Friday, June 15, 2012

The Problems of Portability and Traveling

A small complaint.
I would like the ability to do a lot of things that I do on the go (90% of the time this is "On the bus" or something similar).

The best way I have of doing this so far is a little "Hipster PDA" of sorts in my back pocket.  However, as I've mentioned in "Idea Capture Upkeep", I have problems with this.  That, and, I'd like to keep a more permanent long-term journal or something similar.  For example, if I want to flesh out a post while writing "on the go", I inevitably have this 'transfer phase' that makes the upkeep somewhat irritating; i.e., if I succeed in getting myself to use the "Hipster PDA" for everything, I would still have extra upkeep (and thus extra problems in a behaviorist sense) by way of transferring this to a computer.  Most handheld computers, however, don't have functional inputs, or have this problem (for me) of portable internet access that comes with the device.

This gets to a more general point, which is that often when we are shifted out of our normal environment temporarily, we lose a lot of our previous reinforcement chains, which causes a load of new positive habits or negative habits to form.  The classic stereotypical example of this is someone gaining weight over a vacation.  But it can also occur that someone suddenly isn't an alcoholic anymore when they're forced to move.  Or, there were quite a lot of mathematicians that became amazingly reinvigorated when they moved (like when Sylvester moved to the U.S., and again when he moved back to Britain).

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