I was promised jetpacks.
I’ve been a gadget-freak as long as I can remember, and for just as long, I’ve strongly suspected that the “productivity” or “happiness” or “massive penis” that the next awesome gadget would surely endow me with was an illusion. Deep down I knew my gadget habit was probably as useful as, say, my love of fine food. I absolutely love good food, but it doesn’t exactly make me a more productive member of society. The difference was, of course, that I didn’t justify a good meal by saying it would make me more productive, happier, or better hung.
Not any more. Gadgets are really making my life better, and it only just hit me this weekend.
My wife gave me my christmas gift—an Amazon Kindle—early this year, on Saturday. I immediately started reading “Coders At Work” on it, and while this isn’t a review and I haven’t spent more than four hours using the Kindle, I can say that my initial impressions are very favorable. More on that at some later date.
The next day, I went out for a three-hour training ride to the middle of fucking nowhere™ and back. About two hours in, my front tire went flat, and for reasons I won’t go into here because they make me look like an idiot, I was stranded. Since I was only about halfway back from the middle of fucking nowhere™, I couldn’t just call my wife and ask her to pick me up at the corner of Ima and Dumbass, because even though she knows that intersection well, I was nowhere near there.
But I have an iPhone.
So I pulled up the maps app, tapped that target icon[1], tapped ‘Share Location’ and MMS’ed it to the missus. As I learned in the first war in the gulf, GPS can find you anywhere—even in the middle of fucking nowhere™.
But, as you may have guessed, the middle of fucking nowhere™ is a fair ways from our house, so I had a long wait ahead of me. What to do for the next half-hour to forty-five minutes?
Oh, yeah, I have an iPhone. I checked Google Reader, then I checked Twitter, then I remembered something: Didn’t I hear something about Amazon releasing a Kindle app for iPhone? Yes! There it is in (or on, depending on which way you lean) the App Store! For free!
A minute later it was downloaded and installed. Now, I’m no downloading-an-app-over-the-air virgin or anything, but this is the first time it struck me how completely awesome it is that you can grab an app anywhere you have a cellular connection. But that’s nowhere near as awesome as what happened next.
The Kindle Reader app grabbed “Coders at Work” in less than a minute. When I tapped on the book’s cover, it opened to the same place I had left off on the Kindle device the night before. And there I was, sitting at the side of the road in the middle of fucking nowhere™ in my silly-looking cycling outfit reading Doug Crockford’s and Brendan Eich’s takes on Javascript, complexity, and how to hire great hackers.
And of course, when I finally got home, I ran to the Kindle device and, yes, “Coders at Work” came up right where I had left off reading at the side of the road on my iPhone. I never had to tell the device or the app to sync, it Just Worked.
Now, I know we humans have tougher problems to solve than keeping The Fat Triathlete occupied while he waits for a ride in the middle of fucking nowhere™. But damn if I don’t feel—for the first time in my life— that the gadgets I own are actually helping me work on those problems rather than getting in the way.
Bring on the next gadget!
[1] Am I the only one that feels like they might be calling down artillery or an air raid on their heads when they tap that button?
