“What do we do now … talk to each other?” I don’t know who asked it. We were all in kind of a daze. A blur. Wondering what had happened. How this could be possible. What we would do next. Was the Internet … the WIFI … the cable … even the daggone landline phone (who even has those anymore!?!) really out? And for two days? There had been some kind of outage in the neighborhood cable lines. Trucks were dispatched and crews went to work fixing it. Little ants, all up in the lines. And fix it they did. Only, there was a bigger issue with our line, and no one thought to take care of it right then. We knew this because no matter how many times we poked at our phones, tried to reset the modem or cursed at the remote control, no signals ever screamed from our devices, giving us the rush of data we sorely craved. Funny how we’ve become so used to voice-activated devices that in crisis we ACTUALLY think yelling at them will get answers: “I am NOT going to say it again, ‘WHAT … IS … WRONG … WITH … YOU!?!’ Answer me or I’ll put you under the chickens’ perch again.” Nothing. Silence. The world had gone dark. We sat around on the sofa, trembling. Staring at each other.
Hey dog, I can see you on the spycam!
There are great mysteries to be solved in this small world: Is there anything prehistoric swimming around in Loch Ness? What size shoe does Bigfoot wear? Why does a calendar reminder keep popping up on my computer telling me to drain the hot water heater tank? (Yeah, like I’m going to do that!) And the biggest of all: What does your dog do when you’re not home? Turns out the last one I’ve finally solved. Glory be! It’s thanks to the proliferation of these tiny home cameras you can install for security purposes, or keeping up with your animals. My brother calls it the “doggie spycam.” Mind you, I’m not spying on my dog. It’s setup more for home security. And if the dog would just stay in her bed, and not stroll through the camera’s frame, I wouldn’t know anything about it. But the minute she does, a little alert pops up on my phone.
Beware the DIY dude on YouTube … or should you?
Washing machine un-level again … wife perturbed … must … resist … temptation … to Google it. Must … resist … temptation … to watch … rubes … on YouTube … who … know … less … than … strained … carrots … AHHHH! Can’t do it! Me: Google, find me morons who know why washing machine goes un-level. Google: I have just the moron for you! And so it goes … I hate appliances. I used to think the problem with appliances is you can’t buy cheap. So, I started buying more expensive ones. It was then that I realized something very important: Expensive appliances are just higher-priced cheap ones. They break the same amount, but the repairs cost more. That’s when the DIY-er in me comes out. The urge. The pull. The tractor beam that calls me to the light. Or the Dark Side. Or whatever the heck makes very dumb people with questionable repair skills think there must be a cheap and easy solution within our grasp. It’s called: YouTube! Have you heard of this fairy tale land? It’s where the desperate and the deranged go to find solutions to their problems. It’s a place where any so-and-so can record a video and proclaim their expertise at being expertly stupid.
Discovering (already-known) family history in my DNA
The results are in and big surprise … I’M HUMAN! Just as I suspected. Some suggested I was part water bug, or had traces of wild dingo. But the DNA doesn’t lie. Turns out I’m still just a boring, slightly-graying man whose family history is exactly what we thought it was: unspectacular. WOOHOO! Thank you saliva-scraping family origin DNA kit. You have determined the obvious. But my mother was beside herself at the results. Always prone to audacious, grandiose statements, she declared over the phone: “This is incredible. Our family is the history of the world!” Well, that was a bit of a stretch. If anything, all it had told us was we were true American mutts, which we already knew. It wasn’t like we were a lost people searching for our family roots. My grandmother on my mother’s side was born in Cuba, and her family had moved there from Spain. Documented fact. My grandfather was born in Tampa, but his family had immigrated from Sicily. Documented fact. My father had been born in a steamer trunk, in Louisville, Ky. He had researched his family, and they were of European and British descent. Documented and fact.
Ideas for Amazon’s grocery store of tomorrow
Amazon opened something truly revolutionary the other day: A grocery store in Seattle without a single checkout line. Lined with cameras and sensors, you walk into the Amazon Go store, scan an app, pickup what you want and leave. No lines. No loud calls over an intercom for Herb to do a price check on aisle 8 for your corn remover. No trying to pretend that the tabloid story about Prince Harry being a space alien doesn’t actually interest you. Personally, I love the idea of a store like this. I hate checkout lines. But this only solves a couple of my biggest annoyances. So, in hopes that a bright Amazon engineer might read this, here are a couple of things that should also be incorporated into a high-tech grocery store of tomorrow: • We need sliding floors. Let me explain: This would come in handy in situations where someone has decided to park their cart right in the middle of the aisle so they can read the ingredients on a box of crackers. First off, who reads ingredients on a box of crackers!?! Any way you look at it, they’re bad for you! But to the point, I’m so polite that I hate asking someone to move. So, I stand there for 20 minutes while saying in the softest voice, “Uh, excuse me … Um, pardon me, but I can’t get through …” Sliding floors, though, could use sensors to spot this and gently “slide” that person out of […]
Big, dang TV time
There are moments in our lives when insights reveal themselves in special events and the world is never the same again. The birth of a child. A marriage. A devastating illness or injury. A milestone birthday. A career change. Or when you realize your TV screen isn’t big enough. BLAMMO! Hurricane Irma did it for me. We were staying with friends — designated by the county as the official Thompson evacuation shelter — and I was watching The Weather Channel, mesmerized. “That’s a big dang TV!” I told my friend. “I mean, it’s like a Jumbotron. I’m seriously concerned Irma might just roar out it and bowl me over. If I still have a house after this, I need a big dang TV, too!” He just looked at me and said: “Yeah man, I think you do.” Thank you, Hurricane Irma. You have helped me to see the light.
Never trust your smart-phone
It read like a horror movie: “How smart-phones hijack our minds.” That was the headline of a piece in the Wall Street Journal — an article that immediately got my attention, and caused me to curse my phone: “Aha! It was YOU who caused me to eat all those candy corn pumpkins!!! I TOLD my daughter I had nothing to do with it!” The article gave some pretty shocking statistics: We pull our phones out 80 times a day … our phones are actually making us less focused and sloppier … their mere presence makes us dumber and we’re willingly letting these devices “commandeer our brains” … if there is anything resembling candy corn in the house, they will force us to eat it. Stuff like that. Truth is, if aliens wanted to invade Earth, all they need to do is buy a bunch of iPhones and pass them out for a free on a street corner. “Keys to the planet for a free smartphone? Eh … sounds like a fairly good deal! Does it come with unlimited data?” We are willingly letting ourselves get hijacked.
Lessons from walking into a pole while looking at a phone
I walked into a pole. A pole! A big, giant, sticking-straight-up-out-of-the-ground pole. In the sidewalk. Screaming, “hey stupid! Don’t walk into me!” I walked into it. While looking at my phone. It kind of hurt. I bumped my knee. My arm hit it so hard that my phone spun out of my hand like a boomerang and into the street. My wife was walking along next me: “Oh my gosh!” she said. “Are you OK?” I think she thought I had been shot. Until she noticed … “Wait a minute … did you just walk into that pole?!?” I walked into “that” pole. Yes. Yes, I did.
Remembering names and that neural implant something or other
Torn. Absolutely torn. Because technology is starting to frighten me. With all its advances and nefarious uses and the fact that our microwaves are now snickering at us when they see what we’re wearing each morning. But there’s some cool stuff, too. Some of it seems awfully tempting. Like the news that tech entrepreneur Elon Musk is launching a company with the goal of implanting electrodes into our brains. One day, this could help us do all manner of wonderful things, like speed up how we process and analyze information. You know, like finding the most adorable cat videos on the Internet without ever typing on a keyboard. That way we can have our hands free to eat cheese puffs! I’m terrified and intrigued by this idea. The cool part is how such a chip might help my feeble little mind work better. Like remember names. I’m possibly one of the worst name-remembers in history. I once looked in the mirror and had to ask myself, “So, one more time, tell me your name?” How awesome would it be to have a neural implant in my brain that gently reminds me with tender nudges who people are: “ARE YOU FREAKIN’ KIDDING ME!?! IT’S ED!!! HOW HARD IS THAT TO REMEMBER?!?” I could totally go for that.
Dear technology engineers … a little help with my email password
I was watching a car commercial the other night when it occurred to me that driver-less cars are probably the next big technological milestone. Here was a car that could automatically brake in emergency situations no matter what the driver was doing. The commercial showed a couple injured in an accident getting to magically go back in time to avoid the whole episode thanks to their car’s sensors predicting the crash and bringing the vehicle to a stop. Cool! Just like that I was a driver-less car convert. But at the same time, it also got me thinking that if we can create such incredible inventions, why do we continue to fail on easy, low-hanging fruit? Self-driving cars? Great. But why not pollen-resistant paint! My two cars could be mistaken for a landslide. They’re covered in so much dust, pollen and other assorted detritus that I sometimes lose them in parking lots. I refuse to wash them because I know it won’t last more than 5 minutes. So, I lose my cars and walk around asking people if they have seen something that looks like a boulder or what a cat might have coughed up.