In my drawer in this
office there is a blood pressure monitor. You strap it on your arm and
it pumps up and tells you your alleged blood pressure and pulse rate.
I bought it for my mother, I think, but then we made her old one work.
I'm not sure. I've been using it just for the heck of it. Just one of
many gadgets. It doesn't seem very accurate (gives different readings
rather randomly) but it seems to 'just work' no problem as long as the
batteries are fresh.
Anymore, the most
important of our gadgets are the computers and their connections to
WEB pages and email. Businesses can hardly limp along without email.
And FFP is still doing real business. Today our Roadrunner quit working.
Ours stopped working around 8:30 in the morning. They had been having
trouble starting a couple of hours before. I think that gradually all
the cable modems in town quit authenticating. By three-thirty they said
it was 'gradually coming back' and we heard that other people had service
but not us. I spent a few minutes out of the day staring at the lights
on the cable modem. Occasionally the sync and ready lights would go
on and things looked hopeful and then everything would go off and only
the light showing the connection to the router would be on. The recv
light would blink and it would stay in that state. I was watching Wimbledon
matches on ESPN on a TV above the modem. I noticed while I stared in
despair at the lights on the modem that there was a commercial on ESPN
for HP. "Anything is possible" was the tag line. Yeah, possible.
But improbable. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I should
be surprised when ANYTHING works rather than constantly disappointed
at the failures.
Yeah, the gadgets
are everywhere. The digital cameras (I've had four now) that allow you
to take the pictures of the insides of your junk drawers and then save
and back up the images, the clocks and calculators and phones and cell
phones and AC and DC chargers for everything and, yes, I have a Palm
though I rarely use it.
I've resisted a few
gadgets of late. I've resisted some for years. I was tempted to buy
a laptop and add a wireless access point to my network. I think GPS
is cool and I've been tempted to get a graphics tablet. I'll probably
get all those things eventually, I guess. I want a new scanner to replace
my SCSI one but really the old one is OK except for keeping a machine
running with the SCSI connection just to run it. That same machine has
my old JAZ drive on it. Also with a SCSI connection. Like lots of gadgets
this was purchased in hopes being able to back up computers. But the
JAZ drive developed a bit of quirky behavior and didn't insinuate itself
as a really reliable backup and while I did use it for backups for a
while and while it now seems to operate well if a little slowly, it's
mostly a useless dinosaur. There were CD drives and tape drives that
were supposed to solve the backup problem. This problem has been finally
'resolved' by backing up machines to each other over the network, occasional
CD and ZIP creation for the safe and backing up really critical stuff
to an Internet backup service. These procedures, though theoretically
'automated' develop various little glitches and have to be watched and
pampered and serviced. I hate backups.
But, yeah, gadgets.
We spend time getting everything to work just right and then for a few
moments we think, hmmm, what was it we were going to actually do
with these gadgets?
I'm not much of a
game player myself except for tennis. Occasionally I play a game of
Bridge on the computer. I know people who are devoted to their computers
primarily for games. The software that floats it for me is really my
Dreamwever/Fireworks Studio. (I'm not MX yet, just V4.) I use WORD and
Excel, too, of course. The latter to work on the family budget. Of course,
using the WEB to check financials, buy stuff and look for information
is critical.
I attached a new
computer to the network today and was going about getting some new virus
protection on it when ka-boom a virus. One thing the virus did before
I contained it was send weird jobs to printers. So weird in the case
of one of the ink jets that it sounded like it broke the printer. (Really
it had jerked it around and sprung open one of the little clamps on
the ink cartridge.) We are snakebit today by the gadgets.
Maybe I'll just go
read my paperback book of Peter the Great with the cover taped
on it. Low-tech sounds good now. The stack of newspapers looks inviting.
Ah, gadgets. You
know, I find it far easier to give up phones and cable TV than the computer
and the Internet. Go figure. But after excising the viruses I do sit
in my easy chair, channel surf and read. I'm watching one of the Men
in Black things (am I the last person on earth who hasn't watched
one?) and then I start thinking of all the BS we went through with the
media room...bad cables, VCR passthrough circuit busted, DVD going out,
the super woofer groaning its heart out in the middle of the night.
Once the stuff works again, we take it for granted.
In fact, I thought
when I was retired I would watch stuff on cable (all the Wimbledon coverage
comes to mind) and watch DVDs and DJ old records and CDs. But, in fact,
I spend time keeping the equipment working. But don't seem to actually
use it that much.
Now, something needs
to change, I think. So that things don't take so much time. I think,
for one thing, having more than one computer/VCR/DVD player, cable box,
etc. etc. is like having more than one car. Yeah, you have a spare but
it isn't really worth it because of the care and feeding.
JUST
TYPING
