Today's pimpage

One downside to self-publishing of any kind (including the rebirth of old books as electronic books) is that it's up to the author to do all the publicity. Which means we must regularly beat the drum for our own wares. Which makes some of us uncomfortable.

Just one of the many adjustments we must make as publishing morphs into something different. Those of us published by traditional houses have come to expect a certain amount of assistance: Editors, publicists, cover artists. With e-books, we must look elsewhere for this help. I happened to be married to a computer-savvy professional editor. I suggest you run right out and get yourself such a spouse. Otherwise, you'll have to do it all yourself.

Authors can't afford to ignore e-books. Not only is e-publishing a great way to breathe life into out-of-print works, it's a direct, tree-free way to deliver new books such as my thriller "Firepower." Free Kindle apps and Smashwords downloads mean the consumer can turn any computer, laptop or smartphone into an e-book reader. That's why e-book sales are soaring.

I'm not abandoning traditional publishing. My agent is circulating a couple of my manuscripts to the New York houses right now. But, if e-books, old or new, can provide another revenue stream and a bigger audience, I'm on board.

So here is today's pimpage: You can see all the books I've got on Kindle so far by clicking here. The same books are available in a variety of formats at Smashwords here. More to come soon.

Thanks for listening.

Newbie on Kindle

I've dipped my trembling toe into the ice-cold waters of e-books for the first time, making my backlist humor book available on Kindle.

"Trophy Husband: A Survival Guide to Working at Home" was published in hardcover by University of New Mexico Press in 2003, and disappeared shortly thereafter. (Kidding. It's still available. There's a whole warehouse full of them somewhere.)

The material in "Trophy Husband" came from my syndicated newspaper column, The Home Front. You can read most of those columns right here on this blog, but I reshaped the material slightly for the book, making it into a self-help guide that's no help whatsoever.

The book got great reviews and my favorite blurb of all time, from Virginia Swift: "If Erma Bombeck and Dave Barry had a love child, it would be Brewer."

Available now at a special introductory price of $2.99. I'd appreciate any feedback from Kindle users out there.

Next up will be my bank-heist caper, "Fool's Paradise." Then I'll start putting the Bubba Mabry books on Kindle as well.

O, brave new world . . .

We walk the night

I snapped awake at 2 a.m., my parental radar fully engaged.

A light was on somewhere in the house, its glow barely reaching our bedroom. I figured one of our two teen-aged sons was: a) up in the middle of the night, possibly ill, or b) STILL up, though they’d been ordered to bed hours earlier.

I strained my ears, trying to determine if someone was prowling the kitchen and/or tossing cookies in the bathroom. Nothing.

After a few seconds, the light went off.

Ah. One of the boys was up, for whatever reason, but he’s now gone back to bed and--

The light flicked on again. I listened, waiting. Clearly, the boys were UP TO SOMETHING. But I couldn’t hear a sound.

The light went out. OK, I told myself, go back to sleep. You can deal with the kids in the morning--

The light came on.

I was getting steamed. It’s 2 a.m., and I’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow--

The light went out. Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe I can still get back to Slumberland, so I’m not a complete wreck tomorrow.

The light came on.

I leaped from bed, slung on my bathrobe and marched down the hall, ready to read somebody the Riot Act. Only the light wasn’t coming from the boys’ bedrooms. It was coming from my office, which should’ve been uninhabited this time of night.

Yikes.

I tiptoed to the office door and peered inside. And there was my computer, chugging away, displaying its revolving slide show of screensaver art. Each frame lit up the room for a few seconds, then winked out, followed by the bright glow of the next slide.

You get the picture. The computer had been up in the night, doing routine maintenance, and was now headed toward shutdown. Satisfied, I closed the office door, went back to bed and probably got a good 20 minutes’ more sleep before dawn.

This isn’t the first time my computer’s played such a trick. Once, I was in the shower, no one else at home, when I distinctly heard a man’s voice somewhere in the house. Couldn’t make out what was being said, but it definitely was a man’s baritone.

I toweled off and sneaked around the house, ready to pounce on an intruder. Then I heard the voice again: “You’ve got mail!”

The air-conditioner roars. Clocks tick-tock. The VCR whirs. The icemaker goes bump in the night.

Our sprinklers irrigate the lawns in the pre-dawn cool, so less is wasted. They hiss and gasp, and the pipes stutter in the walls. No wonder we’re such early risers around here.

Every appliance/computer/phone/smoke alarm in the house has a red “on” light or menacing green eyes or a blue digital clock flashing “12:00.” So many colorful little lights, it’s like the bridge of the Enterprise around here. All the lights come in handy when I’m chasing phantom noises in the night. I can wander the house without flipping a light switch, navigating by the familiar beacons of our electronic gizmos.

Sometimes, lying awake, I get paranoid. Among all the whirs and clicks, I hear snickering. Not the sort of thoughts that help a person get back to sleep.

I should teach my computer to play lullabies.

Wonder wanders on the Internet

Remember when we used to wonder about stuff?

Some obscure question would arise, and we’d wonder about it, scanning our brains, trying to remember if we’d ever heard of the poser before and whether me might know the answer. We’d even file the question away for later, with the notion that we’d look it up in a dictionary or an encyclopedia when we had more time.

Now that computers are commonplace, there’s no reason to wonder anymore. You want to know something, you can find out in seconds. A search in Google or a little shoveling in Dogpile or a quick romp through Wikipedia, and you can answer most any question that comes to mind.

Who played the cop in that movie we saw last week? How far to Bali? Whatever happened to old So-and-so? What is this rash? How long do you cook a two-minute egg? Where did all my money go? Why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near? All that info, and much, much more, is readily available via the Internet.

We could be the best-informed populace of all time, but in the process we’re losing the capacity for speculation. Wondering is good for you. It makes your brain work. It forces you to come up with your own creative (albeit often extremely incorrect) answers.

Kids are great wonderers. Everything’s brand new to them, so they wonder about everything: Why is the sky blue? Where do babies come from? Why is grass itchy? How many deviled eggs can I stuff in one automobile ashtray? Could you make a doubled-barreled slingshot out of a brassiere? If there are undertows, how come there’s no such thing as an “overtow?” Why is Paris Hilton a celebrity?

As parents, it’s our job to answer their many, many questions as best we can, or to at least steer our offspring toward the right answers. Of course, we parents are tired and distracted, so the quality of our information may be suspect. Plus, some of us are perverse, and have been known to make up fanciful answers from whole cloth.

That no longer works once the kids get access to the Internet.

“You lied!” they shriek. “Thunder is NOT caused by God dancing around in rubber boots. I looked it up!”

We parents have to back and fill, telling the little beggars we were only joking, grain of salt, etc. The children never look at us quite the same afterward.

Not that we notice. We’re too busy looking stuff up on the Internet ourselves. We waste huge chunks of time, tracking down random factoids that we’d probably be better off not knowing.

We start clicking through links, looking for a little more information, and instead get captivated by tangents. We click and we click, and each link takes us farther away from the original question. We start off trying to understand why the ocean is blue, and end up reading a treatise on Portuguese pornography.

This leads to a whole new set of questions: What the heck am I doing? How did I get here? What was I originally looking up? Do I still care anymore? Did I miss dinner? Who knew things were so hot in Portugal?

It’s enough to make you wonder.

We'll jump off that bridge when we come to it

I recently changed my computer's desktop background to a color photograph of one of my favorite structures, the Golden Gate Bridge.

It was a photo I plucked off the Internet, shot from the waterfront to show the full sweep of the grand orange bridge. A sunny day. A few sailboats nearby. When I put the photo up on my screen, the image stretched slightly, softened, so it looked like an oil painting.

Ah, an inspiring backdrop for my workday. Probably an important metaphor there somewhere. I'm crossing some bridge in my career. Or, I'm connecting two worlds, the everyday one and the virtual one in my computer. Or, I'm bridging between real life and art, trying to--

Then I noticed where all my desktop icons had lined up. The four icons for my latest project were midway along the bridge, in midair, apparently leaping to their deaths.

Now there's a nasty little coincidence. I spent the next few hours fretting over omens and lemmings and my new book. Finally, I couldn't stand it anymore, and I changed the desktop to a lovely airbrushed photo of a chimpanzee dressed for the office. Better that my icons be spattered all over the chimp's suit than plunging into San Francisco Bay.

This story illustrates a number of points about work in the Computer Age:

1) Somebody's got too much time on his hands.
2) Superstition ain't the way.
3) Nothing's funnier than a chimp in a necktie.
4) We spend so much time with our computers that something as basic as the desktop background can affect our moods. There's a reason for the cheerful daisies and colorful reefs displayed in every cubicle farm in America.

Changing desktop backgrounds is so last decade for most people, but not to me. I am extremely low-tech. I'm the kind of computer user who doesn't want to change anything, ever, for fear it will somehow break the machine.

In the past, I'd pick a standard, pre-loaded image for my background and leave it alone for months, maybe years. Sure, I might tire of climbing that same scenic mountain day after day, but why take a chance, messing with it?

My latest computer makes it ridiculously easy to steal -- I mean, reproduce -- background images from the Internet. Now, my desktop is a revolving art gallery. Landscapes and seascapes and cityscapes. Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol and Vincent Van Gogh. Snow-covered peaks and pale flowers. Surf and turf. And, always, that wry chimp in the suit.

The revolving images reflect my moods and how well work is going. Sometimes, I want to be inspired by a sculpture or a skyscraper, some great thing man has made. Other times, I need to get away, and I'll resort to a secluded beach. If the background changes frequently, it's a sign that I'm goofing around in Google Images all day instead of getting any work done.

I'll probably stick to a single image for a while. Bet on the chimp.

Racing the clock

"Greetings, Agent Parent. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to finish a major work project, complete with Power Point presentation, while also driving kids to music lessons and the dog to the vet. Pick up dinner somewhere and have it on the table by the time your weary spouse gets home. Spend three hours overseeing homework, washing dishes and resolving disputes before falling into bed, exhausted. This Palm Pilot will self-destruct in 10 seconds."

(Cue theme music: "Dum-dum. Da-dum. Dum-dum. Da-dum. Dum-dum. Da-dum. Dum-dum. Da-dum. Tweedle-dee. Tweedle-dum. You're late!")

Modern life has become "Mission Impossible." Working parents can't make a move without synchronizing our watches -- or, at least, our calendars -- and most days are filled to the brim.

To meet all our daily appointments, we need organizational skills and coordination and communication. We share responsibilities with our "team," assembled for their special abilities -- spouse, coworkers, carpoolers, cleaning lady, yard guy, babysitter, travel agent, in-laws. We schedule everything down to the exact minute.

And still we find ourselves zooming through traffic at the last possible second, turning a routine trip to the orthodontist into an action-movie driving sequence.

(That maniac you saw in traffic today? The one who nearly mowed you down with a minivan while trying to simultaneously drive, talk on the phone and discipline children in the back seat? Five will get you 10 they were late for soccer practice.)

Most of us have demanding jobs, chock-full of appointments and sales meetings and other time-wasters, and we speed through them so we have time left to do actual work. Quitting time gets pushed back, later and later, until it sometimes seems simpler to set up a cot in the workplace.

Things don't settle down once we finally do shake free; just the opposite. Our children have too many activities, all of which require transportation, typically all the way across town. We need family time and exercise time and laundry time and a few hours' sleep and, please, oh, please, just a few minutes to collect ourselves. Because tomorrow we do it all over again.

Everything must go like clockwork. Throw in a dental appointment or a flat tire or a special homework project or -- gulp! -- an unexpected business trip, and it all goes kablooey. Work goes unfinished. Dinner is forgotten. Children are left waiting at curbs, collecting resentment they can reveal to their psychiatrists years from now.

Families coordinate these impossible missions in different ways. Some use a universal calendar, where everyone in the family gets to note appointments and events. Others do everything electronically, sending e-mails and instant messages with constant updates (this technique has the added benefit of allowing family members to avoid each other). Some skip planning altogether, rushing around willy-nilly, everybody late all the time, until the parents keel over with heart attacks and the children become wards of the state.

At our house, we use a combination of methods. A technophobe, I use an actual paper calendar, where I write cryptic little notes to keep track of everything. My wife tracks everything by computer. Once a week, we synchronize our calendars.

Is our system working? Let's put it this way: If you see my minivan hurtling through traffic, you might want to drive up onto the nearest sidewalk where it's safe. Because here's what playing on my car stereo: "Dum-dum. Da-dum…"

Flushed

So I'm in an airport men's room, relieved at being back on the ground where the restroom is larger than a coffin, when a guy steps up to the next urinal and starts talking.

Now I enjoy a chat as much as the next person, but there were several things wrong with this scenario:

1. I didn't know this guy.
2. I didn't know what the heck he was talking about.
3. We're in the MEN'S ROOM, where I prefer to keep to myself, thank you very much.

Just as I was about to answer -- something along the lines of "Hey, buddy, I'm a little busy here" -- I realize he's not talking to me. On the far side of his head, he's got one of those little "Star Trek" headsets attached to his ear. He's on the phone. Conducting business. In the men's room. Which brings a whole new meaning to the term "hands-free calling."

I had to wonder whether the person on the other end of the call knew this. Wouldn't it be obvious? What about the background noises -- flushes, hand dryers, nose blowers, echoing tiles?
But the biggest question: What was so danged important that Mr. Urinal Phone couldn't wait, oh, 60 seconds to make this call? Was this an emergency? Is his business so precarious that he can't take even a minute for himself? Doesn't he know he's irritating everyone else in the men's room, to the point that we'd like to give him a "swirlie?"

I've grown accustomed to people walking around, apparently talking to themselves. I've learned to tune out all but the most annoying yakkers. But I'm still regularly amazed by the stupid and/or rude stuff people will do in the name of talking on the phone:

--I witnessed a young woman emerge from a curbside parking space and pull a slow U-turn across four lanes of rushing traffic. She had a phone to her ear and seemed truly peeved that the resultant chorus of honking interrupted her conversation.

--Several times lately, I've had to alter my shopping pattern at the supermarket to avoid people carrying on long cell-phone conversations. The callers probably saw this doubling-up as an efficient use of their time, but the rest of us didn't care to hear about Aunt Agatha's goiter while trying to decide between Frosted Flakes and Cocoa Puffs. We're trying to read labels and compare prices, and this chatter doesn't help our concentration. Isn't the Muzak annoying enough?

--As a plane taxied to the gate, a passenger turned on his phone, and we were serenaded by his "ring tone," a 200-decibel rendition of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." My ears are still ringing.

--A woman in a doctor's waiting room entertained the rest of us patients with a lengthy, emotional conversation, complete with tears and ululating. I believe she was talking to an estranged lover, but I'm not certain because the whole conversation was in an unfamiliar language, possibly Urdu.

Where will it end? Will all privacy be surrendered to the forces of technology? Will we all be forced to hear everyone else's conversations all the time? Can't we even hide from it in the BATHROOM?

Tell you what: Next guy I see talking on a cell phone in a men's room is in for a big surprise. I plan to snatch the phone right out of his hand, and toss it into the nearest porcelain receptable.
Will the person on the other end hear the flush?

Inbox blues

What if you had a coworker who sneaked into your cubicle every time your back was turned and stacked more work on your desk?

You wouldn't stand for it, right? You'd complain to the boss, or have words with the coworker or give him a deserved thrashing.

But that very scenario happens all the time. With e-mail.

Whenever you're not looking (and sometimes right before your very eyes), e-mail slips into your computer and deposits work assignments there. There's no stopping it. There's no arguing with e-mail. You can't even beat it up.

Sure, you can turn off your e-mail, even turn off the whole computer, but many of us can't do our work without a computer. And shutting off e-mail means cutting yourself off from the world. Eventually, you're forced to turn it back on. And guess what? The work will be there waiting for you.

All this came to mind recently after I finished a big project. I was so happy to be done, I met my wife for lunch to celebrate. Finally finished! After months of daily striving. Now I could catch my breath. I could take a few days off. My time was my own. I could take a nap or read a book or go for a stroll.

I went home to my computer, eager to send an e-mail to my best friend, to crow about finishing my big project and getting some time off.

You guessed it. Waiting in my inbox were three e-mails from people who needed me to do some work or make some decisions. Right away. So much for a nap. I had another hour of work to do.

Remember the days when you could be unavailable? No e-mail, no cell phones, no laptops. You could take the weekend off, even take a vacation, and your employers wouldn't call unless there was a dire emergency. Now, the work never stops coming.

Your boss gets an idea on the golf course on Saturday, zips it to you via e-mail, and you're expected to have a full proposal ready by Monday morning. You spend a quiet evening at home with the family, but make the mistake at looking at your e-mail just before bedtime; whoops, you're working until 2 a.m.

Work delivered by e-mail is impersonal and uncaring. If your boss tries to shovel a big, steaming pile of work onto your desk in person, he might pick up some cues. He might notice that you're already overwhelmed, extremely annoyed, even homicidal. With e-mail, he can zip that work your way without worrying that you might club him with a paperweight.

Just maintaining one's inboxes presents a ton of work. Sorting out the spam and the porn and the greeting cards and the Nigerian money scams can gobble up hours every day. Hiding among all those jokes and gibberish and attachments will be more work, lying in wait, snickering.

I don't know about you, but I'm ready to give my computer a good thrashing. Soon as I answer these e-mails.

The pain of the upgrade

If you want to feel like Maxwell Not-so-Smart, get a new cellular phone.

The new generation of phones comes with more gizmos and bells and whistles than Inspector Gadget: digital cameras, video cameras, pagers, music players, electronic games, calculators, alarm clocks, date books, e-mail delivery systems, voicemail, news tickers, download devices, text messengers.

You can even make telephone calls. Fancy that.

But first you have to figure out how to use the phone.

I got one of these new-fangled phones, and I hope to master it real soon, perhaps by the time it's obsolete. So far, I can make phone calls and hear my voicemail. I managed to set a simple ringtone that doesn't involve a full electronic orchestra and 14 rap stars I've never heard of. I've even snapped a few photographs, mostly of my own finger, though I don't know what to do with the pictures now that I've stored them.

Beyond that, I can't make heads or tails of the danged thing.

The phone came with an instruction manual. It's divided into two 80-page sections, one in English and one in Spanish. I might as well read the Spanish section, for all the good the directions do me.

I run across entries like this: "A phone theme is a group of image and sound files that you can apply to your phone. Most themes include a wallpaper image, a screen image, and ring tone. Your phone may come with some themes, and you can download more."

No matter how many times I read that paragraph (and I'm up to 237 times now), it still makes no sense to me. The only "theme" that comes to mind when I use my phone is the ominous one from the movie "Jaws," as the shark of updated technology swims my direction.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. I'd asked for a simple phone, but my wife couldn't find anybody to sell her one. Apparently, all the phones come with all the features now, whether we like it or not. You can say, "I don't need a video camera," but har-har, you've got one, right there in your phone.

The only reason I submitted to an upgrade at all was so I could get a phone that fit in my pocket. My friends had these folding "flip phones," and I saw the convenience of not having to wear your phone holstered like a revolver.

My old phone didn't fold. It didn't do much of anything. It was just a phone, the size and shape of a stick of butter, only heavier. It came in handy on those occasions when I was out of the house and my kids were scattered all over town and calling me for transportation. Otherwise, it sat on the kitchen counter, waiting for me to remember to take it somewhere.

The new phone's a big improvement, though it, too, spends most of its time on the kitchen counter. When I do remember to take it with me, it fits in my pants pocket, which is more convenient despite the unsightly "thigh bulge." I don't have to wear a belt to pack a phone.

When the new phone starts ringing and vibrating, I twist and shout and dig in my pants until I extract the phone, usually just as the screen says "1 Call Missed." If I push the right combination of buttons, it might tell me who called or whether they left a message.

Or, I'll take a picture of my thumb.

Read this resolution

New Year's resolutions are the triumph of optimism over memory.

We forget how long we stuck to last year's resolutions (average: 3.6 days), and instead look to the future with a positive outlook and the absolute belief that we can change for the better.

Most of us make the same resolutions every year. Eat less, exercise more, earn more, save more, be a nicer person, kick a bad habit, pay better attention to our, you know, whatayacallem, uh, families.

Worthy aspirations all, but the sad fact is that these become our annual resolutions because we fail at them. Again and again.

That's why, this year, I've come up with a new resolution, one that hasn't been tried and abandoned over and over. I'd suggest that Americans everywhere attempt the same. Pick something new and give it a try.

Here's mine: Read the instructions.

I know it doesn't seem like much of a goal. But for me to read the instructions every time requires me to overcome many personal shortcomings:

A) I am a guy.
B) I am a know-it-all.
C) I have no patience.

Why am I this way? I refer you to "A" above.

We guys hate to read instructions, the same way we famously hate to ask directions when we're lost. To do so proves there's something we don't already know.

Better to go through life by dead reckoning than to show any sign of weakness. Better to ignore a problem, in hopes that it will go away on its own, than to consult the instructions and fix it properly.

Here's an example: Recently, our garage door was giving us fits. It has one of those automatic openers, which means we never have to get out in the weather. Punch a button and -- vrr-rrr-rr-rr! -- the door opens or closes, as needed.

One of the great inventions really, right up there with the TV remote control. Until it stops working.

Then, when you try to close it, you get this instead: Punch the button. Vrr-rr. Door stops halfway down. Punch button again. Vrr. Door lowers another foot, then stops. Punch button. Vrr-rr. Door starts going UP. No, no, DOWN, you rotten $*%@! Punch button repeatedly. Vrr. Vrr. Vrr. Door, terribly confused now, moves inches at a time. Up, down, up, down. Finally, catch the door going down and HOLD the button until the door rattles all the way to the ground.

This went on at our house for weeks, until my wife finally got fed up and ordered that I get the garage door fixed. The implication being that if it wasn't fixed when she got home, I would be sleeping out there with the cars.

I went into the house, grumbling, and looked in our household files and found the instructions for the garage door opener. A quick perusal uncovered these facts:

1) This is common problem.
2) It can be easily fixed by two tweaks with a screwdriver.

Five minutes later, the door was working like a new one. All that frustration vanished. And I got to be a hero to my wife. Because I finally bothered to read the instructions.

This solution has arisen repeatedly. The dishwasher. The DVD player. My cell phone. All of these electronic gizmos that drive me crazy can actually enhance my life if I'll learn to operate them by reading the instructions.

So that's my resolution for the new year, and I plan to stick to it. Now I must go. I've got a ton of reading to do in the next 3.6 days.

Stunned by electronics

If your Christmas wish centered on the hottest new electronic gizmo, then you may be what marketers call an "early adopter," the type who must have the latest toy available.

Early adopters drive the world electronics market. They're never satisfied with last year's model. They're willing to spend top dollar rather than waiting for prices to fall. They push manufacturers to make products smaller and faster and ever more complex. They have to be first so they can gloat and strut.

They are, in short, a big pain in the neck.

It's because of these gearheads that your new computer is obsolete before you get it out of its box. It's because of them that cell phones now take pictures and play songs and send e-mail. They killed VCRs in favor of DVD players, vinyl in favor of CDs (then CDs in favor of iPods), stereo speakers in favor of "ear buds" (which sounds like a disease).

Guess it's clear that I am not one of those guys. I resist every new electronic development. I was the last guy to surrender his Betamax. My stereo is older than my teen-agers (and just as troublesome). My computer starts with a crank like a Model T.

I'd still be using land lines and listening to a "hi-fi" if weren't for my wife, who happily buys every new widget that comes along, and my kids, who are thoroughly modern, which means they'd rather talk to their friends by "texting" than in person.

Part of my resistance comes from the fact that I tend to rigidly compartmentalize: cameras take pictures, phones make calls, computers send e-mail, orchestras play music. That makes it difficult for me to fathom one gizmo that does all those functions, and is smaller than a filling in your average molar.

The other reason I resist is that I don't want to spend weeks learning to use these products. Reading manuals (which are always written in techno-speak pidgin English), visiting instructional websites or -- God help us all -- calling technical support all seem like forms of torture to me. Just thinking about learning to take photos with a phone gives me a headache.

So I'm a "late adopter." I'm last in line. I embrace the new technology only after it's been loved by every geek in town. And I use a gadget until it either falls apart or my wife sneaks around and replaces it while I'm asleep. Even then, it'll be years before I learn to use the danged thing, and I only learn as much as I absolutely need to know.

I was drinking beer with a couple of friends one time, and they were comparing cell phones. They had the latest in shiny chrome fold-up phones, each smaller than an Oreo, which did every function you could imagine, short of lubing your car.

When it came my turn, I pulled out my cell phone and thunked it onto the table for their amusement. My phone was nearly as large as a brick. It didn't do anything except make phone calls. It had a belt-clip holster, and looked very much like the "phasers" used on the original "Star Trek."

"My God," one gearhead said, "that's prehistoric!"

"That's right," I said. "And I still don't know how to use the voicemail."

They stared at me as if I were an exhibit at the Luddite museum, with that mixture of awe and head-shaking disbelief that says, "How did people ever live that way?"

I just smiled. And set my phone on "stun."

Plugged

We've become a nation of nerds.

The average American now spends more time using media devices -- TV, radio, iPods, cell phones, computers -- than any other waking activity, according to a new study.

Coast to coast, we're "plugged in" to music and news and text messages and Internet shopping. We still read newspapers and books and magazines, but way too much of our time is devoted to television and our beloved electronic gizmos.

"As a society, we are consumers of media," said researcher Robert Papper of Ball State University's Center for Media Design. "The average person spends about nine hours a day using some type of media."

Papper and his cohorts spent several months shadowing 400 people in Indianapolis and Muncie, IN, where Ball State is located. The researchers recorded information every 15 seconds on what media the subjects were using. All told, they studied 5,000 hours of media use.

Here are some of their findings:

--About 30 percent of the observed waking day was spent with media as the sole activity, and 39 percent was spent with media while involved in some other activity. Only 20.8 percent of the day was spent solely on something called "work."

--In any given hour, no less than 30 percent of those studied were "engaged in some way with television, and in some hours of the day that figure rose to 70 percent."

--About 30 percent of all media time is spent using more than one medium at a time.

--Women do more media multi-tasking than men. Papper told the New York Post that men seek media contact of "short duration and instant gratification" while women are interested in "longer, more thoughtful" interaction. So, it's just like sex. Proof once again that "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Calgon."

--The average American spends four hours a day watching television and three hours a day using a computer.

As a casual observer, I would now like to say: Great Googly-moogly! Nine hours a day? We spend more time "consuming media" than we do sleeping? Are you kidding me?

Four hours a day of TV, and there's still nothing good on? Three hours a day on a computer? Does that count all the time spent waiting on reboots?

Imagine how much crap we're stuffing into our brains every day. No wonder we can't remember where we left our car keys. We're too busy processing the latest update on Britney Spears. And listening to an MP3 song we don't remember downloading. And turning away telemarketers. And waiting for the computer to finish displaying its annoying pop-up ads.

It's All Input All the Time here in America. If we're not on the phone, watching TV and surfing the 'Net, all at once, then we might miss something.

We stay indoors, filtering the wider world through a haze of electronics. When we do leave the house, we block out extraneous sounds by blasting music into our heads via "ear buds." We sort through our e-mail in coffee shops. We check our voice-mail in movie theaters. Apparently, some of us cannot drive without talking on cell phones.

Media consumption is the true "Revenge of the Nerds." The nerds didn't recruit us into their pocket-protector cult. They just designed neato gadgets, and we all willingly joined their ranks.

I'm in the mood for voicemail

Anybody who has voicemail knows you can waste entire minutes every day, sorting through messages, erasing and saving and prioritizing.

Researchers at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (who apparently have a lot of time on their hands) have come up with a software that will prioritize your voicemail on the basis of the callers' moods.

Emotive Alert software measures the volume and pitch of the voice and the ratio of words to pauses in each message, then compares them to eight "acoustical fingerprints" representing different emotional states: happy, sad, excited, calm, urgent, not urgent, formal and informal.

Critics say this technology could have a downside. Telemarketers likely will figure out how to leave messages that score highly for "urgency," so they'll go to the top of the list. Every time you check your voicemail, all the most urgent messages will be "spam." Just like your e-mail is now.

Telemarketing is only the most obvious hitch with emotion-recognition software, however. I can think of lots of other problems:

--How will the software analyze those prerecorded messages used by doctor's offices, where everything is a robotic drone except the time and date of your next appointment, which is filled in by the chirpy receptionist? Will the resulting pauses and tone changes move the call to the bottom of the list? If you've got a voicemail message that begins, "The results of your medical tests are in," that might be a top priority.

--Will heavy breathing count as pauses?

--Does "formal" language make it a priority message? I'd be much less interested in a formal message about a picayune legal matter than in the informal language used by a redneck threatening to "come over to yore house right now and stomp a mudhole in ya."

--"Excited" rarely means a top-flight message. It usually just means the caller himself is excited, often for no good reason. My dog could leave an "excited" message.

--Does a "sad" message automatically become a low priority? Seems to me that news of Aunt Ruth's demise, while sad, might be the most important message of the day.

--Why should "happy" messages go to the top? Are we so shallow that we always want the good news first?

--Isn't such software biased against plodders? Just because there are pauses doesn't mean the message is unimportant. If the caller is distracted while leaving the message, does that push him to the bottom of the list? What if the distraction is, say, a standoff with the police?

--Doesn't this put a lot of pressure on the person leaving the message? It's already hard enough to create a brief message while remembering to leave a phone number, a good time to be reached, etc. If you knew your mood was being measured, too, couldn't the result be panic? And why isn't "panic" on that list of emotions? I would think that would be a top priority.

--For that matter, why stop there? If you're going to sort your messages by emotion, how about "anger?" Angry messages might be the ones you want first (see "mudhole" above). Other emotional states that should be measured: love, hate, rancor, loneliness, fear, envy, arousal, pity, "bad vibes," consternation, guilt, gratitude, euphoria, shyness, delirium, impatience, depression, sympathy, playfulness, boredom, "just friends," drunkenness, exaggeration, stupidity, regret, resentment, menace, misery and "the willies."

Finally, and most importantly, there's this issue: If you get so many voicemail messages every day that you need to prioritize them by mood, then you're getting too many messages. You need to slow down. Take yourself out of circulation. Get an unlisted number.

Too much voicemail can give you the willies.

How do you mend a broken hard drive?

Modern career couples often rely on service-industry personnel -- gardeners, caterers, house cleaners -- to make their lives easier, but what most of us really need are computer technicians.

This is especially true for those of us who work in home offices. We depend on our computers, but we're out here all alone, far from the assistance of any tech services department that could bail us out when things get dicey.

We have a tenuous, love-hate relationship with our computers. We love how easy they make some jobs. We love the instant access to information. We love e-mail and that sense of connectedness to the world. We hate, hate, hate our computers when they go wrong.

Owning a computer is like being married to a felon. They make life exciting at times, but you just know you'll wind up with a broken heart.

They lie to you. ("This download will take 12 minutes . . . 47 minutes … 2 hours, 36 minutes . . . 14 days.") They cheat on you (adware, spyware) and try to dip into your money (spam). They bring home the occasional virus. When you need them most, they lock themselves up and throw away the key.

We try to salvage the relationship. We lose many man-hours (not to mention a lot of hair) attempting to repair our own computers.

We don't really understand how these machines work, so we're afraid to go poking too deeply into their twisted bowels. Our answer to every glitch is to reboot and pray.

When that doesn't work, we inch along through System Restore and various other lifesaving programs, only to end up back where we started -- with all our important data frozen inside a block of plastic on our desks.

When all else fails, we call a toll-free number, where we reach a technician who directs us through the very same steps we just tried. Since this technician can't actually see our computers, s/he is simply running through corporate protocols -- educated guesses about what might be wrong. In the end, all the customer gets out of this interaction is a bill.

After going through this rigmarole a time or two, home computer users recognize we're simply lucky whenever our computers function properly, and we don't want to do anything to disturb that.

We treat them so gently, you'd think they were teetering on the corners of our desks, ready to commit suicide. We don't want to do anything that might push them over the edge. We don't want to download anything, ever. We don't even want to perform routine maintenance for fear something will go wrong and we'll end up in that most dreaded place of all -- The Frozen Blue Screen of Death.

Since we clearly can't manage our computers ourselves, what we home-office workers need is someone who's always on standby to fix or maintain them -- a Household Nerd (trademark registration pending). When a computer acts up, we could call in the nerd, who would correct the problem while we go out to a relaxing three-martini lunch.

We could designate a spare bedroom for the nerd -- sort of like a maid's quarters -- and arrange for his care and feeding. Pay him a regular allowance. Provide him with his own computer to keep him busy between repairs.

It would be exactly like having a teen-ager in the house. But unlike the typical smart-aleck teen, the Household Nerd really would have the skills to remedy computer woes.

And mend our broken hearts.


(Editor's note: Since I originally published this column, services like Geek Squad and Nerds on Call have become commonplace. I am a regular client. Sigh.)

Hands-free dialing

I was quietly reading recently when I noticed an eerie, prolonged whine.

The muffled scream seemed to come from nearby, but I couldn't place it. I looked around the room, trying to find an electronic device that might've gone kerflooey, but saw nothing amiss. I got up to look out the window, and the noise stopped. Sat back down, and it started up again.

Through shrewd detective work, it was only a matter of minutes before I determined the infernal whine was coming from my own pants.

I was sitting on my cell phone.

The chair was a little narrow for my ever-widening posterior and my phone was pressed tight against the arm. The phone was shrieking in agony. Mystery solved.

Such puzzlements have become commonplace in our high-tech age. With everybody packing a phone, we all carry the potential for confusion.

An example: I gave a ride to a friend who was in town for a business convention. I pulled up outside his hotel and he climbed into my van and the ensuing conversation went like this:

Me: "Hi! Good to see you!"

Him: "What's that supposed to mean?"

Me: "What? I said, it's good to--"

Him: "Look, that's not our fault! The bank made the mistake!"

Me (uneasy): "Have you lost your--"

Him: "I don't see why this should cost me money, when it--"

Then I spotted the wire dangling from his ear. My friend was on the phone, using one of those hands-free gizmos you see everywhere now. I hadn't noticed right away because it was hooked to the ear on the far side of his head. Fortunately, I realized what was occurring before I could push him out of the van and screech away.

Another example: About once a month, I get a call from my wife's purse. The phone will ring and I'll answer and there'll be no one there. But I can hear background noises and the clanking of keys and other pocketbook detritus, and I'll recognize that something in her purse has pressed the "speed dial" for "Home." Which makes me wonder how often she calls 911 by mistake.

This is why, when learning to use your cell phone, the first item you should read in the owner's manual is how to "lock" the keypad. I failed to do this when I was a neophyte phone user, and it took several months to cancel those calls my car's seat belt placed to Mozambique.

In fact, you should read your entire owner's manual. Most of us think we automatically know all the ins and outs of phone use, and we blithely start punching buttons without any instruction. This can lead to embarrassing situations.

On a jet recently, when it came time for passengers to turn off all electronic equipment, one woman was stumped. She confessed (loudly) that she had NEVER TURNED OFF HER PHONE BEFORE and didn't know how. She was with three giggling friends and none of them could figure it out, either.

(Fair disclosure: It appeared that these women had been drinking.)

Just as I was saying "Don't look at me," a businessman across the aisle snatched up the phone and turned it off. And we were allowed to take flight.

So listen up, friends. Avoid embarrassment. Learn to use your cell phones properly. Lock the keypads. And don't sit on them.

Because it's a sure bet your long-distance calling plan doesn't cover Mozambique.

Danger, we'll robot soon!

Recent scientific breakthroughs have brought us closer to the day when we can each own a smart-alecky mechanical maid like the one on the "Jetsons."

Several companies have demonstrated new robots lately, ranging from Honda's "Asimo" humanoid to little droids that ferry medications through hospital corridors. Each new model raises the question: When, oh when, will we have our very own domestic robots to cook our food and wash our socks?

It may be a while. Researchers say they've still got a few kinks to iron out, such as giving robots proper vision and a refined sense of touch. (There's a fine line between a friendly handshake and a bone-crushing claw.)

We aging Baby Boomers are expected to once again drive the market. As we get older, we'll need "carebots" to give us medical attention and household 'bots to clean up our spills, or so the experts predict.

(Some of us are thinking: That's why we had children. To clean up after us when we're senile. But hahaha on that. The little ingrates will be busy pursuing their own lives, leaving us desperately trying to scrape together enough pennies to pay for our Depends.)

Many of us already are dependent on machines. Laptops, Palm Pilots and cell phones don't just make modern life possible. In many ways, they run our hectic lives. If you don't believe it, think back to the last time your computer crashed. How was your mood the rest of that day?

Do we really need walking, talking, artificially intelligent machines in our lives, simply to do little chores? Do we need more machines managing our lives? Isn't this situation fraught with peril?

(Example: Anyone who has seen the Will Smith action movie, "I, Robot," can tell you that advances in robotics pose the very real danger of producing greater numbers of mediocre action movies.)

But the robots are coming, whether we're ready or not.

Already, you can pay a mere $200 for a robotic vacuum cleaner called Roomba. The machine -- which looks like a bathroom scale on wheels -- will run around your home, bumping blindly into walls and furniture, vacuuming every square inch of carpet, until it is, in an unfortunate misunderstanding, killed by your dog.

Also available are robot lawn mowers which operate much the same way. You input the parameters of your lawn, and the machine takes off on its own, mowing like crazy. We all know how fallible such human programming can be:

"Look out, it's headed for the swimming pool!" Splash.

Robotics experts are looking for new market niches, and I'd like to suggest a robotic coffee cup that will follow me from room to room. Currently, I misplace my coffee cup an estimated 23 times per day. I thought about attaching it to my dog, since he follows me from room to room anyway, but he tends to drop to a sleeping posture without warning, which could result in undue spillage. I need a coffee cup delivery robot. Or, cut out the cup altogether and design a coffee urn that will follow me and squirt java directly into my mouth. That's what I'd call a "carebot."

Another marketing suggestion for us machine-dependent Baby Boomers: Design a robot whose sole responsibility is finding the TV remote.

We'd pay big money for that.

Reader feeder

Thanks to my wife and something called FeedBurner, you can now subscribe to the Home Front blog by e-mail or by a "reader." Beats me. Click on the orange thingies at top left and follow the directions.

Good luck,

Steve