My wife recently asked me to get the batteries replaced in the watches we gave each other for our wedding. So, for the first time in a long time, I’ve been wearing a wristwatch.

I’ve seen (but, I’ll admit, haven’t read) a few lifestyle section stories about the death of the wristwatch. It seems more people are checking the time on their cellphones.

But for me and my decidedly uncool Razr, at least, a wristwatch is a much better method for checking time.

If my watch is on me, it’s on my wrist. My phone might be in my pocket or in my jacket pocket or in my bag or on my desk.

Until the next time have to replace the battery, my watch will keep working. My phone is sometimes dead or off, to conserve its meager battery life.

To tell time on my watch, I just look at it. To tell time on my phone, I either have to push a button or open it. If I push the button, it sometimes tells me “No signal,” such as when I’m running late on the subway. It sometimes tells me, “Low battery.” Neither of these messages is really helpful to me when all I really want to know is the time. So, I need to open it, meaning I’m carrying a modern-day pocketwatch, but without the dashing waistcoat and gold chain.

Let’s say I’m on my phone and want to know the time. If I’m wearing my watch, I can just look at it. If I’m not, and I try to turn over my phone to check the time on the little external screen, it unhelpfully tells me, “TELUS,” as if I need to know which company I’m stuck with until this damned contract runs out.

I need a new phone, is what I’m trying to say.

There’s a lot wrong with Vanessa Lu’s article in today’s Star about Mayor Miller’s twittering.

I can forgive the “a-twitter” pun in the first graph. Journalists will get over it soon enough.

Lu writes that Miller’s photos are out of focus. Have you ever seen an in-focus photo from a BlackBerry?

She writes that Twitter might be a fad and some politicians are being criticized for tweeting during Obama’s address to Congress. She neglects to mention social media’s role in getting Obama elected in the first place.

But the worst, the unforgivable part, is the list of tweets she uses.

First of all, she says they’re unedited. There are tweets included in the list that are captions for pictures on twitpic with the link to the picture removed, making them look nonsensical. I get that this was probably written for the newspaper and they didn’t want to print the URLs. Fine. Just don’t say they’re unedited.

Second, it might have been is she had included one tweet responding to a comment from another person on Twitter.

And, as @rhh pointed out, “Almost all of the tweets she quotes are about personal matters. She does this deliberately to misrepresent how he is using twitter.”

Oh, and the comments. I think it was Cory Doctorow who said that no one who works in TV gets to say, “These people sound like they have a lot of free time,” when referring to social media. Same goes for people who make comments on news websites.