Terrible Analogies

Much like relationships, we go though several emotional stages with each new bit of technology we purchase.

Take my new iPad, for instance.

After lusting for an iPad for the better part of a year, I finally broke down and picked one up this past Friday. I was instantly enamoured by this new magical piece of hardware, and for the better part of a day I couldn’t keep my hands off of it. Playing with it. Whispering sweeting nothings to it.  Configuring it to my liking.

But I wanted to improve  on it.  To make it better than it currently was.  In short, I wanted to stream media to it, so I purchased a Western Digital external hard drive and placed it on my network. I fiddled with this thing for hours, trying to get my iPad’s iTunes to recognize the new drive. After wasting several hours I went on a run to think about it. Six miles later I get back to the house and began to work on this problem some more. After a couple more fruitless hours I abandoned the project and returned the hard drive.

Sure, I could get third party apps to recognize and stream data, but I couldn’t get iTunes to see it and stream directly from the networked hard drive.

Sunday night, and I believe I’ve moved into the final phase of the honeymoon. Acceptance. This iPad is now just a tool to be used at work and at home. The glossy sheen has worn away, replaced with familiarity and acceptance.

Sure, the iPad is still a fantastic toy, but now that I’ve had time to settle down with it, there are no more secrets between us.

And just like a relationship, we’ve accepted each other and have settled down into a routine. But hey, I’ll take it like that. At least there’s no more running upstairs to the desktop computer each time Karin and I want to quickly look something up on imdb.com while watching a movie.

And in case you missed the partial solar eclipse yesterday, here are a few pictures I managed to grab of the event.  Luckily I have a super heavy filter meant for long exposure times for my Nikon D200 (I love this camera!).  The first picture was captured at 6:40m during the peak of the eclipse.  The second picture was taken at 6:37pm, where you can see the shadow of power lines overhead (I know, not as dramatic as, say, the Eiffel Tower, but whatcanyoudo?).

Sensory deprivation is not a term that gives many people cause to pause unless you’ve experienced it for yourself firsthand.

According to Guinness World Records, the quietest place on Earth can be found in a small laboratory in Minneapolis.  Constructed of a room-within-a-room-within-a-room and coated with sound-absorbing baffles, Orfield Labs’ anechoic chamber mutes 99.99% percent of all noises from within.  It’s in rarified conditions such as this that the mind begins to play tricks on you to compensate for a complete lack of audio input, triggering the brain to fabricate sounds, making you believe that you’re hearing things are just aren’t there.  And it’s this strange effect that NASA relies on to test future astronauts to see how they might react to the noiselessness of space.

Imagine, if you can, floating in the vacuum of space, shielded from a quick, cold death by the meager folds of your government manufactured space suit.  As the minutes drag on your heartbeat becomes increasingly louder.  The sound of your breathing, once not even an afterthought, now resonates like a whirlwind trapped within the suffocating confines between your ears.  And if you suffer at all with tintinitus, well then, with no hint of white noise to mask the effects…welcome to a new level of nail-scratching dementia.  It’s an environment where the silence is so complete that nothing like it can be perfectly simulated here on Earth.  And for those individuals not trained in how to function in such extreme conditions, the experience can be nothing short of fever-induced madness.

I can’t imagine have a complete meltdown in space, with nothing above your head nor below your feet to anchor yourself to any semblance of reality.

Just think about this the next time you see an unfortunate astronaut in a science fiction movie get sucked out into space, tumbling end over end until they meet their ultimate demise, suffering in the absolute perfection of total silence, with nothing but the demented, unrelenting sounds of their squishy, pulsing, gaseous mass to keep them company until the final, bitter end.

Would you be able to cope for any extended amount of time in the absence of sound?

Wired Magazine posted an online article yesterday focusing on the many patents that Apple owns.  One of Apple’s new patents is a system which creates a vacuum that sucks the glass screen down tight against the hardware when the device’s accelerometer senses that the iPad is in free fall, which helps protect the glass screen for shattering upon impact.

This is great and all, those Apple engineers are amazing, but could Wired have used a less creepy finger in their publicity photo?

Seriously, what’s up with that thing? Shudder…

The other day Karin and I went to Chili’s for dinner. Once we were done perusing the oversized menus which were plastered with pictures of their popular offerings (I’m guessing so the illerates can point and say, “I want this one”) and had placed our orders with the over-exhuberant waitress, I excused myself to go wash my hands.

It turns out that the restrooms at our local Chili’s are equipped with all manner of “automatic” hardware, so all one has to do is wave their hands in front of the devices to activate them. At least that’s the theory.

Standing in front of the sink, staring at a mirror badly scratched by repeated keyings, I waved my hands under the faucet and…nothing. “Hmm, I must be doing this wrong,” I thought, and proceeded to wave my hand underneath the spigot once again, then both hands, then angling my hands, undulating them up and down and back and forth. Still nothing.

But finally, with a bit of luck and abnormal contorting of digits was I finally able to cooerce that fickle sink to turn on and give up its watery goodness.

With hands washed I turned to the grab a paper towel, only to discover that it too was automated. I waved my wet hands in front of the device but nothing happened. I waved them underneath, and still nothing. Perhaps the sensor was on the side? Nope. What if I waved one hand on the bottom, one of the top, and whistle the them song to The A Team while jumping up and down on one leg? Nope, still no paper towel.

I then muttered a curse under my breath, bitterly admitted defeat, and wiped my hands on my pants on the way out the door.

Nothing makes me feel less like a human then being ignored by restroom accessories.

Some people might consider trawling the internet for hours on end to be a waste of time, but I beg to differ. The internet is a bottomless trove of information, and I’m constantly amazed at how much knowledge the human mind is capable of retaining and regurgitating at a moment’s notice. With so much information at our collective fingertips I firmly believe that we’re on the crest of a wave that, when it eventually breaks, froths and merges with future technologies, it will usher in a state of near-enlightenment for all mankind.

Before the advent of the internet most of us were forced to hunt down information in places called “libraries”, where one was force to “check out” books and return them within one week or pay a “late fee”. Oftentimes the required books were not on the shelves, whereupon you would beat a hasty retreat to a “book store” in hopes of purchasing the needed reading material. If the “book store” didn’t have what you were looking for you could order a book at the counter then wait for days before your order arrived. When it did arrive you then had to drive back to the “book store” to pick up your book.

Cumbersome, I know, but that’s how we rolled back in the day.

Nowadays the internet can answer just about any question from the comfort of….well, just about anywhere.  No need for a Dewey Decimal system.  No concerns about not being able to check out the “referrence” books from the library.  Need to know who won the Battle of Hastings, what the Proclamation Line was all about, or even who was victorious at the ’94 World Series?  A quick Google search and you’ll instantly have your answers.

The amount of information online is intoxicating and addictive.  So addictive in fact that I find it difficult to go an entire day without logging in. Again. And again. And again. I feel a sense of disconnect when I can’t get online, like I’m missing something, and that’s probably a sign of sickness.  But, like a junky, I can quit any time I want…just not today. I need just one more fix.

I find it hard to imagine that my son will grow up not knowing a world without the internet.  The internet will be ingrained into his life, it will open doors for him that I never could have expected, and it will help to make him smarter than I could ever hope to be.

In fact, it will be so ubiquitous that I’m sure some day he’ll even be able to identify all of the memes that there ever was at a glance: