After leaving New York City, I expected the drive to Philadelphia to be rather easy…and it would have been, if not for the legendary badness of Pennsylvania highway design and signage. See how I-276 appears to intersect I-95 there? Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. Only it doesn’t; there isn’t even a sign to mark the place they cross, nor any instructions such as “use US 13 to reach I-95”. If one doesn’t already know how to get from one to the other, one will find oneself west of the city wondering what the hell happened and calling one’s husband for directions. Furthermore, even those highways which are labelled properly often don’t connect properly; one may have to exit and drive for miles on surface streets (complete with traffic lights) to get from one interstate highway to another it supposedly connects to. Oh, and please don’t suggest I get a damned GPS unit, either; every time someone uses one of those screwy things to give me directions it takes me miles out of the way through a maze of turns instead of just plotting a direct course; on the day I’m writing this I was literally given GPS directions to a business that led me to a completely different part of town than the one the business actually occupies (fortunately, there was a similar business in the vicinity of the incorrect destination, so I used it instead).
Grumbling aside, I had a good visit to the city; the group at Liberty On the Rocks was undeterred by heavy rain, and we had a lively discussion which was actually joined by a sex worker who just happened to be in the cafe at the time. On Thursday I drove down to Washington DC, stopping briefly in Baltimore for a TV interview on the local ABC affiliate (I understand it will be part of an investigative series). From there I went on to Alexandria, Virginia, the Washington suburb where the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit was being held; I’ve written my thoughts about the conference in a little more detail for Eros Guide. While I was there, Cathy Reisenwitz kindly invited me to stay at her place; it turned out to be very conveniently located, a straight shot down one long street to the convention. I touched base with some activists I already knew, met some folks I hadn’t before (including Melissa Gira Grant and porn performers Nina Hartley and Buck Angel), attended an informal group discussion of Lawrence vs. Texas and similar sexual freedom cases, and even sold a few books before zooming down to Raleigh, North Carolina for a podcast that evening. The details of that, however, can wait until next week!
The tour’s nearly over, but you can still catch me in Charleston, Atlanta, Tampa or New Orleans; if your city is within a few hours’ drive of those (or between them), you can still send an email asking me to visit, though obviously it’s pretty tight now. Your request will be more likely to be doable if you can make the arrangements yourself (in other words if it’s your store, club or whatever).
Wait, don’t you have a smartphone? Most modern phones come with maps and GPS functionality standard. Google’s pathfinding particularly isn’t as bad as, for instance, the Garmin I once used which attempted to insert a diversion via Italy into a <40km journey between two cities in South Africa.
I do not own a “smart”phone, and never will if I have anything to do with it. IMHO the liabilities of such a device strongly outweigh the benefits. And BTB, it was Google that gave me the bad business directions yesterday.
How odd; I’ve never had issue with Google, even on sometimes-sketchy back roads.
Decades-old cars have their charm, as does anything built in a previous era where planned obsolescence would have been near-unthinkable. Smartphones, on the other hand… there’s nothing more useful than a pocket-sized computer, communicator, organizer, translator, GPS, Telnet client, media player and all-round application handler. In africa, one can even trade prepaid airtime from phone to phone directly by the side of the road, making it a sort of bush wallet.
The downsides of distraction and potential information compromise don’t really seem all that terrible, faced with all of that good stuff. 😉
If you aren’t concerned with short battery life, high cost, comparative fragility of the device and carrying a bug and tracking device that others can control without your consent, I guess that’s probably true.
Afaik, dumb phones also work as bug and tracking devices others can control without your consent. Being less complex though, they’re a tad less vulnerable to all and sundry, but if the attacker you’re worried about is or has connections to the govt, you’re screwed either way.
– Energy densities and efficiency improve (slowly) with every generation, and smartphones tend to be nearer to the bleeding edge than traditional handsets, so they gain faster, and are particularly good when turning off the useless bells and whistles with which every manufacturer seems to insist on burdening their OS.
– Gorilla glass and IP58 certification are becoming more popular, so smartphones can be just as tough as an old-fashioned device, if not more so – especially when outfitted with a solid resin body as HTC does on some models, or perhaps the full aluminium cladding common on high-end devices. As a motorcyclist I can tell you, these things deal with rain, dust, sweat and occasional falls much better than the old phones of yesteryear.
– Tracking can be disabled, except to the degree that any other traditional handset can be tracked using tower triangulation – which is pretty damned accurate with current generation networks, so it really doesn’t make much odds unless you’re out somewhere where the networks haven’t run upgrades since 1999, and even then you’re dead set within ~50 meters.
– As for listening devices… that’s got little to do with how smart a phone is. The functionality has been available on devices since long before the days of iOS and Android – it’s just that people are now becoming more aware of their privacy, and more sensitive to this sort of abuse. It’s more of a hardware issue.
So yeah, unless you have the good fortune to live outside of the first world – ie., where those who would take advantage are less motivated and/or competent – worrying about how smart one’s device might be is pretty much wasted thought.
I’ll concede on cost, though, and protection from malicious code needs more precautions on smart devices. End of the day, what matters is that personal cost/value graph, and if yours stacks a good device below the line, well, I won’t try and tell you different. 😀
Just want to say that it was a pleasure to meet you in person as well as get your book autographed! I don’t know if I will ever be able to see you again, so I hope you have a safe and pleasant journey the rest of your journey through America and I hope that you get home safely! Please give your husband and pets (I haven’t forgotten Nancy!) my love when you get there.
So you’re back in the South now? It must feel good returning to civilization.
Tonight at dinner I was even able to order sweet tea and get it! 🙂
I’ve heard of GPS screwing up like this. I’ve never witnessed it first hand. I have to wonder if some people have ‘bad mojo’ when it comes to GPS, the same as some people can’t wear a wristwatch, no matter how cheap or expensive, without the damn thing dying on the arm. I’m one of those. It’s not like I go around practicing tamishiwari while wearing it. In fact I don’t do tamishiwari at all.
Or perhaps it works better in some parts of the country than others, and Dallas County just happens to be lucky.
In any case, you’re back home by now. Congratulations on your book and on your tour.