Imagine a life without hearing the words, “Is that for here or to go?” No coffee to go. No drive-thrus. No take-out containers.

Imagine walking into a coffee shop where no one is staring at a piece of technology. Instead everyone is either engaged in conversation or silently taking in the scene around them.

Impossible? Maybe in this country. But such was my life along the Camino. For 37 days my only option was to sit down and enjoy my beverage or my meal. Instead of assuming I wanted everything in a disposable container “to go,” it was assumed I was sticking around and thus everything was served on real plates with utensils made from something other than plastic. Takeout was not even an option.

Walking into any cafe along the Camino, I rarely saw people staring into the screen of their laptops, or scrolling through the Internet on their phones. I saw something that used to be common in coffee shops: people gathered talking to each other.

I loved this single-focus mindset. It was impossible to drink coffee while walking on the Camino — they were two independent tasks, …

A while back Tara Parker-Pope wrote a New York Times piece about the high toll of technology over-dependence that’s worth mentioning: With immediate access to information and online storage galore, are we getting more impatient… and more forgetful?

Typically, the concern about our dependence on technology is that it detracts from our time with family and friends in the real world. But psychologists have become intrigued by a more subtle and insidious effect of our online interactions. It may be that the immediacy of the Internet, the efficiency of the iPhone and the anonymity of the chat room change the core of who we are, issues that Dr. Aboujaoude explores in a book, “Virtually You: The Internet and the Fracturing of the Self,” to be released next year.

Dr. Aboujaoude also asks whether the vast storage available in e-mail and on the Internet is preventing many of us from letting go, causing us to retain many old and unnecessary memories at the expense of making new ones. Everything is saved these days, he notes, from the meaningless e-mail sent after a work lunch to the angry

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Scientific American has a fun podcast on one of the more irksome elements of modern life: Hearing half of the inane conversation of a fellow passenger on mass transportation.

Researchers have found that it is more distracting to listen to half of a conversation — dubbed a halfalogue — than it is to listen to two people chatting in front of you. Although, as someone who spends a lot of time working at coffee shops, it’s really distracting to a) listen to someone get fired; b) hear to one woman offer bad dating advice to another woman; and c) try to focus when two men are discussing their weight-lifting regimens – and the importance of interspersing yoga three days a week – in very loud voices. But I digress.

Reports FoxNews.com

Whether it is the office, on a train or in a car, only half of the conversation is overheard which drains more attention and concentration than when overhearing two people talking, according to scientists at Cornell University.

“We have less control to move away our attention from half a conversation (or halfalogue) than when listening to

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The mobile version of bustedhalo.com has arrived! Get a quick overview of our most recent content — the last few posts; the latest columns, blog posts and comments; what’s new in Googling God; and today’s Daily Jolt. Now, when you go to bustedhalo.com it should automatically detect whether you’re on a regular computer or a mobile device, and send you to the right version. Below are instructions to bookmark the site — and if you are on an iPhone you can create an app-(button)-for-that which looks like any other app button and takes you straight to Busted Halo.

Looking at Busted Halo articles on a phone always kinda worked. The big change is our home page. The regular Busted Halo home page is so rich with multimedia content that it doesn’t really work on mobile devices. Now, you’ll be taken to our lightweight mobile home page. Most video and audio clips will work (though their behavior will vary depending on the device). Articles and posts on a mobile device are cleaner and easier to read, and you can see and add comments.