my education

One thing I learned, while I was without Internet service, was that it's hard as hell to blog from my Droid X phone.

For the uninitiated: smart phones have pop-up keypads that appear on the screen when you tap your fingertip inside a "field," i.e., a blank space in which you're going to insert alphanumeric text. If the field is a large one-- say, for email-- then you can tap the field again to bring up a tiny, arrow-shaped cursor guide that you can drag with your fingertip in order to drag the cursor to the proper spot for text insertion/deletion. Normally, the cursor and the cursor guide are glued together: wherever the guide goes, the cursor will follow.

Such is not the case when you're blogging on a Droid X.

I was just about ready to smash my phone to bits because of the misbehaving cursor. I had Blogger's mobile version up on my Droid, and was blogging away when I noticed one or two typos. I tapped the spot in the text where the typos were... and the entire screen zinged to the left like a dodgeball player, leaving only a blank white space and the cursor guide. Where did the text and cursor go?

With a bit of fingertip finesse, I was able to coax the cursor and cursor guide onto the screen at the same time, but was unable, for whatever reason, to get the cursor to ride atop the guide, the way it normally does on Twitter or Google or text messaging or regular email. There must be some sort of fundamental incompatibility between Droid's OS and Blogger's mobile software. The whole affair felt like trying to grab a piece of living sushi with a pair of chopsticks: the sushi dodges left, dodges right, and never fucking sits still.

I'm one of those people who fume when they can't move straight from Point A to Point B in an expeditious manner. Whether we're talking about hi-tech smart phones or about a lo-tech two-by-four that doesn't want to be nailed smoothly into place, if reality fails to conform to my expectations, I get frustrated.

But I've learned a valuable lesson from all this: from now on, I'll be blogging via my Gmail app. The cursor and guide behave normally on that screen.


_