Smartphones and Hotel Rooms

My friend told me at Oracle Open World in San Francisco how much he likes his new smartphone; he uses it for so many things, the interface is really nice....he is so pleased with it.

And I found myself thinking in response: I like not having a relationship with my phone.

I have a relationship with my laptop, and it's not particularly healthy.

So I am quite content to have my phone be a smallish, squarish lump in my pocket until someone calls or I need to call someone.

Yes, that means that I can't look up instructions to the restaurant at which I am meeting my sister-in-law and her family. That I can't play Angry Birds or a gazillion other game apps, many of them free or costing almost nothing.

I've decided that's OK. I don't really need to have the world at my fingertips. It's much more important to me to be in the world that is just beyond my fingertips and under my feet.

Think about this: when was the last time you experienced the earth - the very world in which your mind and body evolved to finally - in an unmediated fashion? When you were last truly in the world, not walking along a path in a nature preserve, not sitting on a chair in the lawn in your backyard, certainly not sitting in a cubicle working at your computer, but in a part of the earth that was untouched by human development, that simply was?

========================

And while in San Fran (my first business trip this year without any family along, and only my second of the year!), I realized that my favorite part of a hotel room is the latch on the door - which ensures that no one can just stroll into my room. I have privacy and that makes it feel just a little bit like home.