I don't think of myself as an early adopter. I was pretty late to get a cell phone at all, friends were using the web a few years before I started using a search engine instead of Archie, and while I think a lot of bleeding edge stuff is cool when I read about it, I don't even get around to installing the latest shareware.
I'll cop to the geek label though: this wasn't a case of being an early adopter to a new technology; rather it was a matter of my seeing as obvious a way of sticking together a couple of established tools for my convenience, and not realizing that it was something someone else would see as clever and new.
And yeah, it does bug me to see distance units confused with time ones, but I often switch things the other way in conversation ... it's not that I confuse time units for distance, but that I describe distance using a travel-time metric. "My place is half an hour North of College Park, and fifteen minutes West of the Inner Harbour." Not sure whether that's a universal thing, an English-specific thing, or a regional thing, but it's how I'm used to hearing distances expressed.
Re: <cough cough> Early adopters?
I'll cop to the geek label though: this wasn't a case of being an early adopter to a new technology; rather it was a matter of my seeing as obvious a way of sticking together a couple of established tools for my convenience, and not realizing that it was something someone else would see as clever and new.
And yeah, it does bug me to see distance units confused with time ones, but I often switch things the other way in conversation ... it's not that I confuse time units for distance, but that I describe distance using a travel-time metric. "My place is half an hour North of College Park,
and fifteen minutes West of the Inner Harbour." Not sure whether that's a universal thing, an English-specific thing, or a regional thing, but it's how I'm used to hearing distances expressed.