Toilet seat Tuesday
11:32 AM 10/19/2004
There's technology, and there's technology. And then there's the LED toilet seat that would've been a great party thing if it weren't for $249!
I wouldn't want to be one of those invited or attending that party, but hey..to each his own.
That's gratitude for ya...
11:32 AM 10/22/2004
I don't know if this attests to my memory or my potentially-innate tendency towards telecommunications, but I remember the day the telephone was installed at home. In fact, I also remember the first call I made. Yes, it was one of those chunky instruments with rotary dial bezel. In hindsight, its design seemed blissfully unaware of the need to be user-friendly, or to be future-friendly. But it was fun. I still remember watching my father write out our phone number on a slip of paper and slide it under the little plastic window on the front face of the device and feel very..."Wow, I can talk to someone who isn't here!"
Cut to the present, and even videotelephony built into cellphones doesn't seem to elicit a "Wow!" from most of the technoliterati. For example, a recent conversation about how a cellphone carrier now allows subscribers to watch live TV on their cellphones, got a muted, nonchalant "Cool" from the group. Everyone's apparently been there and done that before me. (Not true, but I'm told that a big part of being cool is being nonchalant about everything else that is cool. That's sorta part of the "cool-th")
So, there were "telephones", which became "phones", which became "cordless phones", which became "cellular phones", which became "camera phones", which are now set to become "videophones". Is this where I go into some retrospective nostalgia and start praising "the way it was"? 'Fraid not, but I would like to wax eloquent on how there's an interesting pattern in there that's been trying to bob its head into the limelight for a while now.
Telephones got people talking, and then people got computers. People wanted to get their computers talking, so they used the telephone infrastructure to set up computer chatter. Over time, people with phones who also had computers increased, and computer chatter went community-wide, and then global.
It took us about a hundred years to go from copper-wired, circuit-switched telephony to the optic-fiber-wired, packet-switched Internet. From the way the ball's rolling now, it could take the Internet about ten more years to roll copper-wire telephony out of our lives and into the museum, and that's a strange thought. Sorta like killing a foundation, but I'm sure there's a set of evolutionists who claim that "We're not killing the phone system, we're merely immortalizing it through a higher plane of existence, through evolution". Geez - I cracked myself up...
If you weed away the garnish, there's probably more than an ounce of truth there. And it almost unfolded like poetry. Using the phone system to get to the Internet, and using the Internet to get to a phone system. Perhaps the widespread use of wireless networks and miniaturized computers (a.k.a PDAs) were the final nails in the proverbial coffin for traditional telephony. With San Francisco and Taiwan making lofty claims to being city-wide free wireless zones, its going to get a lot more interesting very soon.
Ergo, a cookbook for free telephony:
# One free wireless network
# One PDA with a wireless card and able to run VoIP freeware
# Optional audio equipment like a headset
# Enter the coverage sphere of the free wireless network and ensure broadband connectivity to the Internet by running a bandwidth test from your PDA
# Launch your favorite flavor of VoIP freeware
# Use a headset if you're outside and/or driving. Its not polite to talk loudly while outside, and its not fun to plaster yourself on the freeway if you've got one hand busy with your PDA while driving.
Come to think of it, this is a sparkling attestation to Darwin's theory, albeit in a cyborg sense. Evolution does exist. Predecessors do make earlier versions obsolete.