1. For the social media addict: HootSuite. Has someone you love become a slave to their social media presence? It's great to see a family member or friend find success online, and we know you want to cheer them on when they reach their thousandth Twitter follower or Facebook friend. But when the need to post a status update takes precedence over the opportunity for face-to-face conversation, it's time for an intervention. Give your addict a premium subscription to HootSuite, a service that lets them schedule the updates they want to post to Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks. That way they can queue up a day or week's worth of updates at a time, and recover some attention for their offline lives.
2. For the distant relative or friend: Online gaming. By now most of us have had the experience of rediscovering an old friend or lover via Facebook. But you don't need to limit your long-distance or rediscovered relationships to the occasional status update or photo exchange. Online video games let you virtually visit with your friends or family by, say, bowling together, while you catch up. It's a terrific way to help your kids connect with their long-distance cousins. You can find lists of recommended online games for the XBox, Wii, Playstation or iPhone/iPad; just be sure you know which platform(s) your friends/family already use, and choose a title that you can afford to buy for both them and yourself so that you can play together. Use your console's chat system if it's available, or dial up your pal on a land line (remember those?) while you play.
3. For the Blackberry addict: A feature phone We all know a smartphone user who e-mails their way through date night, tweets during movies, and multitasks during meetings. "But I can't leave home without my phone!" they object, if you try to encourage even one night off the 'berry. The only way to help these folks is with a phone that limits them to basic connectivity. Disconnect the temptations of e-mail, Facebook or Twitter by giving your addict a feature phone, i.e. a basic, non-smart cellphone, from the same carrier that supplied their Blackberry, iPhone or Android. (You can find some basic model recommendations here.)That way they can pop the SIM card out of their smartphone and use a simple phone one day a week. Imagine the world they'll see when they finally look up for a second. (Note: If your giftee uses an iPhone 4 or other micro-SIM based phone, you may need to buy them an extra SIM card, too.)
4. For the civilian: Backup. Nothing does more to sour an incipient love of tech than a digital disaster. Non-geeks are doubly threatened because they can be especially vulnerable to those disasters and particularly unprepared for dealing with the consequences. Protect the less geeky members of your family or social circle by setting them up with a bullet-proof backup scheme: something that doesn't require their active involvement to keep their data protected. A premium DropBox subscription is a great way to go. For $100, you can buy someone 50 GB worth of online storage, useful not only as a backup solution but also to keep files synced across multiple computers. Go the extra mile and set up DropBox on your pal's computer, ensuring that their key folders are automatically synced and backed up online.
5. For the early adopter: Keyboard case. Early adopters are the hardest folks to shop for. As an early adopter married to yet another early adopter, we struggle to find good gifts, since we own every gadget we need, and many we don't. That's why you've got to surprise us with something so new that it hasn't yet arrived at Best Buy. But you don't want to feed our tech fetishism with yet another device. Instead, help us make saner use of the tech to which we're already welded. A great bet is a keyboard case that will speed up the pace of our relentless tap-tap-tapping on iPhone and iPad screens: this case turns the iPhone into a slider phone with a keyboard, and this case does the equivalent for an iPad. Just make sure your geek promises to use the keyboard to type faster, and not more. (UPDATE: I bought that iPhone keyboard for myself, and it was awful; the weighting was all wrong, and I retired it after two days. It sounds like the NUU MiniKey might be a somewhat better option.)
6. For the kid: uDraw. Every aunt, grandfather and parent has a chance to shape how the next generation relates to technology. Is life online a series of quick hits and pointless games? Or a chance to discover meaningful human connection and self-expression? Help point kids towards the wonders of online creativity with a gift like the new uDraw studio for Wii, a drawing tablet that turns your little gamer into a little artist.
7. For the agnostic: Songs about the Internet. Lost among the early adopters and the tech skeptics are those who are still struggling to make sense of this online world; to decide whether they want to plunge in with both virtual feet or maintain a life that's primarily analog. Help them mull over the meaning of life online with this iTunes playlist of songs about the Internet [opens in iTunes].
   
   plus 3 new recommendations for 2011:
8. For artists-with-iPads: the Wacom Bamboo stylus 
9. For health nuts: the FitBit pedometer
10. For mini Apple enthusiasts: the Lego Life of George set 

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I want you to think really carefully about how happy you are right now, because as soon as I describe the killer features of the latest iteration of the Plex media center software, you’re going to be plunged into deep despair. Despair over the fact that you don’t have the new Plex installed on your computer right now, and may in fact have to wait until the end of the business day to get it.

That’s how I felt, anyhow, as soon as the Raised Eyebrow team started to regale me with its benefits during a recent meeting. I raced home, got the software up and running, and have been nothing short of dazzled.

I’ve been a huge Plex fan since David Drucker put me onto it a year ago, but the new version of Plex — and its flagship innovation, myPlex — take the app to a new level. With version 9.5 and the advent of myPlex, your media collection gets a home on the web. Here’s what that means in practice:

1. Anytime, anywhere access. If I forget to run a video transfer with Klexi, I have a tendency to skip my morning workout because I don’t have anything fresh to watch on my iPad because I . With myPlex, I can use my iPad’s 3G connection to stream anything on my home media server to my iPad, with no pre-planning. (I fear that if this is good news for me, it’s even better news for the people who make money on my data overages).
2. Watch it later queue. Login to your myPlex account from any computer, and you can add a browser bookmarklet that lets you store any web video for later viewing via Plex. Found an intriguing TED talk? Dying to watch that cute kitten video again and again? With one click, you can add them to your Plex queue, and you’ll find them waiting for you when you get home (or online) to catch up on your viewing.
3. Sharing! Maybe you never offer to help your friends move, or bring them chicken soup when they are sick in bed. You will nonetheless be counted as the best friend in the world when you give your pals access to your myPlex media server, and to your complete collection of all 4 seasons of Mad Men episodes. Whoever said food isn’t lot had it right: data is love.

If you have thus far resisted the siren song of Plex, it is time to get serious (and to get torrenting) with this how-to. A used Mac Mini sells for about $100 more than Apple TV, and with the glory that is Plex and myPlex, you are going to be delighted that you’ve rolled your own home media server.

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Q: How many computers does it take to enjoy a relaxing evening at home?
A:  7.  Five to use simultaneously, a sixth to blog about how you’re doing that, and a seventh to keep your spouse entertained while you do.

Yeah, I know, it reads like a formulaic joke. But that is indeed how I spent last evening, tucked happily in bed for a major geek-out.

If that sounds more horrifying than appealing to you, it’s because nobody has clued you into what I will narcissistically dub Samuel’s Law: the joy of a geek-out grows exponentially based on the number of devices under deployment. Each additional device doubles the total emotional pay-off.

That’s because the emotional pay-off is proportional not to the number of human minutes that go into a given night of geekery, but to the total number of computer minutes. The more devices you are able to use simultaneously, the more total processor time goes into your geek-out, and the greater emotional benefit.

Let me explain how that works in practice by reviewing the number of devices deployed last night. My primary mission for the evening was to update our home media server with the beta release of the new Plex. But if you think that only implicated the computer that we use as a media server, well, you’re missing the big picture of how to maximize computer use. Here’s what it actually took to get the server updated — and the emotional pay-off from dragging all these other devices into the picture:

1. Mac Mini #1. This was the media server I needed to update. Happiness units from successful update: 10.
2. MacBook Pro #1: This was the computer I used to remotely control the media server. Happiness units from being able to snuggle in bed while doing my server update: 10.
3. MacMini #2. Used to watch TV while doing all this updating & blogging. Happiness units from watching The Good Wife: 20.
4. iPad: Running HootSuite so that I can tweet my exasperation at various points in the process. Happiness units from emotional discharge and peer support: 40.
5. iPhone: Used to download the Steve Jobs biography as an audiobook so I’d have something to listen to as a way of winding down after the tech marathon. Happiness units from getting a good night’s sleep despite massive screen exposure: 80.
6. MacBook Air: Used to look up how-to tips on the Plex upgrade, and to blog about the process. Happiness units from accessing and contributing to the Global Internet Brain: 160.
7. MacBook Pro #2: Used by husband to happily blog during my geek-out. Happiness units from being side-by-side in bed with my sweetie in bed, each of us totally having fun: 320.

Compare the total pay-off of 640 happiness units with the original 10 happiness units created by a simple software update to our media server, and you can see the massive value created by integrating additional devices

Here are some tips on how to maximize the number of devices you are using:

1. Reflect on your activities. Use additional computers to tweet, blog, Facebook and/or photograph whatever you are working on. By documenting your activities, you ensure that you will remember what and why you did what you did and you’ll create value for other people — which, with any luck and/or empathy, will maximize your own satisfaction. Use a different device for each network you’re conversing with and you’ll spare yourself the annoyance of having to switch windows — maximizing both happiness and number of devices used.
2. Spread out. If you’re sitting in an armchair, it’s tough to use more than a couple of devices without the risk of dropping one. So spread out on a sofa and coffee table, large dining table or work desk, or even in bed.
3. Find company. Getting advice from other people — via forums, blog posts or tweets — will make your primary task easier and more fun. Plus, you can easily use up another device or two by keeping your helpline open on yet another screen.
4. Get comfortable. When you use screen sharing from one computer to manipulate something on a remote computer, you’ve just doubled your pleasure by finding a way to use 2x as many devices as technically necessary to accomplish that task. If you feel too silly to do that while sitting in the same room as the computer you are controlling remotely, try moving to another room, or simply take off your glasses so that the remote computer is too hard to read.
5. Downloads and/or update. These are easy wins that will help you get to that logarithmic sweet spot. Grab any unused devices you spot lying around the house, and use your geek-out window to run any available software updates or undertake any procrastinated video downloads. These downloads will take minimal attention but maximize your pay-off by bringing devices and/or software up-to-date at a moment when you won’t miss using those devices.

I know, I know: this all sounds like the exact opposite of the kind of online presence I advocated in my TEDx talk on the weekend, and in my blog post here. But the funny thing about multitasking is that while using two devices is distracting, using five is strangely immersive:  using so many devices at once requires you to commit to multitasking as its own full-throttle experience.

No, it won’t leave you feeling refreshed the way you might from an equivalent commitment to meditation or mono tasking. But you sure will have gotten a lot done.

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Dear Bored Travellers of Earth, I am assuming that if you were horny you would be googling different keywords. So I am figuring you are merely looking for amusement, which is why I have rounded up some blog posts that point you towards moderately entertaining activities, or which may even be enjoyable reading in an of themselves. The great thing about you, Bored Travellers, is that I don’t have to rock your world: I merely have to be more interesting than whatever is on the closed circuit TV channel at 2 am, or at least, offer something you can read in the bathroom.

Here are 10 posts that are cheaper than pay-per-view:

1. Make a list of your secret dating criteria. Not the things you put on a dating profile — the stuff that really matters.
2. Post your first (or next) 21 tweets. Or just make fun of people who tweet in an incredibly tedious, formulaic way.
3. Find out what the Internet secretly looked like in 1971.
4. Take pictures of the most interesting graffiti or signage in the bathroom. This works best if you’re staying in a dodgy hotel; the swanky ones tend to keep the walls clean).
5. Imagine glorious or entertaining ways you might die. For added poignancy, imagine them happening in this very hotel room.
6. Take an inventory of the cords you felt the need to pack and consider which unresolved childhood issues they represent.
7. Test yourself for menu bar blindness, America’s secret killer annoyance.
8. Watch whatever Star Trek episode happens to be on, and decide whether it’s appropriate for your kids to watch it. If you don’t (yet) have kids, contemplate the advisability of creating offspring that take years to reach Star Trek-watching age.
9. Put on your pyjamas and look in the mirror. With that image fixed in your head, start culling your Facebook friends.
10. Play with the hotel gaming system and see if it conjures up deep insights into what life was like in 1997. It certainly won’t inspire you with visions of 2020.

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Some people remember their freshman year of college for their first love, or the professor who blew their mind, or the book that changed their whole way of looking at the world. What I remember is the life-altering realization that I was now living in a building with a vending machine that provided 24/7 access to peanut M&Ms.

No wonder, then, that the dilemma of how to resist readily available M&Ms haunts me to this day. And when I saw the amount of traffic I got from a March 2010 blog post on 10 things to do in a hotel room other than eating the peanut M&Ms, I figured lots of other people might share this particular challenge. In the year after I wrote the post, it became the most frequently read post on my site (until finally getting bumped by 25 rules of social media netiquette).

But it didn’t take much in the way of analytics wizardry to realize that the popularity of this post wasn’t driven by fealty to the combination of chocolate, candy and legumes. The truth is that there seem to be an awful lot of bored people sitting in hotel rooms. Just take a look at the top 15 search strings in the search engine traffic to my site: 8 of them are people who are just desperately trying to escape the combination of a 22-channel universe and a polyester bedspread.

So to these noble, bored souls, let me offer a warmer welcome. That M&M blog post couldn’t have staved off boredom for more than about 2 minutes (2 minutes and 18 seconds, actually, according to Google Analytics’ “average time on page”). That’s why I’m rounding up some of the posts and resources that I think are most likely to interest the bored travellers of the world — beginning tomorrow.

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When you’re about to hit the road, you need to look at your iPad or iPhone as a Swiss Army Knife: a device to load up with the essential tools that allow you to rise to any challenge. Here are 10 apps I won’t leave him without:

1. TripAdvisor: To check out reviews of any hotel you are thinking of booking. Don’t just look at the overall rating: read the comments to figure out whether the kinds of complaints people have are the kinds of things that are likely to bug you, too, or conversely, whether the things people love are the things you’re looking for.
2. Yelp: To find the nearest and best restaurants, food stands, ice cream, book stores or drug store for an emergency ibuprofen stop.
3. iExit: Look up which shops and restaurants are available at upcoming exits on the interstate.
4. Skype: To save on phone charges if you are traveling outside your coverage area; make calls when you’re in a wifi hotspot instead.
5. Audible: To download and listen to audiobooks, if you can’t find what you want on the iTunes store.
6. OpenTable: To make reservations at the restaurants you identify on Yelp.
7. Evernote: To view the travel guide you’ve cleverly compiled for yourself from online resources snipped using Evernote’s web clipper.
8. OffMaps: To download maps that will work when you are out of 3G range, or if connectivity is overloaded (as happened to us in New York). You have to download the specific maps for the places you’re visiting so make sure you do that before your connection cuts out.
9. Facebook: To quickly upload and share photos and videos from your road trip (which you can’t do by simply using Safari on your iPhone or iPad, because there is no way to browse to your phone/pad’s photos). Just make sure you’ve set your Facebook privacy settings so that you’re comfortable with who is seeing those uploaded images.
10. Klexi: To download movies and TV shows from your computer onto your tablet for offline viewing.

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If only Apple would introduce an Apple Store passport! We’re well on our way to the goal of getting stamped at every Apple Store in North America. Not (only) because we make a point of seeking out each retail location in hope of finding some as-yet-unseen doodad, but because we rarely hit the road without discovering that we have left behind some crucial piece of our tech kit (usually a Macbook, iPhone or iPad adapter, but occasionally all three!)

The beauty of a road trip is that you don’t face the air traveler’s constraint of limited luggage and a security check that may look at you suspiciously if your entire suitcase is full of computer cables. Here’s what we’ve learned to pack…or regretted leaving behind:

1. AC adapters for your car’s cigarette lighter/outlet. Buy at least as many charging adapters as you have AC outlets in your car (unless your car has more adapters than you have devices, in which case you either have too few devices or too big a car). Make sure your adapters are capable of charging all the devices you are actually bringing; in the case of the iPad, a standard iPhone charger won’t be powerful enough, so you need a special adapter.
2. Power bar with all your adapters plugged in. The absolute smartest thing we did was to bring a couple of power bars that together provided enough outlets to plug in all our chargers (4 iPhones, 2 iPads, 1 pay-as-you-go phone). We plugged all the charging adapters into the power bars, and then dropped them into the one bag that came with us into every hotel we stayed at (the same bag that held our toiletries or pjs). Unfortunately we didn’t have quite enough USB/dock cables to leave them all plugged into the adapters (one had to move into the car each day to keep the iPad charged while we drove and navigated), but ideally you will have your power bar(s) fully set up so that all you have to do is plug a single power bar into an outlet at your hotel, and all your adapters and cables will be ready to charge your devices. Don’t count on your computer’s ports to cover any of your charging needs; you don’t want to be forced to pull out and plug in your computer just to use it as a power bar.
3. Keyboard. If I’d packed my iPad’s keyboard or a Bluetooth keyboard, completing the occasional form would have been even easier. From now on it’s staying in the car!
4. Extra-long charging cable. We got an awesome 10-foot iPod/iPhone/iPad charging cable at the Apple store, which is long enough to snake from the outlet in our trunk all the way up to a kid playing on an iPad in our backseat. Presto! No more whining because an iPad has run out of juice mid-game.
5. Camera connection kit. The iPad’s camera connection kit lets you dump your digital camera’s photos directly to your iPad, using either an SD card or USB port. How we wished that we had remembered to pack ours so that we could quickly post our latest snaps to Facebook! Without the connection kit we were forced to wait until we connected the camera to our actual laptop at the end of the day…when we rarely had the energy to post content. An even easier option: the Eye-Fi card, which (depending on your camera) may allow you to upload your photos to the web directly from your camera, whenever you hit a wifi hotspot.
6. Headphone splitter. Pack one or two of those headset splitters that let you plug two sets of headphones into a single jack. That way two kids can share a single iPad, sparing you from the nightmare of listening to Barbie videos while you drive. Better yet, use the splitter to share an iPad with your sweetie so that you can watch a movie in bed without waking the kids who are sleeping in the next bed. For those of you who have more than two kids, but are still brave enough to pack them up for a road trip, Belkin makes this multi-headphone splitter. If you have more kids than the Belkin splitter can accommodate then you might want to download this app.
7. Cheap back-of-the-neck headphones. When Rob or I listen to something on the iPad or iPhone, we use Apple earbuds (me) or mid-grade earmuff headphones (Rob). Neither option works great for our kids, however, and kid-specific headphones are unnecessarily expensive. We’ve found that cheap, back-of-the-neck headphones work great: the kids put them over their heads instead of behind their necks, and the smaller circumference makes for a good and comfortable fit.
8. Portable speakers. If you want to listen to music in your hotel room or by the beach, consider packing some speakers to connect to your phone, tablet or iPod. Just please don’t blast your music at a campsite. After dark. Next to people who are trying to get their kids to sleep. Hypothetically speaking, of course.
9. Airport Express. Sad to say, there are still many hotels that charge for wifi, or that charge you separately for each computer you connect to their network. If you have an Airport Express router, it’s easy to throw it in your tech bag so that you can plug it into the Ethernet jack in your hotel room and run your own wifi network, sharing a connection among all the devices you’re using in your room.
10. VGA adapter/cable and/or DVI cables. Most hotel TVs have their cables virtually soldered in place, but once in a blue moon you’ll stay someplace that could actually let you connect your iPad or TV to the hotel TV. (The all-time high water mark in this regard was the Hotel Intercontinental in Chicago, where the hotel TV had a separate adapter box offering almost every type of input imaginable.) Pack whatever video adapters you have for the tablets or laptops you are traveling with, and you may have the option of connecting to the hotel’s TV to watch your own bank of video content instead of whatever happens to be on TV.
11. Separate bags for each computer. I didn’t bother bringing a separate briefcase for my MacBook, figuring it would be easier to throw it into the same backpack as Rob’s. But once that backpack was loaded with 2 MacBooks plus 6 devices’ worth of cables, it was a beast! I made Rob carry it into our hotel each night, which is why he is now lying in a special chair while he waits for his back spasms to subside.

Once you’ve checked all these must-have items off your packing list, be sure to take one item out of the car before you start driving. I don’t want to deprive you of an excuse to visit the Apple Store!

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One of the joys of  a road trip is that it gives you a chance to have something of an adventure without breaking the bank. But any savings you get from taking a car instead of a plane can easily be wiped out by a single massive cell phone bill. I’m not the only battle-scarred traveller who can tell tales of a cell phone bill that topped $1k after just a few days on the road (SXSW 2010, I remember thee well. As does my wireless provider.)

That’s why it pays to begin your web-savvy road trip with a little data planning:

1. Buy a roaming plan. I login to my wireless account or call my wireless provider every time I leave the country, because roaming plans change frequently and I want to choose the best one for each trip. I find the Rogers customer service folks to be exceptionally helpful in choosing the right plan or combination of options, but if I’m already on the road it’s often easier to do the job myself by logging into the Rogers website.
2. Get another set of SIM cards. We have a separate set of US SIM cards; when we’re travelling in the US, we pop out our Canadian SIM cards and re-activate our US accounts. (We’ve been using AT&T thus far, but will get Verizon cards next time we’re in the US so we don’t suffer the lack-of-service problems that plagued us during a recent trip to New York.) It’s way better to pay $30 for a generous iPad data plan than $75 for a really tiny amount of roaming data on our iPhones, so we turn off cellular data on our iPhones (to make sure we don’t use data accidentally) and then rely on the iPads.
3. Turn off “push”. If you leave your phone’s data plan on, set your email program and other apps to “pull” only so that your email only downloads if you tell it to. Otherwise your email will download as it arrives, using up your data plan.
4. Reset your usage stats as soon as you leave your roaming area. The best way to track your usage is to zero your phone or tablet’s stats on phone minutes and data usage. That way you can track any roaming minutes or data used, and make sure you don’t go over your plan. The first time you do this, check your data after your first task or two — you’ll be amazed at how much data you can use with a simple Google search. Once you have a sense of how quickly your data is getting used up, check your usage once a day, and even more often once you get close to your limit.
5. Get a cheap phone. If you’re traveling outside your coverage area, consider buying a cheap pay-as-you-go phone that is native to the area you’re travelling in, so that you won’t run up you roaming plan making calls to sort out travel logistics. We have an AT&T Go phone that tells us exactly how much each call costs us, and try to stick to local calls only.
6. Coordinate by text. If you’re anything like us, you are used to coordinating with your sweetie or travel pals through an endless succession of phone calls (“I’m out front — pick me up!”, “What corner did you say you were on?”, “OK, got a table, can you bring my sweater in from the car?”) This is probably what cell phones were invented for, but at roaming rates, it gets expensive. Buying a text message package is a lot cheaper, and makes it possible to connect by text instead of voice.
7. Load your tablet and smartphone before you hit the road. Fill your phone or tablet with essential travel apps, music, podcasts and videos — many apps and podcasts are too large to download unless you’re on wifi, or else use up your data plan! I’ll provide some recommendations in my next post.
8. Lock your phone after each call. Rob and I spent $76 to buy a block of 40 roaming minutes on each of our phones, and on the second day of the trip, used up all those minutes with ka butt call from him to me. I answered the butt call and hung up immediately, but since my iPhone touchscreen isn’t working properly, the phone didn’t hang up until Rob noticed and hung up the call an hour later. From this I learned how important it is to be sure you have ended each call, which you can do by locking your phone each time you hang up.
9. Cancel your roaming plans after your trip. If you set up new SIM cards, phones or data plans for your trip that automatically renew, make sure to cancel them when you return home. Better yet, when you’re setting up the plan, ask if you can specify a cancellation date.
10. Get a refillable credit card. Depending on where you’re travelling, you may find it hard to pick up a pay-as-you-go SIM or phone without a local credit card. I maintain a refillable Green Dot Visa account, linked to the US post office box that I use for occasional online purchases (for retailers who won’t ship to Canada). Between my US address and US credit card it’s not a problem to set up US-based devices.

Obviously, we’re getting into some extreme measures here, especially when you get to the point of establishing a separate credit card or post office box. If you’re taking a one-time-only trip to a new country, you probably won’t go to quite these lengths (though it may still be worth picking up a SIM card or pay-as-you-go phone, if it saves you on roaming charges and/or hotel rates).

But a road trip is, by definition, something you’re likely to do close to home. For many Canadians, US road trips are an easy getaway; setting up US connectivity can be worthwhile not only for the family driving vacation, but for US business trips. And Americans, I’ve got even better news: not only can you enjoy a beautiful drive through your favorite province (or two), but up here you won’t have to deal with AT&T’s lousy connectivity!

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I’m just back from a week-long family road trip to the Oregon Coast, Portland and Seattle. One of the great virtues of a family vacation is its ability to separate us from our screens: to wean the kids from their daily fix of PBS edutainment, to interrupt the staccato sounds of videogame walkthroughs enjoyed on the nearest iPad, to prevent Rob and me from immediately distilling each experience into a 140-character summary. Those are (almost) all delightful parts of our daily existence, but taking a break from them gives us a chance to step back and reevaluate the role our various screens play in the rhythm of our family life, and to think about whether we want to make changes.

If I sound surprisingly calm about severing my connection to the Hive Mind for 7 days, perhaps that’s because I was the one person in our family whose screen time didn’t decline all that much while we were on the road. For a variety of reasons, we decided to let this trip unfold relatively spontaneously: when we hit the road last Saturday morning, our only reservation was for a Sunday night campsite on the central Oregon coast. So it was up to me, in my role as trip planner and navigator, to figure out each day as it unfolded. That meant I was on my iPad for several hours each day, sorting out everything from where to have an emergency pee to where we would sleep that night.

It’s the kind of adventure that would have been literally unimaginable for me in the pre-iPad, pre-iPhone days. I’m not a roughing it kind of gal — and by “roughing it” I mean sleeping in a cruddy hotel room. So the idea of trusting myself to the fates, and sleeping wherever we happened to land, would not have cut it. It’s only thanks to the iPad, and the ability to check out potential destinations while in transit, that I’m able to create the illusion of being a devil-may-care free spirit who can take off on a moment’s notice.

If you’ve got a tablet or smartphone, you can become a free spirit too. Here’s how to use your smartphone or tablet to book your well-priced accommodations from the road:

1. Create accounts on several hotel booking sites before you leave home. We have accounts on Hotwire, Expedia and Hotels.com: that way, if we find a deal on any one of them, it’s a snap to quickly complete a booking. Believe me when I say you will be grateful you entered all your address and booking preferences beforehand, so you don’t have to do it on your tablet’s virtual keyboard.
2. Search multiple sites. My routine consisted of a quick Expedia search (to see which hotels had rooms), a TripAdvisor scan (to see which hotels got the top ratings), and then Hotels.com and Hotwire searches to see what deals were available. If something appealing popped up on Hotwire (which gives you better rates, but holds back the hotel name), I did a follow-up search on Expedia to see if I could deduce which hotel Hotwire was offering; by cross-referencing the location, amenities, star and TripAdvisor rating of a Hotwire offering, I could usually narrow the likely candidate down to just one or two hotels. Then I reviewed the TripAdvisor ratings on that hotel to see if I’d be happy to land there.
3. Choose a daily booking window, and stick to it. Our first couple of days on the road, I felt like I spent the whole day on screen, scanning for potential rooms, but holding off on booking until we saw how far we’d been able to drive. Once we hit the gorgeous coastline I didn’t want to spend the day staring at my iPad, so from then on I tried to either take care of booking a room at the very beginning of the day (at which point we committed ourselves to being at a certain place by the end of the day) or to hold off until we arrived at a town charming enough that we felt like staying. If you take the “wait until the end of the day” approach, it’s still a good idea to start the day by looking at availability in a few destinations so you don’t find yourself driving past 2 or 3 towns with vacancies, only to arrive someplace that is all booked up.
4. Search multiple towns at once. Our hotel booking process got a lot easier once I realized that I didn’t have to search for hotels one town at a time: instead, I could input “Central Oregon Coast” or “Northern Oregon Coast” as our destination, and Hotels.com and Expedia showed me all the options in all the towns in the area.
5. Filter your search results. The hotel search process is a lot faster if you can narrow your search not only by location (town or neighborhood) but by rating, price range or required amenities (like a pool or room service). Expedia offers the most filtering options so even if you’re booking on Hotels.com, this is another good reason to start with an Expedia search. Why spend an hour browsing through 40 possible options if there are only 3 you’d really consider?
6. Know your minimum viable deal, and jump on it. In general we were happy to get a 2.5-star motel for under $100, and a 3-star hotel for under $150. A couple of times I held off on booking same-day deals when they first appeared because I was hoping for something better (higher rated, cheaper, or both) and ended up having to accept a less-desirable option because the deal I was eyeing got booked up.
7. Book 2 days at a time. Another way to avoid staring at the screen all day is to handle a couple of day’s worth of bookings at a time. If you’re driving a stretch of road that is remarkably unscenic, or held hostage in a shitty motel room while your kids catch up on sleep, you might as well use the time to book your next two nights; while the best deals are same-day you can also get lots of good deals the day before, and you’ll have more options.
8. Book campsites a few days ahead. Ironically, camping is one of trickiest options for a pseudo-free spirit, since you typically have to book at least 72 hours in advance if you want to make an online campsite reservation with Reserve America. If you like certainty, book a few days ahead. Otherwise, you can try visiting a campsite and seeing if they have space: we got a space at the campground we wanted, and they still had vacancy by the end of the day.
9. Travel against the tide. Since we were travelling in peak summer vacation season, we structured our traveling so that we were in coastal vacation towns during (slightly less busy) weeknights, and in cities on the weekends. That gave us more options and lower rates.
10. Pick up the phone. Don’t forget that many small or independent hotels don’t participate in the big online booking sites. If you see a hotel reviewed on TripAdvisor but can’t find a deal for it online, call the hotel directly — we found a couple of places that way.

Of course, this system only works if you have a good data plan, so in my next post I’ll share my tips for roaming with your phone and tablet. I’ll have additional tips to share on tech-savvy road tripping in the days ahead, so do jump in with your own suggestions!

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It really bugs me that all the stock photos of people looking confused by tech are pictures of women, so I decided to give her a beard and a jaunty hat.*

One of the joys of living in a multicultural society is the experience of welcoming someone from a different heritage into your home, and introducing them to the various artifacts, practices and beliefs of your own culture. It is in this spirit that we sometimes receive visitors to our home who use Windows machines rather than Macs, paper rather than Evernote, or who still think of a phone as something you hold up to your ear.

Until someone publishes 1001 Questions and Answers About Computer Geeks, it’s easier for people to find out why we have a little metal box affixed to our doorway than it is for them to imagine why there is a wireless keyboard under our coffee table. When we are here in person we can happily demo our home media server, but sometimes we actually like to leave the house. (Q: With high speed Internet access and a 42″ screen, why on earth do you need to leave the house? A: Most Amazon.com products can not be delivered to Canada.)

Over the years we have had ever-more-frequent occasion to leave people in our home, without access to tech support: Dogsitters. Home exchange partners. Grandparents. Babysitters. (Contrary to our foundational parenting philosophy, it appears that even people who don’t know PHP can do a not-bad job looking after kids.)

Once the dogs are walked, the counter wiped down and the kids put to sleep, these visitors from Analogia may yearn for a little CNN, some relaxing music, or a chance to watch a movie. If they hope to achieve their dreams with a single remote, a stereo or a DVD player, well, good luck to them. Our house is not for the faint-of-tech.

That’s why we have, over the years, developed and maintained a running guide to our home media setup. After all, if someone is kind enough to take care of our dog, or our kids — or to lend us their house — then the least we can do is make it possible for them to put up their feet at the end of the day and watch every single episode of Star Trek ever aired.

The more complicated your home tech setup (and the more kids you have), the more important it is to document how it all works. Not only does this make your TV, music or computer setup accessible to other people (including your partner, kids or parents) but it may also save you from the horror of forgetting exactly why you have an HDMI switch attached to your TV, or an extra keyboard for your computer.

Today I’m sharing the documentation for our home tech setup(.doc file). (Click here for .pdf version.). If you use a Shaw cable box, or Plex, you may find that a chunk of this documentation is useful to you personally. It may look a bit complicated, but it’s a lot simpler than the 2004 instructions and 2007 instructions that I wrote before we discovered the joys of Plex.

As for non-Shaw, non-Plex techies: I hope you will use these documents as a jumping-off point for your own home tech manual (though Mac users should check out Plex). Take a look at the different topics the document covers  (not only home media setup, but wifi, phones, etc.) and think about how you’d prepare someone else to visit or stay in your home. And please do let me know if you’ve got a home tech guide of your own — it would be great to collect more examples here.

I know there will also be a few people who are baffled by the whole premise of this post. (Q: What kind of person would actually spend 10 hours writing a guide to their home tech setup? A: The kind of person who would spend 100 hours optimizing their home tech in the first place.) To you, dear friends, I simply say: welcome to our homeland. We look forward to immersing you in our culture, and to learning more about yours.

* She got the cap once I realized that her confused look simply reflects the fact that she can’t tell which of these remotes has the kind of decoupling capacitor she needs to hack together her own USB remote control receiver.

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Six months after our Kinect arrived in our lives, it’s mostly unused. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less transformative than I’d hoped…just in different ways than I predicted.

In our household the Kinect’s shining moment came on New Year’s Eve, when our first effort at having a kid-friendly grownup party (as opposed to a kid party with adult chaperones) turned out to be one of the best evenings we’d had in a while. For a long time the parents were upstairs chatting while kids were downstairs gaming, but around 10 pm everybody converged in the living room and started playing Dance Central on the Kinect. Parents played their kids, kids played each other, families played families. It was the kind of moment videogame ads package in commercials, but it was also an authentic experience of social connection in which technology helped break down the generational walls.

Last week, the world greeted Microsoft Kinect as “revolutionary”, “sci-fi like” and “the most exciting, most important leap forward for interactive home entertainment since Nintendo introduced the Wii”. This add-on for the XBox 360 gaming system uses facial and voice recognition and motion sensors to dispense with controllers: your body and gestures control the game.

It’s a huge advance for consumer-grade interfaces, so I was eager to try it out for myself. After a few days of playing on the Kinect with my husband, kids and a couple of friends, I feel like  I have a preliminary grasp of how this technology promises to transform more than videogames. Here are my predictions for how our world is going to change over the next 10 years, thanks to the Kinect:

1. 2011: That snapshot of you puking is no longer the most embarrassing picture on your Facebook page. My favorite Kinect feature is the way Kinect games use the camera feed to snap pictures that show you exactly how stupid you look while fake hang gliding, bowling or dancing.  Hook the Kinect up to Facebook, and you can post those humiliating photos on your Facebook page. Which is somehow irresistible.
2. 2012: You get a 3D TV. Playing games on the Kinect is the first experience that’s made me crave a 3D TV: since the sensor tracks your movements in 3 dimensions, you want to see your game in 3 dimensions, too. In some cases it feels like 3D would enhance game play, while in others (most notably, “Space Pop” in Kinect Adventures) the game feels almost broken in the absence of 3D. Once the Kinect gets a critical mass of 3D titles, you’ll want a 3D TV to play them on.
3. 2013: Dance clubs go Stepford. Thriller, YMCA and Time Warp won’t be the only dances that inspire uniform choreography in a club full of dancers. Unlike Dance Dance Revolution and other mat-based dance games, the Kinect’s Dance Central does a good job of teaching actual dance moves. As a generation of dancers learns a set of real moves to go with current hit singles, they’re going to take those routines onto real-world dance floors. So expect to see a lot of side steps and fist pumping the next time “Poker Face” comes on at your favorite nightclub.
4. 2014: The housedress makes a comeback. My grandmother worked at Condé Nast, the fashion publisher, and spent her workdays in tailored suits, silk blouses, stockings and heels. She needed something comfortable to wear once she got home, but never stooped to jeans and a sweatshirt: instead, she had a closet full of elegant house dresses, which she changed into before applying a fresh coat of lipstick and making dinner. After reviewing the photos that the Kinect took of me gaming in sweats, I suddenly see the appeal of a high-style home wardrobe. Look ahead to a new wave of fashion and beauty products aimed at making home gamers look good in their snapshots.
5. 2015: The Ikea catalog will include 8 throw rugs and 25 different wheeled coffee tables. Our living room sofa is exactly 8 feet from our TV screen. For games that needed to see our feet, that was too close: we had to move our sofa out of the way.  As more and more folks get in the habit of shoving their furniture around, Ikea will need to offer more wheeled coffee tables than its current single model, and fewer throw rugs than its current selection of 100+.
6. 2016: The average business person will be 10 pounds heavier. The Kinect’s voice recognition system has a cousin in the speech recognition built into Windows 7. Once people get used to using voice control with their home entertainment systems, they’ll take it for a spin at work…and give up using the mouse. No mouse means no mousepad…so companies will need a new swag item to give away at tech conferences. Logotized candy is the obvious alternative for the price. More free candy equals fatter business people.
7. 2017: Your doctor finally gets a tablet PC. If you go to Kinect.com — an address a lot of people are going to start punching into their browsers — you land not on an Xbox site, but at the Kinect division of CAHG, a healthcare communications agency. Apparently one of Kinect’s areas of success is in moving pharmaceutical sales reps to tablet PCs. With the good luck of owning a newly hot URL, expect CAHG’s Kinect to grow its business…and pharmaceutical reps to change their marketing practices as a result. With all those tablet-wielding pharma sales people wandering through your doctor’s office, it’s only a matter of time before your doc makes the switch, too.
8. 2018: Your can’t find your best friend in a crowd. To activate the Kinect’s sensor, you wave your hand. In a few days’ worth of testing, we found that you can’t count on a natural, full-arm wave to bring up the Kinect controls. What works consistently is moving your hand in a smooth arc while keeping your elbow tight against your ribcage. As we’re all retrained to wave just our forearms, the process of searching for a friend who’s waving at you from a crowd will get much tougher. If you’re lucky enough to have your friend on a cell phone (“I’m over here, waving at you!”) you might remind them to wave from the shoulder.
9. 2019: Your ass will look great in jeans. It’s currently illegal to put surveillance cameras in retail store change rooms. But once we get used to having an Internet-connected motion sensing camera in our living rooms, we won’t be so shocked by the idea of ubiquitous surveillance. Bathrooms, office cubicles, elementary school classrooms: in the absence of protest, all the places where civil libertarians have guarded us from the watchful eye of the camera may soon be subject to monitoring. And once we have cameras in change rooms, it’s only a matter of time before stores offer 360 footage as a shopping “benefit”…allowing you to finally buy a pair of jeans with a great rear view.
10. 2020: Drag goes mainstream. The prospect of family gaming was one of the chief appeals of the Kinect, and from the initial lineup of titles, you can be sure that parents with young kids are one of the key segments that MIcrosoft is targeting. Particularly for our 4-year-old, controller-free gaming sounded ideal, since many Wii games require more nuanced handling than he can manage. But a number of Kinect games persistently refused to see him unless we boosted him onto a stool…which made it hard for him to move around. The obvious solution is to put him in platform shoes. So figure that about 10 years from now, a generation of boys who learned to walk, dance and run in heels are going to take the drag scene to a whole new level.

The great thing about making bold predictions is that nobody remembers the 9 things you got wrong: they only remember the 1 thing you got right. So 10 years from now, when your son goes to his prom in heels, I want you to remember: you heard it here first.

Originally published November 10, 2010.

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For the next week, this site will feature updates on some of my favorite past blog posts while I am (largely) offline.

I begin with my post about last summer’s Lady Gaga concert. For the past week, I’ve been listening to the new Lady Gaga album, “Born this Way”, as my workout music of choice. It’s an album that Gaga has attributed to her the inspiration she draws from her fans, in a monument of mutual appreciation that reminded me of my reaction to last summer’s concert.

Last night I went to see Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball in concert. The last performer I saw at an arena-sized concert was Madonna, to whom Gaga is often (appropriately) compared. That was 15 years ago, and at the time I was the age that Gaga is now, Madonna was the age that I am now, and social media had yet to be invented.

I layer those chronologies because the differences between Madonna and Gaga, or at least in the way I see them, seem to be inextricable from the birth of social media culture. When I was in my early 20s I was fascinated by Madonna, and in particular by the lively debate among feminist scholars over whether and how to engage with her as a phenomenon. In retrospect that whole conversation about Madonna feels very of the moment: characteristic of the seriousness (read: humorlessness) that tortured progressives and feminists in particular, and one of the earliest incursions of pop culture into the sacred terrain of academe. It seemed like every facet of Madonnna was up for analysis: her embrace (or was it critical engagement?) of the male gaze; the merits of the music itself, and the question of whether those merits were even relevant; her sexualized self-image; her sexual orientation and her role in the LGB (“T” not yet part of the acronym) community.

Everything, it seems, except her fame itself. A fame that was so big, so constitutive of what Madonna was, that we didn’t for the most part think to name it: so obvious that it eluded the scholarly discussion entirely.

Fifteen years later and the Madonna for our time is a performer who explicitly called her album The Fame. And fame is what last night’s show was all about: in the lion’s share of dialogue from Gaga herself (reflecting on her fans, her need for her fans’ love, her fans’ reaction to seeing her, her love of being famous) but most of all in the meta-narrative of a spectacle that made 20,000 people into something that felt more like a collective ego — Gaga’s — then an assortment of individuals.

Gaga’s ability to bottle fame — the experience of it, the desire for it — is inextricable from her mastery of social media. She’s at the top of the Twitter charts, described as a social media genius and a transmedia storyteller. But seeing her in concert, it’s clear that this is a performer for whom social media is not a tool: it’s a mirror.

Gaga in concert feels like nothing so much as a social media presence come to life. Everything is credited to her fans — her success, her performance, her ability to write quickly. She isn’t a person we are engaging with: she is a persona we are creating. The question of authenticity (so dear to social media pundits’ hearts) never comes up: “I hate the truth,” she says. “I choose bullshit every time.” Without truth, without authenticity, we can give ourselves over to the social experience of Gaga as a creation that we own, as much as we own and create Flickr or YouTube.

That’s the universe that Gaga invokes herself:

There’s something heroic about the way my fans operate their cameras. So precisely, so intricately, and so proudly. Like Kings writing the history of their people. Its their prolific nature that both creates and procures what will later be perceived as the “kingdom.” So, the real truth about Lady Gaga fans, my little monsters, lies in this sentiment: They are the kings. They are the queens. They write the history of the kingdom, and I am something of a devoted Jester. It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond. Or, the lie, I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or to become rather, in the future. When you’re lonely, I’ll be lonely too. And this is The Fame.

(Thanks to James for that transcription.)

As enthralling and energizing as it was to be part of a social media community come to life (what we used to call, “a community”) the transformation of fame from context to subject left me uneasy. The word that springs to mind in describing Lady Gaga’s persona (no need to separate it from her person, as she’s made clear) is narcissism: how else can you describe the choice to talk relentlessly about your fans (or “little monsters”)?

But it’s the relentlessness of that conversation that pushes it into new territory: where the narcissism is text instead of subtext. Yes, I feed on my fans, Gaga says. And we feed on her feeding on us. We create our own celebrity and then rejoice in our celebrity celebrating us, an endlessly reflecting mirror. What we see is not simply Gaga’s narcissism but our own: the transcendent narcissism of an audience that can no longer separate the adoring fans from the adored (and adoring celebrity).

That’s the same transcendent narcissism that drives social media: a culture in which we all strive to be mini-Gagas, building our followers, responding to our commenters, embracing “audience engagement” as the highest good of a conversational medium. The Fame isn’t something we give to Gaga, or buy from her: it’s something we try to create for ourselves, online.

Originally published August 25, 2010.

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If you’re heading out of town or to the gym with your iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch, and you want to load it with videos for the road, you’ve got a couple of options for filling it up with those yummy, legitimately downloaded .avi and .mkv files (which I’m absolutely, positively certain you didn’t get via Bittorrent, because that would be wrong).

Option 1: The Hard Way

1. On your Mac, use HandBrake to convert each file to an iPad-friendly .mp4
2. Still on your Mac, drag your .mp4 files into iTunes to add them to your iTunes library
3. Connect your iPad to your Mac with a physical cable and wait for eons while your iPhone or iPad runs through the entire backup and syncing cycle. Your video files will now show up in the “Videos” app under “Movies” (even if they are TV shows).

Option 2: The Expensive Way

On your iPad or iPhone, access the iTunes store and buy or rent the videos you already have on your Mac. It feels annoying, wasteful and stupid but it recently occurred to me that this is what normal people must do in the absence of torrents and HandBrake.

Option 3: The Cheap and Easy Way

Downloading a video in Klexi

With all those .mkv and .avi files on your Mac, I’m going to assume you’re already using Plex. If you’re not, start: it is going to rock your world!  (Read my 2010 Home Media Center Overhaul and Documentation Festival for more on the awesomeness that is Plex.)

1. Buy Klexi for your iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch ($5.99 on the App Store)
2. Launch Klexi on your iOS device (if you’re used to using Plex on your iPad, iPhone or iPod then Klexi will feel very familiar) and select your Plex server (i.e. your main Mac).
3. Navigate to the TV show or movie you want, choose the download option, and sit back while Klexi downloads your selected video(s) over your local wifi network.
4. When you get to the gym or the plane, relaunch Klexi and this time choose your iOS device’s local library (rather than your Plex server). Your video(s) will be waiting for you to watch.

My point in a nutshell? Klexi makes it stunningly easy for any Plex user to transfer videos from a Mac to an iOS device. Install it today.

UPDATE: After a month of using Klexi I can report it’s slightly more temperamental than I originally realized. You need to turn off your iPad’s autolock so Klexi doesn’t go to sleep mid-transfer; best bet is to leave your iPad plugged in, out of contact with your magic cover (if you have an iPad 2) with Klexi running in the foreground. Which brings me to another issue: apparently iOS kills a background process after 10 minutes, so you can’t leave Klexi transferring files while you play Scrabble. Finally, I have found that even apparently successful transfers sometimes refuse to play, so if you are critically dependent on a transfer (say, you are 3 weeks behind on Gossip Girl and have a transcontinental flight that will let you catch up) make sure the files are playable before you leave your home and server.

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What’s the right way for a geek to celebrate the big 40? In my case, as many of you now know, the answer was to spend the previous 40 days blogging.

That met my need for ritual, but what about the day itself? I wanted to do something memorable, something that would ensure I always remembered my 40th birthday. But after 40 straight days of blogging I was really just looking forward to a break. I didn’t have the bandwidth to pre-plan any kind of celebration.

Then destiny intervened. I trace this particular moment of destiny back to sometime in January, when Emily Carr’s President, Ron Burnett, convinced me to take the screen protector off my new iPhone. The iPhone 4, he assured me, is virtually scratch proof. Now that is the kind of challenge I can’t resist — honestly, I’ve never met an Apple protect I couldn’t bash, ding, scratch or otherwise mar – so I just had to see what I could do to a naked iPhone screen.

Flash forward to May 4th, at which point my iPhone screen remained virtually (though I swear, not entirely) pristine. Emily Carr was playing host to a few distinguished visitors, and I attended a stunning demonstration of the stereoscopic 3D lab. In the midst of the excitement, my iPhone had a spontaneous encounter with a concrete floor. I picked up my completely shattered iPhone and I don’t think I even had a moment of feeling devastated: I just had to laugh at this accident happening in Ron’s line of sight, considering his optimistic prediction about the durability of my iPhone’s screen. I have to admit that a 3-foot drop onto concrete widely exceeded what he’d suggested the iPhone could withstand.

If it wasn’t destiny that broke my iPhone under Ron’s gaze, then perhaps it was my subconscious looking for an excuse to visit the Apple store on my birthday. When May 5th arrived, we dropped the kids at school and headed directly to the mall. I was directed to a blue-shirted Apple staffer and handed over my shattered iPhone. I offered neither explanation nor alibi: I simply told her that it was my birthday.

“Normally we charge you $259 for a replacement iPhone,” she told me. “But since it’s your birthday we’ll waive the fee…just this one time!”

While I showered this merciful Apple-tini with the appropriate level of appreciation, Rob sneaked off for an Apple consultation of his own. It turns out that for the past month, Rob has been a regular member of the early morning line-ups at the local Apple Store, looking for an iPad 2 he could give me as a birthday present. Every time he came up dry.

But on the 5th, during that miraculous visit to the Apple store, the iPad 2 was in stock. Happy birthday to me!

Once we had the iPhone and iPad in hand, we spent a little more time getting our various Macbook woes sorted out at the Genius Bar. By the time we left, we’d been in the Apple store for a couple of hours and knew the names, ages, blogging platforms and career aspirations of half the staff. Our primary helper sent us down the hall for the final step in our acquisition process: a trip to mall stand where my new iPad could be wrapped in a protective layer of plastic film.

With my shattered iPhone screen fresh in my memory, I decided to hand over both the iPhone and iPad for their protective wrapping. The young woman staffing the stand said it would take half an hour to wrap both devices; I asked if we could wander a bit and then return. No problem.

Thirty minutes later we returned to the wrapping stand and a wrapper near tears.

“Something terrible has happened,” she said to me.

“My iPad smashed!” I said, horrified.

“No…” she began tearfully. “While I was wrapping your iPad…somebody ran by the stand, grabbed your iPhone and took off.”

“But the owner of the stand says he’ll pay to replace it!” she promised, bursting into tears. “Here, this is his card. I’m so sorry!”

I reassured her that there was no better moment for my phone to get stolen, as long as I could get it replaced. A phone is replaceable: what’s really scary is the prospect of someone else having access to my calendar, contacts and e-mail. But the stolen phone had yet to be synced; it was 100% blank, as-new. No data had fallen into the wrong hands.

Five minutes later the stand’s owner had called to reassure me that he’d reimburse me for the cost of a replacement phone. I walked back into the Apple store, where the same staffer who sold us the iPad heard our story with total astonishment. He checked my file to see which model of phone had been stolen and brought out an identical model. The replacement for the replacement, including AppleCare? A cool $960, in the absence of a trade-in phone or carrier contract.

By the end of the day, the stand’s owner had already made good on his promise to reimburse me for the stolen phone. In the course of one day I had owned three different iPhones, and gotten two of them for free. (Beating my personal record for complimentary replacement hardware.)

Best of all? I will always remember how I spent my 40th birthday.

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It’s not easy to break into a market that is dominated by a player whose name is literally synonymous with an entire product category. In a world that uses “Googling” to refer to the very act of searching for something online, it’s a wonder that anyone is brave enough to launch a new search engine.

But that’s exactly what Microsoft did in 2009 with the launch of Bing. Microsoft’s answer to Google —  and its bid for billions in dollars in online search advertising — hinged on getting people to think that there was an alternative to Google for, well, googling.

How do you get people to imagine themselves binging instead of googling? Microsoft’s strategy apparently hinged on tying our fantasy lives to its new product. (And as of today, on tying it to the Blackberry.) If you watch TV, you might have noticed how that strategy began to remake our landscape, beginning about eighteen months ago.

Suddenly late night talk shows had an urge to talk about online search. Fictional computer geeks with conspicuously de-branded laptops suddenly became Microsoft enthusiasts. Law enforcement officers from Hawaii to Los Angeles threw over their intelligence databases in exchange for the opportunity to “Bing it!”.

This sudden, intense interest in Internet searching was annoying enough. If I want to watch someone surf the web, I can just sit on the sofa and look at my husband. (Hey, that sounds kinda nice!)

But the real problem came not from software, but from hardware. After all, Microsoft was hardly going to pay for televised Bing seaches by a character using an iPhone. So goodbye, Apple hardware: welcome to a new, fictional world in which people only use Microsoft-enabled phones and computers.

In my own TV watching, the incongruity of that shift was most apparent on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. What, you seriously thought I was going to make it through 40 years of Internet history without talking about the TV show that best captures today’s wired lifestyle? That’s right, Gossip Girl.

Bing got serious about Gossip Girl over the course of spring 2010. Suddenly, Gossip Girl characters were not only going online to “bing” their latest queries, but undertaking all of this binging on a series of nondescript PC laptops. What?!!?

Look, I’m willing to strain the bounds of credulity with my Gossip Girl watching. You’re giving your no-good, cheating boyfriend another chance: why not? You’re a teenager who launches your own fashion line? Go for it. You have transcended your drug habit to become a saintly fashionista? Good for you.

But a rich, styling young New Yorker with a Windows machine? Please!

Overnight, Gossip Girl’s producers asked us to accept a universe in which a girl would wear Prada but use Acer. This, despite the fact that Apple’s market share is strongest among “younger, more highly educates, and higher-income households“ and that the iPhone’s edge over other smartphone platforms gets stronger in high-income demographics. And sure enough, before  the Bing-a-thon began, Gossip Girl’s characters used Macs, first subtly, then with logos blazing.

There’s a lesson in the incongruity of Gossip Girl’s Windows/Bing switch over, which was both widely noted and widely criticized. As with any aggressive product placement campaign, people resent the intrusion of advertising into their fictional narratives: drop some identifiable products into the frame if you most, but don’t make them plot points.

But at least in my case, the reaction to Gossip Girl’s Microsoft deal goes way beyond my usual aversion to product placement. What really bugged me is that the placement felt out-of-character. Because in today’s world, our technology use is very much a part of our character.

Technology choice reflects an wide mix of demographic factors: income, age, gender, education and even race. And of course, it reflects individual personalities. Just like casting, costumes and dialogue help us locate a fictional character and understand what makes him or her tick, so does a character’s choice of hardware.

If a product placement campaign like Bing’s can shock us with its incongruity, it represents more than a marketing fail on the part of Microsoft. It reflects the extent to which we’ve integrated technology into our own identities, into the way we locate ourselves and others in the world — even when that world is fictional.

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