Now With Greater Range!

Yes; greater range because I've bought an iPad. I suppose that every blogger who buys one must right a similar post. The truth is it merits a post--not the specific Apple product, but the new stratum of technology: the tablet. Having a giant, portable, app/net/home pc-syncable gadget is a thousand times a boon to productivity. This first photo is a picture I took as I began writing this post in a cafe. I was writing in the minutes before the Seoul Writer's Workshop meeting began (1/28) and continued as my students were taking an exam (the photo below shows them relaxing after they finished--1/30).


I have to admit that I'm one of the last on this bandwagon. From this perspective I can say that not everyone needs to get on the bandwagon. But for those who need to do reading and writing tasks at a professional level, I would say that you cannot decline the advantages tablet productivity and connectivity have to offer.

Truthfully, it is not even the highest of the high-tech features (syncing, multi-tasking swipe gestures, apps talking to each other) that matter the most. It is the shape and the size of the thing. A pure screen that minimizes distractions, of the multi-tab, multi-window sort or of any other kind.
The biggest advantage for someone of my peculiarities is the ability to simultaneously have ONE device that acts like all the separate books, notebooks and other devices I used to carry around. As a result, I'm ready to do whatever work most needs to be done or, in my free time, whatever work appeals to me at the moment. All the excuses like "I don't have anything to take notes with" or "I don't have the right notebook" have vanished.

In an unrelated piece of news: I got an unofficial acceptance email from Purdue's Philosophy and Literature PhD program yesterday. The catch is they don't have funding for me for the first year...so I'm not sure what will develop there. But this result is an encouraging forecast for the responses of the other schools, as Purdue was the 'long shot' among my applications this time around.