The Aerie
[waalcor1.jpg] "Oh mah lord in hayven, it's two entries in one week!
Lan sakes, tell the neighbors!"
Well, an exciting weekend.
First of all, it's the Week from Hell around our house. Three family
birthdays all in one week's time, so it turns into a zoo. On top of
that my wife is Block Club captain, and National Night Out occurs in
the same week. The result? Our schedule is:
Sunday, extended-family birthday party;
Monday, daughter's party and sleep-over;
Tuesday, National Night Out block club party;
Wednesday, Son's party and sleep-over;
Thursday: gaming with Prof. Barker.
So it's a busy week. Last night after the extended family party (and
all the attendant cleaning beforehand) I passed out on the couch like
I'd been felled with a brick to the head.
[t250.gif] On the other hand, I just got a lovely new treat for
myself. I suspect it will be my birthday present, although as yet I
have no idea how much it costs. It's the Mitsubishi T250 Wireless
Internet Phone. Yes, now I can get my e-mail, browse the web, and do
all sorts of other stuff from my cell phone.
People don't understand why this is so exciting for me, but that's
because they're not me. I grew up at exactly the right time for this
to be phenomenally cool. I was fifteen when I started using the
computer, but ever since then I've had a picture of this kind of thing
in my head. Actually I wanted something more like the [1]Nokia 9110i,
but of course that's a GSM phone and we don't have GSM in America
because, why, we're Americans and we have our own protocols, damnit.
We don't need no furrin prot-ee-calls here.
But I've long had the dream of a little device in my pocket that would
let me know what my e-mail is, the status on all the servers I'm
managing, etc. While this isn't ideal it will do for now. I still
have to set up interfaces to the phone, but at least I can start with
something.
The hilarious thing is, of course, that when you boil web services
down small enough to transmit to a cell phone, you end up back with
[2]Gopher. Gopher was written for situations where the final
transmission hop is the bottleneck. But with all these so-called
'experts' running willy-nilly over the web, and companies making
millions on cell-phone technology, they're all out reinventing the
wheel rather than using something established. Oh well! No skin off
my nose!
So I've got my web toy, but I still don't have the time to do anything
with it! C'est la vie!
[3]Last
Posted by Albatross at July 31, 2000 12:00 AM