Dear St. Augustine

Correction to previous post - Offline Writing.

My offline, old-fashioned writing is now done on the iMac that Matthew gave me. A gift, son to dad.

[iMac cool tight simple elegant. iMatt cool tight singular giving. iThanks. iLove. iDad]

Pages from iWorks replaced MS Word. I also like the dictionary that came with the iMac. It has etymologies. A dictionary isn’t for knowing how to spell a word. It’s for knowing the meaning, senses, nuances of words, and for that you need origin and usage. A good dictionary is for understanding, such as understanding the difference between etymology and entomology.

Dear St. Augustine, my next confession is that I have been using Twitter.

Late nights. Mind awake. Write ideas before they flee or morph into brain crack. Then I got lazy, addicted to brain crack.

Lately: use my cell phone to send text messages to Twitter, which Buzz collects for me in GMail. Not true. I text tasks & ideas to my email for my own use. Late night thoughts to Twitter? When I want the tweet concision 140 characters and an audience of nine followers impose.

Dear St. Augustine, I have more.

I've been trying to stay connected to the kids via a Facebook Account. This developed as a result of my declaring on Monday, February 1, 2010, that email is dying a slow and painful death. That's right. I said that about email.

My kids never respond to my email. They say they don’t use email. They say they use Facebook. I believe them. They never respond to my email.

I also believe what I see. I see them using their cell phones. That’s their primary device and from their primary devices they use Facebook and, of course, they text.

My kids, by the way, are all adults, ages 17 to 26. Counting boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses and their peers I personally know, that's a sample of over twenty-five people. Add to that group another population of precisely the same demographic, namely the university students I am around everyday and whom I personally know or observe, then the number departs the domain of the mere anecdotal and becomes a statistically significant sample exceeding 80 who have jilted email.

My primary device? Whatever it ends up being for me, it will likely be created either by Apple, Inc. or by MoleskineUS & PilotPen.