Looking back on it now, the first time I truly felt the need for a note-taking app was when I started researching note-taking apps. I was just looking for a simple tool to save ideas about upcoming articles or jot down an occasional to-do list.

Stop. Do not send me your pick for best note-taking app.

I can’t take any more options. I’ve already spent weeks comparing sets of features I’m pretty sure I’ll never need. I tried out at least fifteen applications on my desktop, phone and on the web. I was completely overwhelmed by choices. The process began to take over my life. I spent hours in front of my laptop, I’d demo various features for my wife and kids, and my quest quickly became the only topic I could focus on when interacting with friends.

They say failure is not an option. But everything else is.

Before long, I was sucked from the relatively simple playing field of note-taking apps into the deep and horrible vortex of productivity tools. There are nearly two thousand personal productivity apps for the iPhone alone. I found myself digging deeper into my research, comparing features, downloading free trials, and even inventing new behaviors to match the feature sets of the tools I encountered.

I didn’t even have a personal productivity problem. But I do now.

These options are everywhere. Amazon just launched a Cloud Drive for storing and streaming music. Please, not another potential way for me to interact with my music. I spend so much time trying to decide where to download, store and stream my music collection that I don’t have any time left to listen to it. I’d be better off hiring a cover band to follow me around and take requests.

A few years ago, the only lesson I had to learn about music storage was to keep my records away from the back of a car on a hot day.

Last week, Firefox came out with a newer, faster, better browser. Oh god no. After months of switching back and forth among browsers I had finally settled on Chrome. And now the speed and new features offered by Firefox have ripped open that wound.

Goodbye browsing. Hello deciding.

I have been reading The New York Times for decades. But now I have to figure out the new paywall. I can access a certain number of articles for free, I can pay for more, or I can get the Sunday paper and be given free access, or maybe I should subscribe to the Kindle edition and then download the apps for my other devices. Come on. Who has time for the articles anymore? Let’s make this simple. How about if I just give you my wallet, my checking account number, my social security number and my first born child and you just let me sit down and read?

Remember when there was a really simple answer to the question, “Do you want to watch a movie?”

Yes, I want to watch a movie. I just can’t decide whether to watch it via Netflix, AppleTV, Pay-Per-View, Amazon, Blu-ray, Boxee, Vudu, Roku, or whether I should watch it on my iPhone, my iPad, my laptop, my desktop or my TV. If I want, I can even download the movie to my iPhone and then stream it to my AppleTV. I was confused enough when I had to choose between Betamax and VHS. What’s next, a hundred and eleven flavors of popcorn?

Want to read a book? Just decide if you want it in hardcover, paperback, or digital format, and if digital, which device, which app, which font size and which background. It’s that simple. Within a few hours, you’ll be happily reading.

Need a new television set? No problem, I can recommend an excellent six-week course on which factors and features to consider. The only problem is that almost all of them will be obsolete by the time you complete the course.

What happened to the old television learning curve when the most complex factors had to do with rabbit ear positioning?

Technology has inundated us with great tools and given us access to heaps of information. But it’s also burying us under an avalanche of options.

For certain products, I can take the easy way out. My friend Isaac is one of those rare people who loves doing the research. If I need a new camera, I just call him. But even then, it’s a challenge to get a simple answer without being confronted with a list of possible features.

Isaac:  One key factor is the number of megapixels.

Me:  Just tell me which camera to buy.

Isaac:  Is battery life or video quality more critical?

Me:  Stop. Which one?

Isaac:  I tend to focus on white balance, iso and lens brightness.

Me:  I’ll give you ten grand if you just hand me a camera and never mention white balance again.

Of course, picking a camera is easy compared to choosing a way to share your photos. My parents always complain that I never let them see photos of their grandchildren. Believe me, I want to. I just can’t decide how.

I hate these choices and I hate doing the research. I’m not even sure how I became an early adopter in the first place. This isn’t me. In other parts of my life I never consider the options and I never change. I’ve poured the same salad dressing and wiped my counter with the same paper towels for more than twenty years.

When it comes to technology, I’m lucky if I can be satisfied with the same tool for twenty minutes.

Maybe what I really need to do is come up with a perfect app that enables people to quickly make decisions about all of their other apps. I should write that idea down somewhere.

Anyone have a pencil?

It seems like a great time to be a bully. When I was a kid, even the most productive bullies could only manage a handful of victims at a time. What used to take a lot of effort can now be handled with a couple thumbs and some wifi. A hateful rumor can spread a lot faster on Facebook than it could on the school bathroom wall.

And while it used to require a certain set of characteristics to thrive as a bully, the internet makes it simple for almost anyone to graduate from cowering weakling to kicking virtual sand in the face of friends and strangers in no time. If you’ve spent more than five minutes reading Internet comments, you know that being a cyberbully requires about the same level of exertion and fortitude as screaming obscenities at other drivers while you cruise down the freeway with your windows rolled up.

And the bullies have figured this out. Cyberbullying has become so prevalent that several states are considering the enactment of laws targeting its perpetrators. The federal government even has a site dedicated to the troubling trend.

The connection between bully and target is so seamless that hate speech can often spread more rapidly than its originator ever intended. One assumes that’s the case with UCLA student Alexandra Wallace, who recorded a three-minute rant against Asian students, in particular those who use cell phones in her school library. In the video, which she posted on YouTube, Wallace shared her version of the Asian language (including several ching chongs and ling longs), urged Asians who come to UCLA to first adopt “American manners,” and for good measure even managed to work in a reference to the tsunami in Japan.

The video went viral. Its contents and the reaction it generated made it all the way to the pages of the New York Times. In a previous era, it would have taken Alexandra Wallace several lifetimes to even encounter as many Asian students as she managed to offend in three minutes.

I’m sure Wallace regrets posting that YouTube video — and will likely continue to suffer the repercussions thanks to the web’s reach and permanence. But the ease with which it was produced and the pace at which it went viral is another indicator of just how easy it is to spread hate in the Internet age.

Tomorrow’s kids — in addition to facing the usual natural disasters that come with adolescence — will be confronted with the multichannel, always-on, upsettingly viral slings and arrows of bullies. Although Alexandra Wallace is a far cry from the worst of bullies, the whole incident left me feeling depressed about the future.

But then I saw Jimmy Wong.

Jimmy Wong reminded me that the tools that can be deployed by the so-called cyberbullies are also freely available to those they harass. Wong, a 24 year-old singer, and up-and-coming YouTube sensation, wrote and recorded The Asians in the Library Song in response to Alexandra Wallace’s video. Here’s part of the chorus.

I pick up my phone and sing…
Ching Chong, it means I love you
Ling Long, I really want you
Ting Tong, I don’t actually know what that means

The lyrics are funny and good-spirited, and effectively turn the tables on the original rant. And the song itself has a catchy hook, has been viewed about 800,000 times, and is now for sale on iTunes.

When I was a kid, here’s one thing I never thought of saying to a bully who was about to pummel me:

“Hey, don’t mess with me. I’ve got a quirky sense of humor, a great singing voice, and I know how to code!”

But Jimmy Wong and many others are proving those types of creative skills could be a decent way to put up a defense.

Modern victims of bullying have a much broader arsenal of tools with which to defend themselves. I’m reminded of those old match box covers that featured a Charles Atlas advertisement with the line:

“Tired of having sand kicked in your face?”

Back then, the ad was for a muscle building program. A Jimmy Wong era version of that ad could read: “Tired of having sand kicked in your face? Get a video phone, take singing lessons, practice Photoshop, and learn to develop snappy retorts that are shorter than 140 characters.”

None of this is intended to suggest a future free of bullying or a panacea that helps all the little guys win in the end. But in some ways, the playing field has been leveled. It’s not just about being physically tougher or being the type of person who thrives on conflict. Sometimes it’s about being smarter, funnier or more creative. And — Ching Chong — I really love that.

Maybe it’s still a decent time to be a bully. But it’s an even better time to be Jimmy Wong.

You might be one of those people who just can’t get enough of this Charlie Sheen story, following him from television to TMZ to Twitter. And who could blame you? The story has all the elements that we love: Celebrities, bad TV, drugs, sex, and self-destruction (generously re-branded as winning).

On the other hand, you might know just enough about Sheen to be enraged that such a pathetic and meaningless story dominates a significant portion of our national discourse in the media and across social networks.

It doesn’t really matter where your opinion falls along the Sheen story continuum. Either way, you’re part of the Sheen Meme, and I thank you for that.

The other day when I was walking out of my local grocery store, one of the guys in the meat department stopped me so he could make a joke about Charlie Sheen. Some of the other folks within earshot laughed while others quietly shook their heads. But everyone on both sides of the refrigerated case got the reference. And that doesn’t happen much.

The Charlie Sheen story fills a vacuum. We used to have fewer television channels and fewer sources of information flooding our screens. It was much more likely that we’d have a common topic to discuss when we gathered around our modern version of the giant campfire.

Today, we’re all wearing headphones, sitting in front of screens. There are infinite channels and thousands of stories flowing in and out of our streams. Even though we are more virtually connected than ever, the content we ingest is wildly varied. We’re each alone in front of our own small, private campfires.

So when one of those campfires blows up into an inferno, we all gather around it faster than the guests at Sober Valley Lodge would dive towards two and a half lines of unattended cocaine.

Nearly all of the major news outlets have provided exhaustive coverage of Sheen’s rants and rambles. Almost everyone I follow on Twitter has had a take or two (or ten) on the topic. Everyone knew that writers everywhere from The Daily Show to Saturday Night Live would open their shows with bits devoted to Sheen. They wait for these moments when a story emerges as a common point of reference. Even other celebrities can’t resist making a joke or coming to Sheen’s defense.

New York Times reporter Nick Kristof, who of late has been providing illuminating coverage from the Middle East, recently lamented the coverage of the Charlie Sheen story: “If there’s a symbol of everything wrong with television news, it’s the focus on Charlie Sheen … It all makes me embarrassed for the news media.”

ABC dedicated a 20/20 interview slot to Charlie Sheen. Nine million people tuned in. We’re all a little embarrassed. But we’re all here around this campfire. And the folks who edit the news need to remain relevant, so they’re more likely to come with lighter fluid than a fire extinguisher.

Sure, we should be gathered around the Libya fire or the Wisconsin union fire or the budget debate fire. But we’re not. This story is not about the quality of the content. It’s about the merits of regaining a sense of community, even if the campfire around which we’re gathered happens to be burning a combination of horrendous television scripts, illegal drugs and our own better judgment.

You are looking at your screen, and I am looking at mine. Half the time, that’s true even when we’re standing right next to each other. Ironically, one our few remaining areas of commonality are the sites and devices we use. That’s why it’s such a huge news story when Steve Jobs announces a new device or Mark Zuckerberg realigns a few pixels in our Facebook stream. That’s why my mom once called me to discuss Steve Jobs’ reaction to the iPhone antenna problem. The fact that we’re all staring at separate screens is one of the last things we have in common.

It’s not that memes are rare. They emerge all the time. Earlier this week, my small corner of the internet erupted with responses to a change Twitter made to its iPhone app. The new feature, called the Quick Bar, makes Twitter’s trending topics of the moment more visible to users of the app. Those offended by the placement of the Quick Bar re-branded the feature as the “Dickbar” (named, in part, after Twitter CEO Dick Costello). The discussion gained so much steam that Twitter employees actually built a makeshift Dickbar in their San Francisco Headquarters.

That turn of events made for a nice communal event for folks who spend their lives working in the internet industry. But if I brought it up at my grocery store, I can’t imagine that anyone on either side the meat display case would get the reference. The Twitter Quick Bar story, like hundreds of others that likely spread during the same period, was an inside joke.

Charlie Sheen is the inside joke everyone gets.

You can nod your head in agreement. Or you can complain about yet another Charlie Sheen story. Either way, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Journalist Nir Rosen managed to do the near-impossible. He published some tweets offensive enough to rise above the din of the Internet’s general state of offensiveness and lost his fellowship at NYU.

Rosen’s offending tweets were in response to the reports that CBS’ Lara Logan had been sexually assualted near Tahrir Square on the day Hosni Mubarak stepped down. Here is a sampling of his handiwork.

“Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson [Cooper]. Where was her buddy McCrystal.”

“Yes yes its wrong what happened to her. Of course. I don’t support that. But, it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too.”

“Look, she was probably groped like thousands of other women, which is still wrong, but if it was worse than I’m sorry.”

During an interview with Anderson Cooper, Rosen apologized for his remarks and explained that he didn’t realize that Logan’s assault had been sexual in nature at the time of his first tweet. He stood by this assertion even though his tweet included a link to a short statement from CBS News that clearly included that detail.

Anderson Cooper suggested that Rosen was describing an unbelievable scenario. How could he link to an article without knowing the full contents of that article?

I have no idea if Rosen was telling the truth, and I certainly have no interest in defending his latest tweets — or the many that came before. But that notion that one would link to something without fully reading its contents seems anything but unbelievable. The fact that the assault was sexual does not appear in the CBS statement until you read a full 463 characters into it. Who’s got time for that kind of research? I would say tweeting about a topic — and even linking to an article — before reading the whole story is the norm, not the exception.

I used to have a junior high chemistry teacher who, in an effort to keep us moving forward on a problem or equation, constantly advised his students: “Write, Don’t Think.”

That could easily be the tagline for this era.

Rosen may have crossed lines of appropriateness and sensitivity. But how many times a day do you see that behavior mirrored on the web? Are Rosen’s takes that much more brutal than the comments you can find in the footer of many web posts?

Even if Rosen’s level of offensiveness was enough to rise above the rest and cost him his job, his underlying behavior make him a poster child for the internet age.

Just look at his own explanation:

“it was the twitter equivalent of blurting something out. i had no expectations because i just didnt think of it … in those few minutes i didnt think about it, you’re lying in bed late at night … just f—ing around on the internet thoughtlessly”

He gave some incoming news his partial attention and then thoughtlessly jotted down a couple phrases and pressed the submit button. Write, don’t think.

Doesn’t that behavior sound just a little familiar? That’s the national pastime. Hot dogs, baseball, apple pie and rattling off idiotic statements without really thinking.

We dedicate a mere 140 characters to explaining our opinions. That’s often about as much thought as we’re willing to give a topic before shoehorning it into our preconceived narratives.

Once Nir Rosen’s tweets started to circulate the web, he deleted them. He would have had better luck trying to build a time machine. That’s one of the ironies of this era. We’re quicker to share half-baked opinions publicly. And now there’s no way to take them back.

Write, Don’t Think. Maybe that isn’t the best strategy when it comes to reacting to the news or publishing opinions. For what it’s worth, it didn’t really work all that well in my Chemistry class either.

How could god let this happen?

I am the Jewish child of Holocaust survivors, so that is a question that I have heard asked throughout my life. Everyone from the most revered religious leaders to George Burns playing the title character in Oh God, Book 2, has tackled that enquiry.

During the early nineties, I traveled to Poland with my parents to visit the rural village where my dad grew up and where he eventually lost his family and his home. As part of the trip, we visited a concentration camp. While every aspect of this tour was moving and upsetting, I was most shocked by what I saw outside the fences that surrounded the camp.

I saw homes. On hills. The concentration camp was in a valley and in each direction I could see more and more houses built on the raised dirt that completely surrounded the killing factory where I stood. These neighbors would have constantly seen and smelled the plumes of smoke.

As I stood at the center of camp I wondered if things would’ve been any different if the whole world was watching. Not just knowing. Watching.

Nearly two decades after that trip with my parents, I am staring at this computer screen and I realize that I am living on those hills.

Pretty much everyone I follow on Twitter has had some reaction to the revolution happening in Egypt. Most of this commentary, including mine, is not backed up by a deep knowledge of Egypt’s history. Instead it’s a knee-jerk reaction to a moral dillemma. Whether we adhere to some religious values or view morality as a human construct, we are all reacting to a situation on the ground where we see the good guys (the young protestors who want freedom) and the bad guys (the old dictators who have repressed the masses for their own gain).

And we’re all living in those houses surrounding the valley where we see something that has to change. Physically, most of us might be on the other side of the world. But the story is piped at us all day long by the mass media and by members of our networked communities. We don’t just know about it in the back of our minds. We’re watching it.

As the revolution unfolded, major media outlets were repeatedly looking to the White House to get the official American response. But at this moment in history, anyone with access to the Internet already knew the American reaction. The network had already responded.

Did the Internet cause the revolution? Of course not. Did it play a critical role in enabling the revolution? It might take a little time to answer that question completely. But it’s certainly worth noting that those who helped to light the fuse used the Internet to do so, and one of the first reactions of the ruling party was to turn the Internet off.

In an interview on CNN, Wael Ghonim, one of the voices of the revolution said: “If you want to liberate a government, give them the internet.”

Of course, there are countless other events in the world that we’re able to ignore even with modern life’s constant connectivity. But every now and then, a series of events in a corner of the world rises up onto our screens and into our communal consciousness.

This will happen more and more often. The more connected we are, the more we’ll see. This will have a dramatic impact on our own experience of world events. Will more be better? It’s easy to argue that we’re better off watching the streets of Cairo than American Idol. But living on those hills might overwhelm us. Every now and then, you might want to take off your virtual beret and focus on events across the living room, not across the world.

But our old living room might be gone. Once you live on that hill, it’s hard to close the curtains. It’s hard to deny that we’ll be increasingly confronted by a new question.

Instead of asking about god we’ll have to ask:

How could we let this happen?

I don’t pretend to have any idea if our watching will make a difference in the course of world events. A few people on the hill didn’t make any difference to the victims of that concentration camp. Would hundreds of millions of people on the hill do the trick? Will we live in a better world because the world is watching?

I don’t know. But at least we’ll know who to blame.

The other night I was sitting in San Francisco’s Herbst Theater listening to renown physicist Brian Greene lecture about string theory, the possibility of multiple universes, and the exciting search for one unified, invisible force that connects us all — from the farthest galaxy to the smallest speck of matter. Greene was riveting and the sold-out crowd sat forward on the edge of their seats. I was both interested and impressed, but I sat back.

I was thinking about Egypt. And I couldn’t turn it off.

The story is on the opposite side of the world. I can’t smell the tear gas. I can’t hear the sound of Molotov Cocktails expoding in Tahrir Square. I don’t know a single person with any direct involvement with what’s going on in Cairo.

But the story is on my television, in my Twitter stream, on my Facebook page, spilling out of my iPhone, everywhere. My screens are a mass of particles with a gravitational force that’s pulling in minute by minute updates on a story from across the world to the front of my mind.

I’ve often been obsessed with big news stories. When I was a kid, I’d listen to my parents discuss stories from the New York Times as they glanced at the Sunday morning talk shows in the background.

But these days I’m always distracted by some news story. Today it’s Egypt, but usually it’s a comparatively tiny story about problems with the iPhone’s antenna, Vuvuzelas, Mel Gibson’s phone etiquette, or the quality of Kenneth Cole’s tweets. I have a deep knowledge about the current weather conditions in places where I don’t live. On the realtime social internet, there’s always a story and it never turns off. My personal focus depends almost entirely on what fixates the other people in the expanding universe of my online network.

A few months ago, I planned a surprise one-night getaway with my wife. About an hour before I was set to pick her up, several people I follow on Twitter started sharing early news of a potentially massive earthquake on another continent. My first thought was that I hoped there wasn’t a devastating loss of life. But almost immediately, I also thought, “Oh no, this is going to ruin my night.”

The earthquake wasn’t as serious as first feared, but if it had been, I would not have been able to turn the story off. I can no longer compartmentalize the news until the next day’s newspaper lands on my doorstep. The news is mixed in with the rest of my online life and the separation between my online and offline lives is blurred.

A few years ago, I would never have heard about that earthquake. I live in San Francisco. The deliverers of my morning news would have known that a little jiggle on the opposite side of the planet doesn’t belong on my front page.

But today, we’ve got no such editors. We’re all messengers. Every few seconds, we all have hundreds if not thousands of virtual paperboys throwing the latest version of the news into our consciousness. It’s getting more difficult to know where a global news story stops and my actual life begins.

Again, Egypt is certainly worth my attention. It makes sense that this story made its way into Herbst Theater where most of the minds in the room were trying to happily wander off to a distant universe. This week, maybe there should be an invisible ethernet cable that plugs Tahrir Square to my frontal lobe.

But soon this story will be off my screens and those who provide my constant stream of links, updates and opinions will have moved on to more mundane topics.

And I still won’t be able to turn it off.