As I sat in a meeting this morning, scanning email on my iPad, up popped this message: “The Smurfs would like to harvest cabbage.”

The darned push messages…it seems every application on the iPad now wants permission to send a push message.  NYTimes.com breaking news?  Maybe…  Twitter?  Probably not…  My Monster Ranch, Empire Story, Virtual Villagers?  Definitely not…

My kids have come to love the iPad.  They really enjoy the games, and quite honestly, like most kids, they aren’t to discerning about how they configure the thing.  So now, on top of  “did you make your bed”  I now need to keep on them to “make sure you turned the push notifications off.”  I feel like the darned IT department.  After a whole day at the office, I now often go home and have to spend hours configuring a printer, or troubleshooting issues on the home network, or updating our online Netflix account, or Hulu or any one of a hundred connected things.

And it’s  coming to the point where virtually any device can let me know that most important information: “The Smurfs would like to harvest cabbage.”