As I type this, I’m listening to a college game on my computer and watching the Atlanta Falcons on the tube. Life is good.
Life is okay, anyway. It’d be better if I could get over this stupid cold (which has basically migrated out of my head and into my chest), but I’ll drink some Nyquill before bed tonight and maybe I’ll feel a bit better tomorrow.
I forgot to mention in my last post that it looks like I’m going to end up being the secretary of the brass band association. Last I heard, nobody else had been nominated for the spot, and I’ve indicated that I’ll do it if the rest of the board wants me to, so I guess I’ll find out in a few weeks when we meet in Cincinnati.
Why do I want to do this? Frustration, mainly.
I don’t expect to step in and make a huge difference, but at least – as a member of the executive committee – I’ll have some authority to actually do things rather than just complain about what isn’t being done. And I’ll also have a dissenting vote when the executive committee wants to do stupid things without (as far as I can tell) putting much thought into them.
At the very least, I’m going to do my best to get administrative control of our official website. That thing is an embarrassment to non-profits everywhere.
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| Took this at last Friday’s high school game. It didn’t make it into the final selection because that guy in the white is making an interception – and he’s one of the “bad guys.” |
I started thinking the other day about what lies ahead in telecommunications. Think about this: 15 years ago, cell phones were fairly rare. Today, everybody’s got one and the phones are so far beyond “phones” it’s ridiculous. With an average smart phone, you can make and receive calls, send instant messages, read and create email, listen to music, read books, watch movies, control your television, surf the web, create documents, check the weather, manage your stocks, tune a piano, film your kid’s recital, pay your bills, play games, keep up with your favorite teams, scan barcodes, redeem coupons, and fine-tune your car’s performance.
I didn’t make up any of those things. And I didn’t try to list everything that a typical phone can do today or even what MY phone can do right now. Smart phones are, simply put, amazing. Even to me – a guy who’s been right in the middle of the technological revolution for the last 20 years.
But I can’t think of much else that can be done. Short of actual teleportation – you buy a shirt online and *poof* it appears next to you – I can’t think of a way that the technology can be improved. Sure, we’ll get faster speeds and better coverage, but that’s not a sea change. That’s just build-out.
The only thing I can come up with is a sort of bio-phone, which is literally hard-wired into your brain. Strides have been made in the area of controlling a computer with brain waves, and I could see the day where a smartphone-like device is integrated into a person’s head in such a way that the video output feeds directly into the brain’s vision areas, the audi output goes directly into the auditory areas, and the whole thing can be manipulated with thoughts or (in a pinch) speech. If you think about it, that would allow a person who is both deaf and blind to see and hear, which is sort of cool. It would also free up space on your belt (no need to carry the phone), and be an awesome way to cheat at trivia games.
It’d suck to give telemarketers direct access to the inside of my head, though.
TWD