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March 14, 2007
Roger Tory Peterson on PDA
http://www.ohgizmo.com/2007/03/13/palm-tungsten-based-bird-encyclopedia/
Despite writing a small tech column for a strategy magazine and reviewing tons of business plans, I only rarely get the feeling that I am at the dawn of a great new age. Palm has just given me one of those moments by integrating a bird encyclopedia into a PDA which is being sold as a standalone bird encyclopedia. This sounds really dull, right, and the product—which appears to be a large birding book, full of text and pictures, crammed into a PDA—is kinda of dull but the possibilities are completely appealing.
This year, we have a text-based bird watcher’s PDA. Next year, I’d like to have a PDA with stored and matchable bird calls. Users record a bird call and then match and time stamp it. Digital camera photos can be time stamped and appended.
This is, of course, just the beginning. A different PDA manufacturer comes out with a different guide, maybe one on seashells, or stamps, or garbage trucks. Aficionados across the states begin collecting detailed, certified records of the objects that they have viewed. Knitted doll experts rub elbows with torn paper bag experts on the subways. The world—as it always is through the eyes of collectors—becomes terribly interesting again. Computer sales go down, walking becomes more popular. Urbanites (except for the used gym mat experts) leave gyms in droves. This borders on brave new world type thinking.
Of course I look forward to the convergence point when and infinite number of affinity groups become focused on single items just as Make/ DIY crafts groups produce an infinite number of items to be observed. A bit of a geek nirvana, maybe.
Posted by jb at 12:27 AM | Comments (0)
March 13, 2007
General Update
Hmm.
Moving, apparently, to Gurgaon, just south of Delhi, probably in mid April. I’ve seen a bit of the city. It’s the Trenton, NJ of India.
On the plus side, the apartment did not work out so apparently I’m getting a small house with terraces and a big field in the back yard (villa they called it). It is a bit of a fixer-upper (these phrases always give me pause. A fixer-upper in India is not a fixer-upper in the United States) but apparently the house will have a full staff (security guards, cook, etc).
So far, my interactions with drivers, cooks etc have been a bit awkward. Americans are not, as a rule, used to these services. It's bad form to push back on the services themselves though, since you just end up insulting someone else's professionalism. Also, I'm just not qualified to drive in Delhi.
I’m in Singapore now but I’m off to Bangalore on the 19th
My parents are leaving their house in Landenberg forever and moving back to the farm in VA. I wish that I could help out with the move and with cleaning up the farm (cleaning out dead trees and vines and poison ivy and cutting back the boxwoods—the farm is pretty torn up right now). I have promised my parents that I will be at the farm for Christmas but everything will be covered with snow then.
Why does a Flickr group search for ennui return the group “Men who love shoes?”
I went for my vaccinations today. They gave me the first round of standard stuff and I need to come back for the Hep B and Hep A (if the screen suggests that I need it) shots. They gave me two boxes of Mephaquin for malaria but I’d rather figure out a way to immunize myself since I don’t want to take a dose every week for my entire duration in India. Maybe I’ll just take a box if I am running a fever. The CDC recommend typhoid but the doctor here feels that’s overrated. Maybe I will look into it later if I ever get the chance to try a bike ride down the west coast of India.
Y’all are of course welcome to visit once I get set up. There should be several guest rooms, at least for a while, since nobody else from my company will be living in the India office (Hari is down in Kerala, which is not at all close to Delhi).
The house
Across the street (these are not my photos)
Posted by jb at 04:42 AM | Comments (2)