So it’s been quite a while on update posts but I think I’ve got a good one for you. Welcome to life, after iPhone, lifeline 0.
We spent the weekend in Dallas in celebration of my beautiful wife and her friends’ birthday. Seemed like a great idea, lots of fun, and not even a bad drive in. We shoved off from Northwest Arkansas, mid-afternoon on Friday and set out on the 6 hour trek to the Fairmount Hotel in Dallas. Great place, friendly staff, nice rooms. The first downer came with arrival. It seems we were sharing a venue with Sarah Palin… and every republican, young and old, for three states. Somehow we managed to get checked in, cleaned up and in the same room with the 8 or 10 people we were meeting, and headed to Hotel ZaZa for cocktails by the pool. From there we landed at Lotus, all in the beautiful and upscale “Uptown” area of Dallas. We had a great time and I managed to make it home with everyone and everything I left the hotel with. Day one, so far so good.
Day two opened with Bloody Mary’s courtesy of Chili’s on our ill fated attempt at going to the Fort Worth zoo. After lunch we decided our time was better suited shopping and day-drinking until our dinner reservation at Dragonfly, again at Hotel ZaZa. We ran back to the hotel to clean up, then off to a great dinner. Service was less than desirable (and costly subsequently) but we managed to make it out of the restaurant only about an hour behind schedule. The next stop was Lotus, where Will, a good friend took great care of us all night. We departed Lotus to get our karaoke on at the Uptown Bar & Grill, a great time by the way and hopped a cab back to the hotel at closing time… which is where I cut myself off from the digital world.
Immediately after the cab drove away I realized I didn’t have my phone. The cab company was unresponsive at best on calling them to track down my lost iPhone and oddly enough, the phone was going straight to voicemail even though it had charge the last time I had checked in. three hours of calling everywhere just in case and I retired to get some sleep before the 6 hour drive home on Sunday.
So here I am, taking a break from my constant connectivity and trying to figure out what my next step is going to be. One friend, @traviswilliams suggests that now I’ve got a great excuse to get the next generation… when it comes out. One one hand, I need to feed the addiction, bite the bullet & get another iPhone. On the other hand, maybe I should just disconnect for a bit. Who knows how life might change at a disconnect. Given my career lives at the intersection of always-on and posting-constantly, a full un-plug is probably a bad career move. My gadget obsession also wouldn’t allow me to go back to 10-key. I’m just at a loss right now.
For the time being, I’ll be unplugged. Email me if you need me. Thoughts? Suggestions?
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In light of all of the hubbub around my new twitter image, I ask this question. Is your icon you or vice-versa? I like to see my image as an extension of myself. I think it’s important to show face on twitter to prove you’re real. I think it was Yale that discovered that those with professional/airbrushed images were considered pompous or not trustworthy to a sample-representative group and those without actual pictures tend to make people feel like they’re talking to the man. Not like “hey, you’re the man” but more like “the man is keeping us down.”
For those of you keeping score, TidyTweet is one of the latest products from Rockfish, and a handy-dandy tool for easily creating corporate friendly Twitter feeds from various keywords, hashtags, or in the case of my homepage, username mentions. The beauty behind the product is that it scrubs foul language and spammer behaviors by default and produces a PG rated feed that you can confidently place anywhere you want people to view what the twitterverse has to say.
Observant regulars might notice the new logo on my homepage, below the streaming (not steaming, mind you) heap of what everyone says about me on twitter. Those who haven’t, 
