swears he would never take part in such activity, and hence couldn’t possibly be following me on twitter, he can still check my updates by simply looking me up. Somehow that really made me think and realize that the information I put on there truly is public.

It’s not that it bothered me that he knew what he knew because of my tweets, after all I never tweet anything I feel is too personal or that I believe is a big secret to the world around me, precisely because I think that not all information is apt for the entire world to know. I just never expected him to know!

I realize that by tweeting I am indeed opening myself to informing people a lot about me and I’m letting people who I may or may not want to inform of my activities, know my activities. It had simply never occurred to me that a person who emails solely because it’s a necessity at work, such as he, would ever find me on twitter. It also made me realize I really don’t ever truly know who reads my tweets.

Tan, tan, tan…

Don’t get me wrong, I love twitter and all the truly valuable information I gain from it, but it’s still a bit creepy to think that your information is out there, anywhere, everywhere for anyone to see, even to people you don’t expect it is. I always felt fine about practically publishing my life, and I still do for all intent and purposes. But, I guess now that I got confirmation that people I didn’t think were reading about me are I realized that it is public…

Do you know who is reading your tweets?

Originally published on Our American Shelf Life on August 25, 2008

I take the subway everyday to and from work. Every morning when I’m walking towards the subway somewhere along the way there is a man, or several, giving out free newspapers or selling them. I always stayed away from them, since I honestly dislike getting the black ink all over my fingers, and you can always get your news. Yet, for whatever reason last Tuesday was different. I decided to take an am New York paper from the man outside the subway station. Aside from the nasty ink getting all over my fingers, I thought it wouldn’t really hurt to take one and enrich myself with whatever knowledge it offered.

I must say, I never really got around to reading it on the subway since it was crowded and I couldn’t find a seat. So I didn’t pay much attention to it for some time. The paper kind of hung around my desk at work until Thursday when I finally picked it up and read it.

The first thing that caught my attention, not surprisingly, was the cover story. “UNSAFE TEXT” it read in red. The story went on to describe how “text-walking injuries are a growing trend.” It must have had been a slow news day, was my first thought. And the newspaper continued to sit at my desk.

Then on Friday, something interesting happened, my sister sent me a brand new blackberry by mail. I spent the entire weekend exploring every aspect of it and trying to figure out all I could. And at some point on Saturday, as I was sending a friend a text message as I was walking down the street and BAM! I walked into a pole! My first reaction was to be angry at the pole for being in my way… but then I remembered the news story. I was not alone with my injury, or cause of that injury for that matter.

I wasn’t looking while I was walking. I was lucky I had not ran into a moving vehicle. But my blackberry was so perfectly and beautifully addictive, and it was so easy to get lost in it. And then I remembered the paper. It warned me, it told me what happened to texting/blackberry addicts, but I had paid no attention.

And this is how I have come to the conclusion that being addicted to one’s phone, as beautiful as it may be to embrace the technology, is not healthy. In fact, it is just as the am newspaper story said: UNSAFE. My second conclusion is that I should read more newspapers too, since the information they provide may save your life, if your smart enough to pay attention to it.

Originally published on Our American Shelf Life on August 21, 2008

Photo credit:

I just came across something on Facebook that I had never seen before. I was invited to a group that seeks to help a woman find her missing father.

I had always known Facebook to be used for finding people. In essence, Facebook was created to find and keep track of people. Yet, this time someone is using Facebook to find someone in a very different way. The group seeks to gain information about the whereabouts of the missing person from its members.

The group, appropriately called “Estoy buscando a mi papá, necesito la ayuda de todos” (I’m looking for my father, I need all everyone’s help), provides details about the last time the man was seen a week ago, what he was wearing and what he looks like. The group’s creator also makes a heartfelt plea to her friends, asking them to invite more people to the group so that maybe the information will reach someone who can provide information that will lead to finding her 71-year-old father.

I have seen Facebook being used for many purposes, but I must say that this particular purpose is a first for me. Hopefully, the 17,708 members the group has will somehow provide the information to find the missing family member.

I guess this is one of the many ways that Facebook proves its usefulness. Have you come across something like this before on this Facebook?

Originally posted on Our American Shelf Life on June 21, 2009