I’m a geek, but I’m falling out of love with geeky toys. I’m an engineer who doesn’t want to build useless junk that’s just going to end up in dump site within a few years. It also means that I don’t want the latest and greatest mobile phones and other portable junk. Seeing ads on TV for things like a portable single-entry voice recorder makes me cringe, gag and want to beat the crap out of whomever is responsible for wasting valuable resources and landfill space on this crap.
I have an ipod. I like it. It’s useful. I hope the battery never wears out; I hope the hard-drive never fails; I hope rockbox continues to improve, including power-usage being more efficient than Apple’s firmware, so that I can play all my music on my ipod, not just the mp3 files.
I have a mobile phone. It makes calls, but doesn’t have a camera, bluetooth connectivity or a big, high-resolution screen. I’ve never used the mobile internet connectivity, as a result of silly high costs, and I’ve never built a custom java application and loaded it in. I’ve been having problems with service reliability – poor connections when calling internationally and next to no service when I was roaming internationally. I don’t know if it’s a fault of the phone antenna or a fault of the service. I don’t want to buy a new phone to find out that I’ve just been at the mercy of poor service. I certainly don’t need a new phone for my day-to-day life, regardless of what the billboards tell me.
When I joined the IEEE, I added a subscription to The IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology. As technologists, we’re largely missing the point – the work we do has large-scale reverberations. Everything we build comes from somewhere and goes somewhere. Nearly all of our resources are finite, as is our capacity to store stuff. Hand-me-downs are a form of recycling, but just because I don’t see my old junk anymore doesn’t mean that it’s gone.
It’s important to make decisions for a better world. I already have enough stuff. My next gadget should be something like a solar powered charger for the junk that I already have, or a charger that draws from the turning of a bike-wheel.
With my trip home, I saw a lot of people that I hadn’t seen a long time, both family and friends. Coincidentally, I was also invited into Facebook around the same time. Quite a few of my university friends have Facebook accounts, but I was surprised how many other friends, whom I’ve been out of touch with, have found me through the social network fabric. There’s a theme of reconnecting developing here and it’s transcending borders. We’ve all opened sails into different winds, but there’s still a thread to tie us together, and it doesn’t necessarily involve boarding a plane and coordinating schedules.
There are downsides, however. The terms of use are a bit of nightmare, especially the part where they have the right to do anything with your content, even make themselves money from it, without any responsibility to the user. Take care in considering what to donate to Facebook…
Subscriptions seem to be slow to spread outside of North America. Whereas many of my Canadian friends are members, most of my New Zealand friends have never heard of the thing. However, the NZ Network is growing. It might have less than half the numbers of my university, but it’s growing. Naturally, it’ll be more popular with the kids than with the professionals, but even the professionals spend a fair bit of time behind computers.
While I was waiting out my Air Canada flight problem in Vancouver, I noticed that my hotel card-key had welcome printed in many languages on the sleeve. Two that caught my attention were German – willkommen – and French – bienvenue. Both actually look to have etymological ties, so where would it have come from? The Online Etymology Dictionary says neither and only reports back to Old English.
Is it possible that it has circular origins? How old are each of the terms? I need better dictionaries.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr has passed away. I first read Cat’s Cradle in high school, which proved to be highly influential, and propelled me onto several other novels, short stories and essays. Over the years, his social commentary helped develop my stance on the world. I’m certain that I’m not alone.
Edit 13–04-2007 Read me
I returned from Canada a couple mornings ago. It’s impossible to capture what went on – coming to grips with losing a parent might take the rest of my life – but it’s important to find the good things that come with the bad. I spent a lot of time with family, close friends and a lot of people who knew us ages ago. It was great to see the reflection of my mother in each of them. We all have our different connections to her. In coming together, the picture we each hold becomes a lot more vivid, almost complete.
For the record, I want a wake(ceremony) when I die.
