Summer in Boston. It drags and drags and drags its heels, denying you even the long-awaited extra hours of sunshine, and then after all that pussyfooting one day it up and slaps you with what feels like a warm towel to the face.

Today was one of those afternoons I regret feeling in such a hurry–to the gym, then the pharmacy, then home with some fresh books, so I can have food at a reasonable time. It would have been a glorious, if sweaty, commute by bicycle, had that been an option. A good afternoon to be outdoors. At the office, our air conditioning was on the fritz (half the building reported being too warm, the other was too cold), but I didn’t notice immediately like most of the office staff, probably because we’re pretty conservative with the climate controls at home.

Books! Books. I spent the last week detoxing from The Dragon Reborn, which is number 3 of 11 in the Wheel of Time series. The first two weren’t suspenseful all the way through, but that one was. I wanted to pause long enough to think about the hours I was giving to reading Jordan; and the thing is, while I’m pretty sure I could identify enough conventionally productive activities to fill those hours, I’m too lazy to do them. You could take this as me needing a kick in my lazy if well-toned bum, or, given that I haven’t had the funds or the inspiration to plan a summer vacation like everybody else in the office, you could call it sloth that I’ve earned.

At any rate, the detox failed to get it out of my head. Consequences for my sleep schedule aside, this may be for the best. Series with large numbers of important characters are a challenge for me, and WoT is notorious in that regard. Jordan’s metaphor of the wheel and the weave isn’t just a metaphysical characterization of his universe, it’s the way Jordan wrote. Little details come back in big ways.

Just the same, I grabbed Pynchon’s V., wondering if alternating books might help me pace myself. It may prove to have been a bad pairing–Pynchon’s supposed to be pretty thick in his own way–time will tell. I was going to try to work through them proportionally, which would mean about 3/4 as many pages at a time of V.

I keep feel like I’ve been doing something (okay, several things) wrong and something helped crystallize that today. I arrived at the office, pulled my bag out of the car and found my boss parked next to me, seeming to have an animated conversation with his car.

Oh, I knew Dan hadn’t lost his marbles. Dan’s a gadget freak; he buys cars that support his iPhone addiction. The Apple hardware sets him notably apart from most of my geek friends, who tend to carry G1s, but in spirit it’s all the same. He’d phoned in to a morning teleconference with the aid of some Bluetooth middleware and was hesitating to disconnect from its superior audio system to walk inside.

The connection didn’t come to me until the afternoon. I was driving home, and doing something I find myself doing a lot lately: I was having an internal monologue I really did not want wasted. Deep thoughts tend to come to me then, when I’m slowly unraveling—my day at the office concluded and my meds wearing off—and making the difficult switch between contexts. That cool and potentially useful Java or JS component I was trying to think out, when it came time to leave, refuses to quietly yield to the Robert Jordan book I’m reading at home, its startlingly sympathetic portrait of the outlaw Logain, and the general awesomeness of a fantasy author who can pull off successive allusions to such diverse material as Lord of the Rings and chaos theory. Not to mention any number of other topical concerns, the inevitable forking off of other lines of technical brainstorming, etc.

It’s a wonder I get anything out onto paper or into the blog like this. I used to come home and do more web programming as a hobby; now, with a working VPN and the ability to carry on from home, I’m doing less work of either sort. I was thinking that, to rally myself to do more with the extra energy I keep claiming to have from my workouts, I might need to institute a once-monthly work weekend, with some kind of reward system to goad myself into some useful bursts of productivity. Gah. Too much to say.

So the thing is, I normally end up losing all the random abstract thoughts, and the fewer good concrete ones, that should be forming the basis for more posts and more freelance technical work. This doesn’t have to happen.

We live in the age of magical pocket-sized wonderment. I’ve been fretting over the fact that I can only post to Twitter, or update my IM status, upon reaching a destination with Wi-Fi, always long after the thought to do so has come; but I’ve been thinking too small.

I do need to get me a magic phone. But not for Twitter, much as it amuses me. Not even for the out-of-sight-out-of-mind benefit of intelligent feed-generating apps that let your friends know when you’re staying in their city on a trip. No, I need it so I can stop this confounded inner-blogging that ends up draining off into /dev/null.

I haven’t investigated for app availability and the quality of hardware support, but I’m pretty sure this is a model use case for either the iPhone or the T-Mobile G1. In fact I spent part of the trip home thinking about ways you could use speech processing in concert with mobile apps to make the whole process more straightforward. Straightforward isn’t really the right word, but it would definitely make it more effective. I could easily find myself geeking out over a custom hardware / software setup if I’m not careful–consensus seems to be that even the best smart phones are stingy with processing power, and liable to drain their batteries if pushed too hard. Audio processing would be a task more suited to a stationary machine or dedicated DSP… okay, so uploading to the laptop at home is a more appropriate solution, but it isn’t half as sexy

Yak yak yak.