Trust

[simont]

When I was a child, I remember that I used to have a peculiar problem whenever I replaced my watch. For days or weeks after strapping the new one on to my wrist, I'd wonder what the time was, look at my watch … and then feel unsatisfied, as if somehow I still didn't actually know what the time was in spite of having just read it off. I'd feel a strong urge to go and find another clock and look at that. It's as if I didn't trust the new watch.

I suppose it's possible that this was my subconscious reminding me of the practical consideration that I didn't yet have a feel for how accurate the new watch was, but that seems far-fetched to me. I think it was just a nonspecific feeling of ‘this thing is newfangled, it has to prove itself’.

I haven't replaced my watch in well over a decade, so until today I had no idea whether I would still have this odd feeling. But just now …

I've recently acquired an iPad, and also I've finally got round to setting up wireless networking at home to use it with. So today I thought I'd do my morning spod – check email, LJ, news, etc – before getting out of bed. (Just to prove I could, and also because it's warmer.)

So I did that; but as soon as I got up, I felt a strong visceral urge to make for the nearest ‘real’ computer and reassure myself that there weren't any urgent emails waiting for me. But I just looked! Arrgh!

(This is even less rational than the one about the watch. A new watch might have turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate compared to the old one, but I check my email over SSH, which is really, really not going to present me with wrong answers depending on where I connect from. If it gives me any recognisable answer at all, it'll be the right one.)

Comments

[aiwendel.livejournal.com]

re checking email/lj etc on different devices. I have that urge too. I think it's something very primaeval: You look for nuts under a nut tree and find a nut, then you arrive at a different nut tree, time to look for another nut. There are studies on birds and searching and, quite sensibly, once they've found food in one place they'll go and look in another place for more. Though after enough time has elapsed they will look in the first place again (if that's had success there).

So I think the wanting to check for more goodies on a different device is a historic foraging thing that's wired into us... Just a bit inappropriate....

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:) Yeah, I agree it's perhaps natural, but still weird :)

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

I have another candidate explanation, which would certainly be the right one if it were me rather than you: You've got into the habit of going and checking your email (on a "real" computer) when you get up, and you felt the urge to do that because it's a habit. The idea that it might be because the iPad didn't correctly report your email situation was a rationalization rather than the real motivation.

On the other hand, that historical odd feeling of mistrust of new things isn't something I have. So while I'm sure the explanation above would be right if it were me, it probably isn't for you :-).

[gerald_duck]

Unrelatedly, SSH from an iPad sounds like an exquisitely masochistic way to read e-mail.

Please excuse me — I just have to send an SMS from my piano.

[simont]

It's perfectly all right for reading email. It's true that I wouldn't want to send one that way that's more than a sentence long, but that applies to any use of the iPad keyboard, not SSH in particular.

[gerald_duck]

What do you do? Use the on-screen keyboard to send keystrokes through to your mail client? I assume you've at least chosen a mail client that operates by hitting individual keys, not case-sensitive stuff, chording or the like?

If I were using an iPad to read e-mail, I suspect I'd be setting up an IMAP server pronto!

[simont]

What do you do? Use the on-screen keyboard to send keystrokes through to your mail client?

Yes. Works perfectly well, even when the keystokes are Ctrl-this or M-that – the iSSH extended keyboard is not excessively unpleasant even for those.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Maybe you missed your old watch?