After several years of absolute resistance to the whole idea, I broke down and got a cell phone the other day. It's actually a crackberry, er, a BlackBerry. The reasons for that route were multiple: I love the big colour screen, the keyboard is nice (though I also like the turn-the-phone-sideways-and-slide-out ones), it's geared towards email which doesn't set my teeth on edge like phone calls do, it has an interesting trackball based interface with the "perl" and it's unlocked so I can pick up SIM cards when I travel and have a local number during my stay.
This neatly solves part of the "giving my number to people, which results in them calling me" problem since a lot of the time it'll be a temporary number. Excellent.
And really, that's my whole issue with these devices: people disconnect from their surroundings and instead chit-chat with friends or business associates constantly. Constant dislocation of attention undermines direct human interaction and contributes, in my opinion, to the erosion of local community and society.
So it was my little quiet personal protest against the whole thing to not have one. It did give me many opportunities to share my thoughts on the matter since people would, upon finding I had no mobile phone, usually ask the magic question: "Why?" (Sometimes I got the impression they thought I was lieing to them and just didn't want them to have my number, as if that was easier to believe than me not having a phone. Heh..)
There was also the "I hate not being able to go places where people can't get in touch with me." thing. People have repeatedly pointed out to me that I can turned of a mobile phone or even leave it behind at times. While I know that, it still bugs me, and I've also had the "but I called you! Why didn't you call me back!" conversations before which are completely avoided by not being reachable at all.
Anyways... now I'll have to play the "no you can't have my number" game to protect my solitude. Which could probably be fun in and of itself, in some ways ...
So.. BlackBerrys... Linux... not great friends. I did find the Barry Project which is hosted by a Canadian company and which does actually work, I've discovered. Unfortunately for me the OpenSync support in KDE3 requires OpenSync 0.3 or better and OpenSUSE 10.3 comes with a 0.2 version it seems. I did find 0.3 packages in the OpenSUSE software barn (as I like to call it ;) so maybe I'll install it from there. Hooray for on-click install from a web browser.
Once that's figured out, I can experiment with syncing to this device from KDE4 apps.
I was going to write a DataEngine + Plasmoid for my new crackberry, which would give me a perfect testbed for plasmoid resource affinity (aka "hiding and showing user specified plasmoids when resources, e.g. devices, go away or become available"). However, the code in libbarry is ... frightening. It works, so kudos to them and all the people who put time into reverse engineering it, but the documentation for the user API is slight and the code itself is .. well .. I'll probably let it sit on my disk for a few more weeks so I can forget what I thought while looking through it for the first time so I can approach it with a clear mind.
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7 comments:
"Constant dislocation of attention undermines direct human interaction and contributes, in my opinion, to the erosion of local community and society."
Woah. Something to think about. I completely agree with you and see this as an extension of the whole more=better belief system.
If we've connected with others while talking to them before then... the more often we talk with them the deeper our connection, right? Trouble is quantity != quality. It's just its hard for businesses to bill people for the quality of their communication, where it's easy to set up a business billing for the "number of minutes" or volume of email, so what services get promoted to us day and night?
Who do you know better though, the business acquaintance who 10 times a week you ask "Hi, how are you?" and they say "fine." or the old friend you see for a couple of hours once every 2 years and talk honestly about everything going on in your lives. You probably talk more to the first person (definitely more often) yet without a doubt it's the second person you have a deeper connection with.
Maybe I'll have to twitter my friends to IM me to arrange to discuss it over IRC. ;-)
*sigh* back to my plasma theme contest entry...
hmm, my blackberry curve doesn't seem to work with barry which saddens me.
Anyway...welcome to the world.
while I agree with you about most of the evils of cellphones, I still like them. the benefits are quite worth it for me. my life gets a lot more frustrating when I don't have a cell on me... and if I'm out in the city alone at night I only get scared if my cellphone dies. it's not about whether people can reach me, it's about me being able to reach other people.
when I first arrived in china and nobody in the group had cellphones or internet, it was incredibly annoying. one time me and pete spent 15 minutes trying to find each other because I was knocking on his door while he was knocking on mine, and we took different staircases... and the more people you're trying to meet up with, the more useful it is to be able to call the ones that haven't showed and ask them where the heck they are. it also means I can call and let people know I'll be late if something comes up. nobody has to stand around confused and worried and waiting, or give up and leave a minute before the other person shows up.
of course, I don't get phone calls very often, so that's not an annoyance for me - and I feel no obligation to answer if I don't feel like it. caller ID ftw :)
Hey PlasMan! What's your number? =)
LJ
@stephen: well, i've the 8310 and at least for the battery charging part it works ok with barry (I haven't tried syncing it), just that on some distros you need to manually run bcharge as root to push juice on the usb wire because some missing udev stuff
that's funny...
I was against cell phones for years, and now I found my self a new job at Telus, a Canadian cellphone company, as a seller...
So I started to think about this, and there is NOTHING wrong with cells, only with some peoples. It's like Internet: nobody blame INTERNET to connect people on a level to be sometimes a real drug (drug of information, the new modern drug). You can waste your time on Facebook, or on Wikipedia (by read strange and very specific articles that you discovered thru hyperlinks), or by compulsively uses textos on cellphones... there's no bad technology - by the way, I don't think that cells are dangerous for the health, I think that few alcoholic drinks are more effective in this way...)
by the way, nice post
http://www.hyperpercetion.blogspot.com
Hey Aaron, I've got my new BlackBerry 8310 synchronizing with KDE-PIM in Kubuntu Hardy (the KDE 3.5 version). I wrote a how-to, but I won't spam your comments with gratuitous links to my blog. :)
One of these days, when I find the time to build a PC to play on, I will (among other things) get KDE 4.x installed. I'm not a developer by any means, but if I can be of any assistance testing or getting OpenSync/barry working, let me know.
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