A star political blogger for Grist.org, David Roberts spent so much time posting and Tweeting and staring at screens that he almost went nuts. So he pulled the plug for a year, restarting his relationship with technology and actively seeking health, balance, and adventure in the real world. What he learned just might save you from meltdown.
David Roberts
i truly appreciate about you. you re much more courageous than i am. how do you communicate without a phone for the last six years? six years. pretty much after we moved here. it started by accident. it wasn t a plan. i had a phone from the government, i couldn t find that exact make when i came here. so i just bumbled around and tried various things and then i got fed up with it. i realized after a week of not having a phone, not by planning it, it happened to be a week, i thought, that was actually really great. give me time to think. then i gave it up for a few months and then it became a conscious decision. i have a laptop. but the part about that, you can connect when you want to. martha: what you do when you re driving somewhere and you re completely lost and you don t have google maps and there is no such thing as pay phones anymore? it s not even easy to find a paper map? i do a lot of research. i look it up before i go. like we used to do. i literally draw pictures. i dr
he could have gotten it very quickly if he took path i m about to team of it is long mostly dirt roads. it is very dark and he could have gotten away with it if no police were present. i m going to show you how easy it is. he was seen jogging. i ll show you how long it would take and how easy it would be to get into canada. cut in through the farm field saves time. all you need is an electronic map and a paper map and anyone can figure out how to do it. i ve now walked a bit over a mile in about 17 minutes. the course we ve charted is 4.2 miles, longer than the two miles through wilderness but this will be much easier to get into canada as you ll soon see. i have less than half a mile to go to the quebec border.
cut in through the farm field saves time. all you need is an electronic map and a paper map and anyone can figure out how to do it. i ve now walked a bit over a mile in about 17 minutes. the course we ve charted is 4.2 miles, longer than the two miles through wilderness but this will be much easier to get into canada as you ll soon see. i have less than half a mile to go to the quebec border. i ve been going about 50 minutes. the 4.2 mile walk/jog is over. this is the international border between the united states and canada.
#seriously in some pilots had to return to the airport to download the app. obviously the ipad is very light. reporter: american was an early adopter of tablets in the cockpit. pilots able to leave behind those 40 pound cases filled with paper maps. the ipad use has exploded in the past four years. map company estimates that 10,000 ipads are in jets and there have been few problems. i m astounded it s been as smooth as it has been. this is one of the first times i ve heard this sort of thing happening. reporter: turns out american airlines has a unique version of the app and an automatic update inserted two maps of the same airport which made the app crash. those two maps are of reagan in washington so any american pilot flying into this airport will have to use the backup system, a paper map till their ipad app is updated in about ten days. david kerley, reagan washington airport.