For eight years now, Susan has been waiting on (at least) one kid hand and foot — and, since 2005, she’s been waiting on two. (Some would say three.) Whether it’s cooking or doing laundry or cleaning up buckets of puke (last night’s gift from Morgan), Susan spends the vast majority of her free time working for the kids. I thought this was pretty funny, until it started happening to me.
My jobs are admittedly different than Susan’s. While Susan is folding clothes or putting away groceries, I do “dad” duties like wrestle, or find movies for the kids to watch. (Susan gets the short end of the stick, no doubt.) As of Mason’s 8th birthday last December, I have acquired a new role: tech support.
Mason’s had a Nintendo DS for a couple of years and a Game Boy Advance before that, but not much tech support was needed for those. Most of the questions I got were about how to do things in games. “Where do I go now? What do I do? Who’s that guy?” (My answers: I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t know … in that order.) He either figures it out, or goes and finds something else to do. Either solution is acceptable.
For his 8th birthday, Mason got an iPod Touch. The interface is simple enough that an 8-year-old can use it, but he can’t do things like install apps, or music, or configure the wireless encryption keys needed to piggyback onto my router, and so those things fall back on me. “Dad, I can’t get on the Internet,” he said the other day. After a bit of troubleshooting I discovered he had deleted the 20-character encryption key needed to connect. After looking up the code and punching it in on the iPod’s small, virtual keyboard, I handed the device back to Mason only to hear, “Oh, so THAT’S how I erased it … Can you type it in again?” seconds later as he handed it back to me.
About two weeks ago, I lost my netbook. I mean, I didn’t lose it, I lost possession of it. Mason’s been guarding it tightly. He knows how to search Google for things and has found several websites with online games hosted on them. I’m sure when I regain possession of it I’ll have to format it to get all the viruses off but, eh.
This morning I woke up around 7:30 only to have the netbook handed to me. “Google Chrome is broken,” he said. What he meant was, the wireless card had quit working. I tried releasing/renewing the IP address a few times and got nothing. When I searched for local wireless access points, I found none. After fifteen or twenty minutes of searching Google (from a different machine) I discovered that the Acer Aspire One has a manual switch that disables the wireless card (for air travel, most likely). After finding the switch and flipping it, everything started working again. Throughout the process, Mason was as helpful as the average tech support caller. “What did you do?” “Nothing, I promise!”
And now, it’s the Nintendo DS again — specifically, the Action Replay cartridge. The Action Replay cartridge isn’t a game — it’s a cartridge that lets you cheat on games. Mason is playing two or three different Pokemon games and has resorted to cheating to collect all the Pokemon, or win the game, or whatever the point is to those Pokemon games. Man I sound old.
The Action Replay uses cheat codes that have to be manually entered into the DS by using a plastic stylus and a virtual touch screen keyboard. Mason asked if I would type one of the codes in for him, and I said sure. He handed me the DS and showed me a code that was 500 characters long. I politely handed the DS back to him and said, “Good luck.”
Now the Action Replay comes with some software for your PC that allows you to sync codes between the two, but it’s lacking the most obvious feature — a way to cut/paste codes found on the Internet into the device. I knew there had to be a way to do it, but so far what I’ve found hasn’t been easy. The codes are stored in XML format and can be imported that way, but I haven’t found a good list that anyone’s put together for Mason’s specific games. I did find a way to cut/paste codes in one at a time, but doing so appears to delete all your other stored codes until you restore, which deletes the code you pasted in. It’s such a clunky system that anyone (including 8-year-olds and 36-year-olds) would look at and instantly say, “this sucks.”
In the meantime I’m having to hear about how much it all sucks from Mason on a daily basis. And by daily I mean several times an hour. “Daaaaaaaaaaaad,” he says, “I can’t get the Juju from the Pling-Plong because I don’t have a code to make Doofasaurus invincible so I can defeat Glorgo and obtain the Sword of Rafadafading Dong.” The names are made up, but barely.
This morning I figured out how to format the XML files and where to store them on the PC. I wrote a quick script to parse codes I found on the net into the right format; with that, I was able to import all the cheat codes Mason could ever want into his Action Replay. He is giddy with delight and I was just informed that Glorgo has been defeated and the Sword of Rafadafading Dong is now in Mason’s possession.
2010 is the year I “go digital,” as much as I can. That means getting rid of dead weight, and some of that weight comes from old books. Last night, after everybody else went to bed, I went out to the garage and began sorting books into piles.
By the time I was done I had sorted through around 400 books. About 300 of those went into boxes to take to the thrift store tomorrow. Many of these were old paperbacks that I either read years ago, or never got around to reading. The remaining books, “the good stuff,” were then sorted into about eight piles based on categories like UFOs, True Crime, Horror, and so on. I listed those on Craigslist, but who knows if I’ll get any bites. The day before yesterday I listed a bunch of old VHS tapes I still had lying around. I got three e-mails: two of those were from Nigerian widows, and the third guy never got back with me.
There were lots of books I felt like I couldn’t part with just yet. These included books that I got as gifts, and/or had sentimental attachments to. When I turned sixteen and got my first car (a 1979 Mustang), my dad bought me a hardback book about Mustangs. It’s in the keep pile. All my Three Stooges books and old AD&D manuals stayed in the keep pile as well. I think I have it down to where I can fit everything I want to keep on one bookshelf.
Tomorrow I’ll take the first load to the thrift store, and if nobody bites on Craigslist I suppose I’ll take the rest of them down there next weekend.
Believe it or not, getting rid of 300 books barely made a noticeable dent on the pile-o-crap that lives out in the garage.
Directly behind the house I grew up in was “the creek”, a large ditch that was roughly 20 feet across and 10 feet deep (just a guess). During the summer, the kids of Sun Valley (my old neighborhood) played a lot of “Army” back there. It was full of weeds and trees and all kinds of cool things to climb and play on. In the spring and fall there would almost always be water standing in the bottom of the creek. With a plastic cup and a quick hand you could catch crawdads, and if you were lucky, with a hook on a string and some bacon you could catch a fish — usually catfish or perch. The creek was full of red dirt, which made for red mud and red water. You always put your old clothes on before going down to play in the creek, as your white underwear, socks and shoes would surely come home stained red.
In the winter, whatever water was left standing in the creek would freeze, giving the neighborhood kids our own ice skating rink. Rumor had it that, if you followed it far enough, the creek led all the way from Sara Road to Lake Overholser, about two miles away. I never personally made it that far. Usually around the one mile mark the ice would break, someone would go knee-deep into the water and we would turn tail and head home in fear of frostbite. I don’t know if you could really get frostbite in those conditions, but it seemed like a real enough threat at the time.
At the other end of the creek (just one backyard away from my own) was the Sara Road bridge. Before they rebuilt it back in the early 90s, the bridge was barely wide enough for two cars to cross at the same time — and, if you knew how rickety the thing was, you wouldn’t try. One game the bigger kids used to play was to hang from the underside of the bridge as cars passed overhead. The whole thing shook and rattled with each passing car while kids hanging underneath clung for dear life. It was so loud that just standing under the bridge displayed a certain amount of bravery.
One winter while a dozen or so of us were hanging out underneath the bridge, a few of the kids came up with the idea of pelting passing cars with snowballs. A few of the older kids made their snowballs and sat in wait by the side of the bridge. No motorist had any chance of catching us. By the time a car could stop, we would already be scurrying through the creek like the rats we were. There were plenty of places to hide in the creek, but really all one had to do was make it up into the neighborhood where we would be home free.
As the first car approached the bridge, kids ducked just out of sight behind bushes and piles of brush. When the car whizzed by — POW — it was pelted by handfuls of snowy spheres. As expected, the driver hit the brakes and slowed, but didn’t stop. We heard the horn honk and saw a middle finger wag, but that was it. Hey, this could turn out to be fun! (Unless, of course, somebody got killed.)
This continued a couple of times. Each time, butterflies ripped through our stomach as we prepared to flee.
Now as we were doing this, one of the kids came up with an idea of his own: ice balls. While we were up by the bridge watching cars zip by and tossing snowballs at them, this kid was amassing an army of frozen snowballs by dunking them into creek water and freezing them until they were rock solid. With a couple of these frozen weapons in town, this kid worked his way up to where we were hiding and took his spot among us.
At the end of Sara Road, a car turned toward us. We couldn’t really make out the details of the car … just the headlights. Waiting in anticipation, I smoothed my own snowball to perfection, waiting for just the right moment to release it.
As the car reached the bridge, we all jumped out of our spots and let them have it. POW. POW. POW.
CRACK.
The sound of the ice ball hitting the windshield. The driver hit the brakes — hard — the wheels screeched and the car came to a stop. The mood changed instantly from “hee hee hee” to “oh, SHIT.” An ice ball? Seriously?
No one dared to chance staying in their hiding spot; it was each kid for himself as we ran down the creek’s slope at full speed and hit the bottom of the creek running, a blur of gloves and mittens and scarves and hats. We splashed through the ice cold water, grabbing at trees to propel our bodies quickly through the brush.
It seemed too risky to lose the millisecond it would take to look over my shoulder and see if we were being pursued, but I did, and we were. The man was screaming for us to stop as he made his way down the creek’s slope toward us. We ran faster as if our lives depended on it — and it probably did.
There was a fork off of the creek that ran down beside my house. I made the turn and kept running all the way home. I think everyone else did too, and I don’t think anyone got caught.
And that was the last time we played “Pelt the Car from the Creek”.
“This is the worst case scenario, folks,” the weatherman informed us last night. Sleet and freezing rain, followed by snow, followed by possible thunderstorms. Expect horrible driving conditions and power outages. Wednesday night (while it was still 65 degrees), Southwest Airlines announced they were cancelling Thursday’s flights out of OKC. Long before a single snowflake or ice pellet hit the ground, all the local schools were closed.
We got some white stuff alright, but fortunately it wasn’t as bad as what we were expecting. The roads are slick, but they’re nowhere as bad as they were this past Christmas. In fact, around dinner time, Mason and I hopped in the truck and drove all over Yukon, taking pictures.
Both work and the kids’ school are closed tomorrow, so we got a four day weekend out of the deal. We didn’t have any problem getting around town at all earlier and the white stuff has quit coming down for the time being, so I don’t see us being stuck around the house tomorrow.
That’s it on the left, with a Kindle 2 on the right. It’s not hard to fall in love with the iPad. What’s hard is figuring out what market Apple is shooting for, and what to do with it once I (inevitably) buy one. Although my gut reaction was to compare and contrast the iPad against Amazon’s Kindle, Apple has made it clear that the iPad is not only set to compete in the e-reader market, but against the netbook market as well.
The iPad (and let’s just get this out the way — it sounds like a feminine hygiene product) will set you back a minimum of $499, but that’s for a 16 gig model. Add $100 for 32 gig of storage and another $100 for 64 gig. The iPad comes with WiFi, but if you want 3G access you’ll need to add it ($130 for the modem). And, for 3G, two monthly data plans have been announced: $15/month for limited bandwidth, $30/month for unlimited. While the $499 being touted sounds good, the biggest model with 3G is going to run you $829 plus $30/month.
When compared to the Kindle, it’s not clear as to which is the victor. The iPad’s full color, multi-touch screen is obviously blows away the Kindle’s 16 shades of gray display out of the water, but it does come at a price. The Kindle uses e-ink technology, which is much easier on the eyes than an LCD screen (especially when reading for long periods of time). E-ink technology also gives the Kindle an astounding battery life. Mine lasts somewhere between two and four weeks before it needs recharging. The iPad is expected to get around 10 hours of usage between charges, and we all know that 10 hours really means 7 or 8 if you’re using wireless.
The Kindle’s lifeblood is Amazon, where users can buy e-books online and have them wirelessly delivered to them via the Kindle’s 3G connection. For the iPad, Apple has announced the iBookStore. Apple has already shown that they know how to run an electronic online delivery system (iTunes), and I wouldn’t expect any less from iBookStore. Books will be delivered to the iPad in ePub format. The good news is ePub is a free and open source format, so at least Apple isn’t reinventing the wheel. The bad news is, ePub supports DRM, which I fully expect them to implement. Both the Kindle and the iPad can also display PDF files, but I can tell you that, at least on the Kindle 2′s 6″ screen, it’s a miserable experience and one I gave up on after about three tries. Assuming the iPad contains the same “pinch and expand” gestures that are included on the iPod/iPhone, the iPad would win the PDF reading contest, hands down. The iPad also surely has to win the mp3 playing contest. The Kindle’s mp3 player is so watered down and simplistic that it seems like it was added on as a joke, while the iPad will contain the iPod’s music system. No brainer there.
The iPad also plans on taking on the netbook market. Netbook users can be divided into two categories: light users, and heavy users. Light users are those who use netbooks to check e-mail and surf the web, while heavy users are those that use them like any other computer (programming, remote administration, etc.) I’d say the iPad would work as a replacement for the first category, but not the second. As I stated the other day, most of what I do “on the road” that I used to do with a laptop, I can now do with my iPhone. That includes e-mail, getting news and weather updates, updating Facebook and Twitter, and so on. The iPad appears to be running the same OS as the iPod/iPhone, which means you probably won’t be coding applications for it anytime soon. If you have custom scripts or applications you use on your netbook, I doubt you’ll be able to replicate that on the iPad. And while I’ve complained at length about my netbook’s cramped keyboard, I can’t exactly imagine cranking out the next great American novel on the iPad’s virtual keyboard, either.
To me, the iPad feels like something from the future. Like, when we were kids and they promised us flat screen computers in the kitchen to help us cook and video tablets with which we could chat with virtual simulations of dead relatives or something … this is what I was imagining. We’ll have to wait until 2010 to see if the iPad makes a dent in the netbook and e-reader markets or if people will be confused and wonder what exactly to do with this thing. At $829 for a loaded model, I could buy both a netbook and a Kindle and have a few hundred dollars left over.
In the meantime, is anyone interested in buying a slightly used Kindle 2? :)
Today was Shedeck’s second-grade spelling bee. Each of the school’s four second-grade classes had their own spelling bee, and the top 3 finalists from each class got to participate in the second-grade school wide spelling bee.
Although Mason placed first in his class without studying the list of words, both Susan and I told him he might not be so lucky in the actual spelling bee. Mason then “forgot” to bring home his spelling words all this week to practice. Last night over dinner I told him the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper, stressing that hard work pays off.
On the way to school this morning, Mason told me that he was excited because he was going to be in the newspaper after winning the spelling bee. I didn’t have time for the “count your chickens before they hatch” speech. By the way, I know all these speeches by heart because I’ve had them delivered to me throughout the years.
The spelling bee started around 9:15 this morning in the Shedeck cafeteria. When I arrived, all 12 kids were already sitting on the stage with numbers around their necks. Mason was #8 and his buddy Tristan was #9.
Nobody missed a word during the first five rounds. The last word of round five was “came”. The student (#12) then said, “Cane. C-A-N-E. Cane.” Anybody who has ever been in a spelling bee knows, that kid is out. It’s the speller’s responsibility to make sure they understand the word before they spell it. It sucks, and I’d be upset if it were my kid, but those are the rules. That’s why you have to ask for a definition and to have it used in a sentence.
After a ten minute break (which involved reviewing both audio and video tape, and no I’m not kidding), the teacher’s decided that the child had misheard the word and should get a do-over. A do-over? In a spelling bee? My first thought was, good God, we’re going to be here all day! After the ruling, the teacher re-pronounced the word and the child spelled it correctly. Ask anyone who was ever in a spelling bee with Stoney Trent or Vi Le, you gotta ask every question every time.
In the next round, Round 6, Mason got the word “just”. “Just. G … no, wait, J-U-S-T. Just.”
“I’m sorry, that’s incorrect. The correct spelling is J-U-S-T.”
Another spelling bee rule is, you aren’t allowed to correct yourself. Mason left the stage. I couldn’t see him directly, but I saw a teacher pass him a Kleenex. Tristen, Mason’s friend, misspelled the next word, “squirrel”. I know the words are picked randomly, but it’s tough luck when one kid gets “squirrel” and the next gets “of”.
Pretty soon Mason got up and came over to me, now sobbing uncontrollably. He and I went out into the hall where he completely broke down. He was upset because he didn’t get a second chance like the other girl, he was upset because he said “G” instead of “J”, he was upset because he knows how to spell “just” … but most of all I think he was just upset. And man, who hasn’t been there before.
A few rounds later, one of Mason’s classmates got the word “next”. “Nest. N-E-S-T. Nest.”
“Listen to the word again,” the teacher said. “Next. NeXt.”
“Oh, next. N-E-X-T. Next.”
Mason just sighed. “How come they’re getting second chances?” he asked.
In the end, speller #12 (the first “do-over”) won the competition. Mason barely clapped. Tonight’s lessons are “being a good sport” and “sour grapes”.
I’m proud of Mason for getting as far as he did, and I hate to say it, but sometimes those lessons that sting teach the most memorable lessons.
The third wave of 3D entertainment is, pardon the pun, heading right for us.
Historically speaking, with each new technological advance adopted by the film industry, we (the general public) receive two distinct waves of films. The first wave consists of movies that simply exploit the new technology, while the second involves good movies that make use of that technology in order to tell their story. For example, when films first made the leap from “silent” to “talkie”, several shorts and movies were released that simply featured people singing or playing the piano for no reason other than to show audiences that, yes, this film has sound. Of course today, sound is an integral part of film. These days, no one is impressed that a movie has sound (in fact we kind of expect it). Today’s movie makers use sound to help tell their stories, and I think most of us would agree that films are better for it.
That is of course a pretty extreme example, but over the past hundred years we’ve seen this happen multiple times. Another example is stop motion animation. Around the turn of the century you had film makers “playing” with the technology, animating things simply because they could. Then in the 1920s and 1930s, Willis O’Brien used that technolgy to turn miniature models into the menacing stars of The Lost World and King Kong. More recently, we saw this with CGI (computer animation). Over the past twenty years, it’s gone from “a trick” to “a tool”.
In the 1950s, movie studios found themselves competing with a new medium: television. For the first time, people could stay at home and get the same type of entertainment that previously could only be enjoyed in a theater. Studios needed to offer something that viewers couldn’t get at home, and for a few years in the 1950s, that “something” turned out to be 3D. According to Wikipedia, here is a list of the most popular and successful 3D movies from the 1950s:
A Day in the Country, Bwana Devil, Cat-Women of the Moon, Cease Fire, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dangerous Mission, Dial M for Murder, Down the Hatch, Fort Ti, Gog, Gorilla At Large, Hannah Lee, House of Wax, Inferno, It Came from Outer Space, Hondo (featuring John Wayne), Kiss Me Kate, Man in the Dark, Melody, Money From Home (featuring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis), Phantom of the Rue Morgue, Revenge of the Creature in 3-D, Robot Monster, Sangaree, September Storm, Son of Sinbad, Space Attack/The Adventures of Sam Space, Taza, Son of Cochise, The Diamond Wizard, The French Line, The Lions of Gulu, and Top Banana.
I’m no a film expert, but I’m having a hard time finding some classic films in that list. I’ve only heard of about half a dozen of them, and the only ones I think I’ve seen are Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dial M for Murder, House of Wax, It Came from Outer Space, and Phantom of the Rue Morgue. People quickly tired of the gimmick and films never made the turn from gimmick to required technology.
By all accounts, the equipment back then required to show movies in 3D was difficult to upkeep and required a lot of maintenance. Thirty years later in the late 1970s/early 1980s, things had improved. The House of Wax and Dial M for Murder were re-issued, which caused a resurgence in 3D movies. Again from Wikipedia, here is a list of what people consider to be the best films from the second wave of 3D films:
Amityville 3-D, Comin’ at Ya!, Friday the 13th Part III, Jaws 3-D, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, Parasite, Silent Madness, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Starchaser: The Legend of Orin, and Treasure of the Four Crowns.
Of those, I only one I actually remember seeing in a movie theater was Spacehunter. I’ve since seen Amityville, Friday the 13th and Jaws 3D at home and let me tell you, all three of those films needed more than 3D technology to save them.
Another thirty years have passed, and film studios are facing the same dilemna they faced back in the 1950s. Between large home televisions, surround sound stereos, DVD and Blu-ray technology and movie piracy, theaters are having a hard time competing with living rooms. Rising ticket costs and concession prices along with rude movie-goers haven’t helped their cause. The movie industry desperately needs something to get us all back in to theaters, and once again they’re betting 3D movies will do it. The problem is, up until now, we’ve never seen that second wave of 3D movies. For fifty years, every 3D movie has essentially been this:
In the early 2000s we saw a few kid-oriented 3D films (“Spy Kids 3D: Game Over” and “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D”) but it wasn’t until The Polar Express hit IMAX theaters in 3D that anyone paid any real attention to the technology. I personally always thought the film’s technical advance was the motion capture software used to turn Tom Hanks into multiple human-like CGI characters, but studios were convinced it was the 3D factor that brought people in. In fact, studios were so convinced that they went back and added 3D to several non-3D movies like Toy Story and re-released them in theaters.
In 2009 several movies were released in 3D (Coraline, Monsters vs. Aliens, and Up), but none of those made me feel like I had to see them in 3D. Susan and the kids saw “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” in 3D last year, but none of them came home talking about a life-changing experience. They just thought it was “neat”.
But now we have Avatar, which not only used motion capture technology similar to The Polar Express, but is also in 3D. Most reviews I’ve read of Avatar say the same thing: “the story’s okay, but you really have to see it in 3D to appreciate it.” In fact, I had people tell me that the story wasn’t great before I went to go see it, and I went and saw it anyway! It’s all about the experience. Avatar is rapidly marching its way up the “highest grossing movies of all time” list, which no doubt is one of the main reasons we’ll have the following 3D movies to look forward to in 2010:
Beautiy in the Beast 3D, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, Nerverackers, Shrek Forever After, Toy Story 3, Despicable Me, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, Step Up, The Guardians of Ga’Hoole, Alpha and Omega, Oobermind, Disney’s Rapunzel, The Smurfs 3D, Here Be Monsters, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Nemo.
I’m no Nostradamus, but I have to wonder how many of those will be considered classics in twenty years. If I had to pick one, I’d have to bet on “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore”.
Additionally, there has been a lot of talk about 3D televisions and 3D video games. If history repeats itself, we’ve got about 3-5 years of this hype before 3D again fades into the background.
Today was “game over” for two of my arcade machines. Troy, Terry and Darry from the Phoenix Arcade stopped by and picked up my Q*Bert and Zaxxon machines.
I bought the Q*Bert machine four or five years ago at a garage sale. My friend Tim saw the machine for sale at the garage sale and called me. A few minutes later, I was racing across town to pick up my new machine. The machine looked and played great the entire time I owned it. Mason was actually a little upset I sold this one. It’s one of his favorites.
I bought the Zaxxon machine at an auction a year or two ago and it’s been nothing but trouble. When I bought it, the game was working. By the time I got it home, the monitor had developed some sort of problem. Now, the machine doesn’t even power up. From what I understand, one of the guys’ friends has a machine and is going to use this one as a parts machine. It’ll work great for that.
The guys got some games they were looking for, and I got paid. Everybody’s happy.
For years, my family somehow managed to make the yearly drive to Chicago and back to visit family without the aid of technology. It’s really not a complicated route; from Oklahoma City you drive to St. Louis, then to Joliet, and then hang a right until you hit Grandma’s house.
I got my first GPS unit in the fall of 2003, one that connected to my laptop via USB. From that point on, all my road trips involved running a laptop in my car. And laptops need power, so I bought a power inverter too.
As time went on I’ve become more and more addicted to e-mail, and soon our trips to Chicago involved me pulling over from time to time and searching for open wireless signals in order to check my e-mail. (This was years before places like Panera, IHOP and McDonald’s were offering free WiFi.) I remember one particularly frustrating and annoying trip where I probably added an hour on our drive time by pulling off the highway multiple times in search of a wireless signal, no matter how weak. I specifically remember thinking at the time how archaic this would probably seem in five years. It does.
By 2006 most of the major rest stops along the route had added free wireless, although for me it was a moot point by then. Thanks to a PCMCIA Sprint cellular modem, I was given the gift of continual connectivity. I remember how neat it was, the first time I logged on to IRC to chat with my friends from the passenger seat of our van.
I think it was our trip in 2007 in which I actually had two laptops up and running in the van, one for the GPS/Navigation software and the other for entertainment (music and movies), plus surfing the web and checking my e-mail. Again, I remember thinking that technology hadn’t quite caught up with my needs yet. I just wasn’t sure how the story was going to end.
I think it has ended; introducing, the iPhone.
I know I arrived late to the party, but I’m amazed at how much this little thing has infiltrated my life. I had a Samsung Blackjack II smartphone for two years, but it wasn’t like this.
At my worst with two laptops running in the car, I was able to listen to music and watch videos, access the Internet, and use the GPS. Guess what? I can do all of those things on my iPhone now. I have apps for almost everything I do online: I can update Twitter, check Facebook, search Craigslist, read my e-mail, and even update this blog from my phone. Although I have a portable GPS unit in my car now, I have a GPS unit on my iPhone as well. On my phone I’ve got around 20 gigs of mp3s (more than enough for any road trip), but if it weren’t, I can stream mp3s from my home server using Simplify. The ability to snap pictures and send them to Facebook where they can be viewed by friends and family almost real time is just amazing. My kids take it for granted and some of you might think it’s “neat”, but … it’s hard to explain but, I’ve been waiting for these days my entire life.
The iPhone is no replacement for a desktop computer (not yet, at least), but as for dragging along a couple of laptops along for a road trip … I think those days may be over.
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