Early iPhone Exuberance

As a proud owner of a five day old iPhone, I can report that it truly is addictive. 

Part of the addiction involves complaining about things that you think should be better.  For example, why can't the 3G net connection always work with blazing speed, even in BART tunnels that are beneath the Bay?  And why does the Times iPhone app always revert to a point in the story I've already read if I set it aside for a few seconds? 

These are abominations.

Another part of the addiction involves excessive excitement when the machine jangles, buzzes, or otherwise makes merry.

I assume that all this will fade--that I'm on the uphill slope of a behavior pattern that will resolve itself into routine patterns soon enough. Someday in the future I'll be unable to remember those long ago days when I didn't a smartphone.

The greatest gift of said phone has been that it's unleashed my inner documentarian. This past weekend was absolutely glorious in the Bay Area, and it was also my last full weekend in Berkeley.  So although I had planned to dutifully pack up, instead I strolled all around snapping pictures with immediate upload to Facebook. I'd become peeved when the upload took longer than I deemed acceptable (see first part of the addiction, above.) 

I captioned every picture.  Many captions involved Helen; one goal of the photo tour was to note places that have been important to both of us in these past two years. A more lighthearted goal was to provide a reasonably throrough overview of Berkeley coffeehouses.  And I cataloged some of the charms of Berkeley vis-a-vis its even more lovely neighbor to the west.

Now that the work week is here the picture taking has waned, but not faded altogether.  Last night at my Tuesday tutoring gig my 9 year old student Charles took many pictures of himself with my phone.  He also offered to delete the pictures from my camera roll that he found boring.  And he took several pics of me, one of which was actually good.  Last night I uploaded one of me and him together (in which one of my nostrils features prominently) and one that Charles took of me. Those generated lots of buzz on the Facebook wires, much more than my snarky dismissal of Haight Ashberry.

Photo time with Charles was a lot of fun.  In the end I'll probably use only 5% of the capabilities of the phone, but I hope that the picture taking never stops.