Technology can be an unexpected surprise
February 22nd, 2006
I’m a technophile within reason. I consider myself part early adopter, part pragmatist; I might rave about some new gadget, but the checking account usually doesn’t agree. So while I don’t surround myself with the latest and greatest, I try to take advantage of what I’ve got right now. Sometimes by accident.
Case in point: my car broke down last week. Heading back home during rush hour, on a very busy commute (there was a major accident bringing traffic to a standstill). That quickly sucked; I ended up having to pull over in a real hurry. When I was finally on the side of the road, I spent a few minutes making sense of it all. I even popped the hood (as if I expect to see what the problem is…I don’t even know what the heck I’m looking at). Eventually, I realized I was going to have to call a tow truck driver — which I do — at which point he tells me he’ll be there in “a few minutes.” Hearing that, and seeing the bumper-to-bumper traffic still around me, I expected to be there for a while.
I began to settle in by fidgeting with the radio, trying to find a station worth tuning into. A few seconds passed before I realized something: my phone has email and a browser…why not hop online for a while? As it turns out, my phone plan has a pretty fast internet connection, and it offers unlimited data usage. Still, I’ve only really been on the mobile internet when it was absolutely critical, and almost never for casual surfing (I’ve been burned by data plans before). Yet here I was, asking myself for permission to surf the web.
I immediately key in Google Personalized, my news reader of choice. I have it set to pull in articles from a dozen sites, and I hadn’t checked it that day. Bingo! Instant time-killer. For the next hour and a half, I was catching up on articles from 37signals, Guy Kawasaki, GMSV, Mike Davidson, Digg, Reddit, you name it. When I got bored, I checked my IMAP mail and even squeezed in a round of Solitaire. By the time the tow truck driver arrived (1 hour and 45 minutes later), I was in the middle of Digg’s page 3. I could have easily kept reading.
To me, it’s just amazing the source of these diversions came from a device that, in retrospect, was only expected to handle Palm-type functions when I bought it.
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