two sheeps in a techno-pen
My best friend and I have a rather unhealthy relationship going. I don’t know when it started exactly but at some point late in 2005, we both stepped onto this path of unending, interminably exciting, all consuming and consequently unhealthy path of not just chasing after electronics and gadgets but also synchronising and paralleling our purchases.
It started rather innocently when I needed to buy a mobile phone and I asked him of his experience with the mobile he was then using, the LG U880. After further research and some consideration, I ended up buying the same mobile phone, the LG U880.
Since then, we’ve pretty much synchronised out gadgets and electronics. When Matt abandoned his LG U880 and bought a new Nokia N93i, I bought a Nokia E61i a few months later. When I bought a Sandisk Micro Cruzer USB drive (embedded with U3 technology), Matt got one as well a few weeks later.
When Matt learned of my blogging, he gave that a tepid go a few months later before eventually taking to it wholeheartedly to the point of registering his own URL and subsequently paying for blog-hosting on Wordpress. We both have flickr accounts and have recently started toying with Twitter - thus, we’ve pretty much synced our virtual presence as a result.
When I recently bought a new digital camera, I started photo-blogging… well, sort-of. Matt loved the idea and put his Nokia N95 to similarly good use - see our individual efforts at visually documenting a day in our lives in Canberra here and here.
We both have portable game machines: I a PSP and Matt a Nintendo DS Lite. We both have large 500GB external HDDs, partially to accommodate our simultaneously growing large music and video libraries. We both also have smaller portable external HDDs to supplement our growing data needs. To listen to our music, we both have high-end Sony earphones from the MDR-EX series that we both plug into our respective iPods (his an iPod “classic” and mine a nano). At one point we both owned a Dell notebook each though he has since moved on to a macBook. Currently, we both think a bluetooth GPS dongle and the new iPods would be nice things to have…!
Ours, however, is not a competitive relationship. It may be individually, though not mutually, destructive but it’s certainly not competitive. If anything, it’s a nurturing relationship - we encourage, support and help each other in expanding, enhancing and consolidating our technological “real estate”. Ours is a truly mutually beneficial and satisfying relationship. Sadly, this does not extend to our work on the PhD but really… who needs that when we have gadgets that keep us happy and distracted!
Posted on September 13th, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Tech
A few points as a corrective.
1- Our blogs are totally different. Mine is light blue, yours is light greeny blue. I think that says a lot.
2- I think it hysterical that we blog about the same things, usually whilst on MSN to each other telling each other we are blogging, and then when we have blogged we rush to comment on it, even though we have already said that which will comprise the comment over MSN anyways. It is both inter-subjective and reflexive.
3 - I am fully supportive of your PhD process. For example, if you quit to move to London to become a go go dancer at G.A.Y. not only would I support you but I would likely quit too and become your backup act. That is about as far as friendship can possibly develop if you ask me.
4 - I never owned a Dell. I merely found myself in temporary custodianship of one until I was chosen by The One Steveness to be elevated to Macdom. I now worship at the temple of Exposé thankyou very much.
5 - Does it ever strike you as ironic that all these gadgets we buy to streamline our lives and enhance our efficiency, because of the hours we spend discussing them, actually retards said efficiency and leads to life e-bloat?
6 - One of us has to tell the other to stop buying things. We are already out of things we want, things we need and things we neither want nor need but kinda wouldn’t mind having anyways. If I end up buying the Sony e-book reader I am checking into rehab.