The Pros and Cons of Blogging by iPad and Other Stories

I can be resistant to new technology, which is why I am writing my first blog from an iPad this morning. Overall the experience is going well. To be fair I have only written two lines, though.

The big transition is proving to be the one from clunky, touchable keys to on screen keys. I have always had a problem with this, being the kind of guy who is prone to fumbling and dropping. Don't meet me for lunch unless you fancy spending the rest of the day as a spaghetti hologram. I have no idea what a spaghetti hologram is but it sounds like fun. I fear I digressed again. The rather groovy thing about the Apple iPad is the fact it's great at correcting misspellings as you write them, which makes up for some of that fumbling. It even knows how to correct the spelling of groovy, a word which I always imagined anchored in the days when we hung out in VW campers, daubed with peace symbols, smoked pot and engaged in free lurve to the backdrop of San Francisco
Bay.  And suddenly I found a downside of the spell check - lurve became purveyors,

Come to think of it, I never had the chance to do that unwashed free love thing. I was born in the Summer of Love (yeah look it up, no clues) although I doubt if my parents realized it. They were too busy collecting Green Shield stamps to get money off tins of baked beans. I doubt if the hippies were rad enough to do that, which is probably just as we'll because you don't want a baked bean heavy diet if you are packed into a VW camper.

This brings me back to the march of technology, something the countermovement was keen to stifle. I am thinking back to the proud moment a teacher wheeled in a gigantic silver device and shoved a plastic brick in it. The school had invested more than $12000 in a video player. We watched the pre-mating ritual of hippos through the horizontal lines of Betamax. It was a great moment. It was the future. It felt awful, though.

I remember the time too when David C- he of the truly awful halitosis - set me up on the Worldwide Web for the first time, frightening me with names like Yahoo and Alta Vista. "Click through the categories," he implored.

"Can I do it later," I replied. I just wanted him to go away because his breath was about to make me pass out.

Colleagues crowded around me expressing amazement at this bold new world I had entered.

"Is there a category for pornography?" asked Willy Woodencock. "I'm doing an article about the effect of pornography on society and would like to see what's out there on the Information Super Highway."

"I doubt if it has that kind of thing," I replied. "It's the Information Super Highway, not the Smut Highway."

So, in some ways I was ahead of the curve and in some ways behind. I didn't get my hands on a BlackBerry until It was obsolete. It was like showing up in the age of gunpowder, boasting of my smart new weapon - the club. I will so be upgrading to an iPhone once I've sorted out those pesky parking fines.

Overall I'm thinking the transition to iPad is going quite well - it even adds apostrophes which is no mean thing in today's apostrophe illiterate society. This may catch on. At this rate I'll have to do something about my Sony recorder that comes equipped with real cassettes and 2x record time and tends to alarm people every time I pull it out.