I discovered yesterday that the New York Times has a Twitter feed. (What are those supposed to be called? Feed? Tweet? Twit?) Every so often it's updated with a top headline of some form or another. This is a good thing, seeing Old Media embrace New Technology - without placing ads in a 160-character message. They even use TinyURL to link to the story.

Twitter is automatically set to send updates to my phone. I’m sure I’ll consider this a good and helpful things when I have friends on the service. Yesterday, the thought of having NYTimes news sent to my phone automatically sounded like a great idea. This could be awesome for cocktail chatter over a glass of pinot noir at Ocean Drive, or some other delusional after-hours fantasy.

And it worked out for a while. Then I went to the Ben Gibbard show at Town Hall NYC. Pure awesomeness, by the way. To begin the encore, Gibbard covered All Apologies on the piano and ended by playing "a cover of a song I wrote" (Such Great Heights, as in the Iron & Wine version). During the show, my pocket would vibrate every 25 minutes or so, annoying the hell out of me as I didn’t want to interrupt the atmosphere with the bright screen.

Of course, I could have just turned it off. That would probably have been smart. My addiction to being connected at all times is something I’ll have to cover later.