This is cool: Nokia’s going to be sending me a fancy free (not fancy-free) cell phone soon, because I have the POWER oF BLOGGING at my fingertips.
They called, got my name from somewhere I guess, and a nice woman asked me a bunch of questions about how often I blog and what about and do I know how to use a telephone and so forth. I answered every question honestly, except for one I balked at: She asked me to estimate my personal blog’s readership, and I have to say, I have no real idea for several reasons:
1) Who reads me on my site vs. RSS vs. via email? And how syndicated is it? I have no way of knowing.
2) My blog is on the Hop Studios site and the traffic numbers are an amalgam of corporate work, personal blog, Susie’s book blog and some non-Flickr photo albums. I don’t have any reason to go through the hassle of breaking out my personal blog’s traffic. So I don’t.
That said, me and 44 other people (or should I say 44 other people and I? The use of “other” depends on a predicate, doesn’t it?) will be getting a Nokia 6682 multimedia smart phone, fully equipped with 512 MB of memory, a stereo headset and a wireless Bluetooth Headset as well.
I’m very excited to have a phone that’s smart. My current Nokia phone is dumb. It beeps in my pocket every time I walk or bend over. It beeps in my backpack whenever I ride my bike over a bump. And, perhaps if the phone is really as smart as they say it is, together the phone and I will figure out a way to escape from the clutches of the evil Rogers Wireless.
Don’t worry, I won’t fill up the blog with all sorts of shilling, toadying, sycophantic things about Nokia, even though they’re being so nice to me. No, for that to happen, they’d need to send me to Finland. Perhaps in August? Hello?
“Almost every American I know does trade large portions of his life for entertainment, hour by weeknight hour, binge by Saturday binge, Facebook check by Facebook check. I’m one of them. In the course of writing this I’ve watched all 13 episodes of House of Cards and who knows how many more West Wing episodes, and I’ve spent any number of blurred hours falling down internet rabbit holes. All instead of reading, or writing, or working, or spending real time with people I love.”
“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
You can scroll right easily by holding down the SHIFT key and using your scroll wheel. (Firefox users trying this will end up jumping to old Web pages until a) Firefox releases a fix, b) they change their settings like so.)