Technology

I'm sitting in some horrific traffic waiting to get on the Bay Bridge when it occurs to me how crazy it is that I'm sitting in a car and adding a blog entry from a telephone. I know it's 2007, and there are speakers the size of a single strand of hair, but I'm still blown away by this. It's one of those moments where the world suddenly seems to be in slow motion and I'm the only one aware of every maddening detail. I am acutely aware of things like my heartbeat, the second hand on my Omega watch ticking laboriously from hash mark to hash mark, the eternity between illuminations of the flashing red hand that says "don't walk!" but not in as many words, and if it weren't so loud, probably would hear the air filling up the lungs with each breath, of the stray cat sitting on top of the mobile trailer that is clearly mission control for the chaotic construction that is causing all of this traffic.

It's a telephone, despite what Mr. Wozniak would have you believe. Sure, it's got some sort of equilibrium feature that rights itself like a this stray cat would if for some reason it found itself suddenly falling toward the earth, when rotated, and it can play music and has the funny "seeing-eye" keyboard, but the fact remains; you CAN place a call to somebody from this iPhone.

It's not mine. I'm not cool enough for an iPhone. No, correction...I don't care enough to have an iPhone. I work in technology, but somehow find it hard to get terribly excited about technology. But come on...I'm logged into the internet on a telephone. That's at least a little bit exciting, if not supremely remarkable. Alexander Graham Bell would send Mr. Watson a text message saying "Where you At? You gotta check this out, Yo!" if he saw me typing on a telephone.

But then again, a moment ago, I conversed with a friend while the phone rested in my lap, easily 2 feet away from my ear or my mouth all because a compact contraption clipped to my ear, with its periodically blinking blue light transported my voice through the air at a radio frequency of ~2.4Ghz to my phone and out into the ether and on to the other end of that phone conversation.

Are you getting all this? I'm speaking into a piece of plastic that contains a dash of silicon, a pinch of copper and a touch or two of solder. (Yawn....)

Wake me up when somebody invents a toilet seat that can put itself down since the current state of the art, manually operated ones are far too complicated and too much work to operate for some people.