High Tech, Low Tech, and On-line Afflictions

I can’t imagine being separated from my iPhone for even a day. Its intuitive features have become essential to my life.  But, now, with the application “Big Oven” I feel like my favorite room in the house, a kitchen, has been added to my screen. This is the BEST app that iTunes has to offer.  Of course, that is only my opinion.

Big Oven is a FREE app for iPhone users only, don’t ask me why it’s free but it is.

How about a little tour? Big Oven says they have 160,000 recipes and in another place on the site there are 170,000, who knows?  We all know how recipes collect and reproduce. (Unlike Al Gore, you’ll never get to the end!) My favorite feature is a random recipe that comes up and if it doesn’t interest you, you shake your iPhone and another one loads. Heck, I could do that all day and probably for years and never see the same recipe twice. Random recipes like Green Goodess Dressing.  Shake it again and up pops a recipe for Almond-stuffed pork chops and then a quick shake and now a recipe for Peanut Butter Cookies.  How very cool!

My look at the top features I’m loving in the new iOS 7 update to my iPhone 5.

Notification Center with Weather and Stocks – great to wake up in the morning and even with the screen locked you can swipe from the top and get a little summary of the day’s happenings. This screen just keeps getting better with each update.

Control Strip with Light and Calculator – They added a new pop up when you swipe from the bottom up and you get quick access to a calculator (awesome), Flashlight (super handy), Wifi, Bluetooth, Timer, etc. Again it works when the screen is locked so you can easily use the flashlight to find your way without having to enter your lock screen code.

Folders – Am loving the new look and multiple pages for icons. You can now store unlimited apps inside a folder. It shows 9 on the screen at a time, swipe right to left and see the next 9.

Safari Rocks – Much faster now with a great interface for open tabs, the ability to enter search items in the address bar, quick way to send a link via text, e-mail or social sites

Four people asked me what I wanted for my birthday last week and I gave each of them the same answer, “A new Filofax.” All four of them said the same thing. “No, you don’t. Nobody wants a Filofax any more. It’s so old-fashioned. Don’t be ridiculous. iPhone.” My daughter Maia was the harshest. She simply said, “Oh, Mom! iPhone.” It made me feel old-fashioned. It made me feel old.

For the record, I have an iPhone but despite the fact that four assistants over the last three years have religiously promised to transfer all my names and phone numbers into my computer and my iPhone, it hasn’t quite happened yet. And I never seem to have the time.

But I like my Filofax (even though it does sort of look like a truck ran over it.) It feels like a friend. I like it that it has names and addresses and phone numbers hand-printed into it. (Arguably, a few of them are dead, but I’ve learned not to notice. And I can’t quite bring myself to cross the names out. That would seem too final.) I use it in meetings to take notes. Sometimes, I’ll have a thought in the car or a random sentence for something I’m working on and I’ll pull over and jot it down into my Filofax. There are a few haikus that will probably never be printed anywhere else. I can gauge from them how sad I was on a given day. (Haikus are usually sad. The more comedic ones have found their way into my computer.)

As much as I hate to admit it, my husband Dave was right. It hasn’t happened often in our over ten years together – married seven with nary an itch – but it has been occurring more frequently, much to my dismay.

However, I guess even he has to be right some of the time and in the instance of his “insane” (my words) purchase of the video game ROCK BAND last November (2007) I would actually say he was a genius. If you haven’t heard of it you must not have teenagers or been living under a rock. We, like all of our friends’ kids, are completely addicted. In fact, the upcoming release of ROCK BAND 2 has us almost as excited as we were about the iPhone.

What’s crazy about our behavior is we are not video game people. Actually, we both were in the arcade heyday of the 80s, but now most of the games have too many buttons to push and too much violence to lure me into wasting my time. Though Dave’s the King of Technology, except for the Wii, he’s rarely tempted into the gaming world. That fateful day in November changed everything. He suckered me into going to the Best Buy on a Saturday by promising to let me purchase a new game for our Wii console. I don’t know if he was already planning on buying Rock Band, but once he saw they had a few kits in stock, he just had to have one. It was rumored to be the “must have game” of the holiday season and Dave is never one to be behind the technology curve.