Why I Chose... an iPhone

My first iPhone was an iPhone 3GS, which I'd bought at the Dadeland Mall Apple Store in the late summer of 2009 after work.

It was a somewhat impulsive purchase, my having gone through a few phones (the one I'd liked most being the Trēo 800w, RIP) and not liking how the application ecosystem just wasn't being friendly to anything but an iPhone. I was a heavy Yahoo! user, and they were really hyping and promoting their iPhone(-exclusive) app; I wanted it.

So, I went and got it, porting my phone number over to it and a very helpful, nerdish, attractive guy helped me to activate it. This was back when one had to go to a store to do so or it would take forever. Another reason I'd wanted to go that route was Sprint, at the time, as considering Wimax as their 4G upgrade and everyone else was going LTE. AT&T, as well, was the only game in town for the iPhone, so more incentive.

My boss, especially, was envious for weeks at my phone. He'd kept saying he wanted an iPhone, but ended up getting a Samsung Instinct and porting it to Metro PCS like one of my other co-workers.

I still have AT&T and their grandfathered-in unlimited data package.

I'd adored my 3GS, which I'd called Mars. When I moved to Georgia, I remember watching the end-of-days movie 2012 on it, streaming it via an Israeli video aggregation site (and, I think, having a multi-ten gigabyte data usage metric that month, too).

In 2011, I got my 4S, ordering it the same day they were having online sales. I'd gotten it by Fed-Ex several weeks later, and that became my favorite. Even though I love my 6 Plus now, I think I loved most that the 4S had the solidity and heft of my Trēo 800w. I think I'd enjoyed it most with iOS 6, with its inbuilt Twitter and Facebook widgets on the notifications slider.

And now I have an iPhone 6 Plus, which I've enjoyed for almost three years now.

We'll see what comes next.

Kris' Vocabulary and Style

Sometimes people have called me out on it, but there seem to be certain words I use relatively frequently. These aren't words one would use all the time, but I do notice them when I do. Partly because people have brought them to my attention.

vacillate /ˈvæ.sə.leɪt/, /ˈvæ.sɪ.leɪt/

1. (intransitive) To sway unsteadily from one side to the other; oscillate. 
2. (intransitive) To swing indecisively from one course of action or opinion to another. 

I'd used this just today in an e-mail to one of my co-workers, and it was then I'd decided this would be today's blog topic.


simultaneously (UK): /ˌsɪməlˈteɪnɪəsli/; (US) /ˌsaɪməlˈteɪnɪəsli/

This is the one on which people usually remark, partly because I've grown up -- and continue to -- pronouncing/pronounce it the UK way rather than the US/American way.

Other words people tend to notice because I don't sound quite American saying them:

• process  /ˈpɹoʊ̯.sɛs/ as if I were Canadian;
• Internet (and pretty much a lot of words with "nt" between vowels): I pronounce the "t", so it's  /ˈɪntɚˌnɛt/ rather than /ˈɪɾ̃ɚˌnɛt/.

iteration /ɪɾəɹˈeɪʃən/

1. Recital or performance a second time; repetition.
2. A variation or version.
3. (computing) The use of repetition in a computer program, especially in the form of a loop.
4. (computing) A single repetition of the code within such a repetitive process.

Especially the second definition.

Well, I suppose those are the only few that really come to mind right now.

My pronunciation is pretty all over the place, generally. It happens in my Spanish, too.

As far as my style, I've unfortunately embraced the lots-of-thoughts-in-a-short-stream method. My French teacher would comment frequently that I try to say too much too quickly. I use parenthetical asides a lot in even semi-professional writing. I also use hyphenate thought streams (like in my first sentence) quite a bit.

I tend to be passive voice-averse; this is my English teachers' faults. I remember reading an article about passive voice structures fairly recently and have been even more conscious about it. It may be partly because one of my co-workers is a serial passive voice user in writing and speech; it annoys me a little because I come across her writings every day (but it's just a personal choice of mine that I try to avoid passive voice).

I rarely have short sentences, and connect my clauses fairly frequently in the most grammatical ways I can. It may be another symptom of my expressing multiple thoughts in a single stream. Equally symptomatic, it seems, is my trying to use a word in every iteration (there I go again).

I suppose that's just another part of being me, exploring what it is to be human even though I really dislike being human a good deal of the time.