On Dec 20, 2008, at 7:13 PM, linus wrote:

I've been holding out against these things because they're still annoying, but teaching a new class on digital image forces the issue, and somebody gave me one.  We still have our home phone but the cel is 7xx xxx-xxx3.

 

Linus

------ the reply -------

aaahh..... hahahahahahahahahahahaha!!

That's so funny, and that's how it always gets started. Someone gave me my first one, as well. I still hardly ever use the damn thing, but somehow I feel inadequate when I need it and don't have it on me, and so, I start bringing it along more and more often. If there are gateway drugs, you could call this gateway gadget-technology. The cell company I avail myself on, lets all the unused minutes rollover; so long as I keep up a minimum monthly payment. By now, I have so many stored up roll over minutes that I could place a three hour, wide bandwidth, emergency interruption call to the most distant moon of jupiter and still have more than enough rollover minutes left over to phone in a pizza for dinner. Unfortunately though for me and my doppelganger on Calisto, the furthest moon, this cell phone company does not handle international calls. 

I never cease to be staggered by how astonishingly annoying technology that removes a minor inconvenience can be. 

And just think... talking dashboards in our cars appear to be not just a standard within our lifetimes, it seems likely they will become an unavoidable item in any new car by the time our kids learn to drive, which might soon become a very different thing than what we experienced. Yet, having access to children of technology may be a favorable, if embarrassing, thing. Just as our parents called upon us to program that incomparably baffling piece of modern convenience making, the VCR, I can envision myself a scant ten years hence, calling across town to my niece: 

"Hi, Natalie?.... yes, this is uncle mark.... fine, fine, and you?... Look, do you think you could come over sometime this week again? My dashboard keeps talking back to me every time I tell it to make a left hand turn.... oh... oh, ok, uh.... I have to re-boot the axel drivers with an omni what?... Turn-blaster?... Yes, ok, what!??... Well can I buy one at Kragen?... Download, download where??... Updates? But I just bought it last week.... Look I have no idea what's going on with this thing, could you just come over and do it for me?"

So... what do I say? Cell phone, schmell phone. There are children in this country who are being brought up to feel unwell, unsafe, in peril, threatened, in other words, weak and sick, if they and their family are not implanted with micro chips that not only contain all their personal information, and information gathered about them, but work as gps devices to track them. 

Gosh gee wilikers batman, It's a brave new world!