Connected?

Last night I happened to wander into my home office when the house was in darkness. The table desk was covered with green and red dots of light: cell phone recharging, printer, computer speakers, printer, laptop power indicator, ipod recharger. I used to carry a little notebook and a pen. I still do, but now I also have all this electronic stuff for keeping notes, keeping in touch. Reaching out and being reached. I have satellite radio, cable tv, an ipod, digital music channels on the cable, fm radio on the cable.

On my computer I have web browsers that play music (including the channels that come with our xm radio subscription), real player, itunes, windows media player, live 365 player. I also have a 6 disc cd player and a cd player in the car. Two of our tv's have built in vcr players. We have two dvd players, and a third vcr in the basement. We have three tv's. Christine has a boom box at work and one in the basement and her own mp3 player. When we walk at the track we listen to our respective mp3 players. I love it. I listen to my ipod at the gym as well. The rhythms of the music lift my spririt, supplement and maybe help the adrenaline jolt that the cardio gives me.

I put reminders into my google calendar. It sends me text messages to remind me of the events and it sends me emails and it puts a notification on my computer screen.

When we go out I forward calls from the house to my cell phone. Christine has a cell phone. My cell has voice recognition. When I tell it "Christine" it calls our home number. When I say "cell" it calls her cell phone. I have a free account with backpack that allows me to give myself reminders which are emailed and texted to me.

My secretary keeps my appointments organized for me. She types them into the Palm software on her computer and syncs it to my handheld. I syn it once or twice a day to my computer. Ical uploads it to my calendar on .mac. My google calendar reads the .mac calendar and integrates the work appointments with my private reminders. Reminders from google calendar appear on my computer screens at home and at work. I can also run ical at home on my laptop and, because I subscribe to my .mac calendars I can see my work schedule at night or on weekends, in case I'm curious about what lies ahead for me.

I have a program called quicksilver that allows me to send to-dos and meetings to either ical or google calendar without using a web browser. It takes about a second. I type in the event and the date and time in a text box and boom, it's up there.

I can send email to a variety of blogs. I can send email to a reading list that I maintain online. When I write in one of my wikis it automatically sends me an email telling me that I have just done that (kind of redundant). I have a special (free) program that lets me read the ny times online. I subscribe to a ton of rss feeds through google reader. I can save them, erase them, email them to other people, tag them to my del.icio.us account.

Flock, my current browser of choice, automatically uploads anything I book mark to my del.icio.us account. My gmail account shows me if any of my contacts with gmail accounts are online. If they are, gmail has built in chat. If I receive an excel spreadsheet as an attachment gmail lets me move it to google documents for viewing and storage. I can also upload or create .doc documents in google documents. I can create, save, edit, read, and share word documents without owning a copy of word.

I can also upload documents to my .mac idisk. I have a wiki on .mac that I type into from any place where there is internet access. Ditto with other files (my favourite being files made with omnioutliner. I have several wish lists on amazon.com where I create lists of books I want to read. I keep a list of books that I have at home and haven't read on my voo2do.com (free) account. Whenever I buy a new book I email its details to this account where it is kept in an alphabetised list.