What did Father Christmas bring you?
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on January 2, 2007 at 12:20 pm
This year was particularly good in our household. Offspring number one works in Chicago for Navteq, the remote sensing and digital mapping company often accused of sending vehicles down impassable tracks; his sibling is part of Carphone Warehouse management team often accused of “selling” a dodgy free broadband service. Consequently they are in the “know” about new gadgets.
Our stockings this year included an absolutely brilliant robot that does the housework and an electronic guitar tuner that was “only five bucks”. Best of all, a tiny radio-controlled helicopter (the latter for me naturally) that with hours of practice I can just about get to go where I want it too. Did you know ‘ground effect” works on ceilings as well as floors? It’s something pilots of life-size choppers never come across.
However, the best thing is to see what toys…err…tools my switched on kids travel with. On arrival, both unpack their pockets. Tiny electronic gadgets tumble onto the coffee table like digital flotsam and jetsam. These contain their entire music collections, hours of TV shows and movies, spare telephones, games and their whole digital lifestyles in clam shell devices. Altogether, gigabytes of data held in storage on tiny wafers of RAM. As far as my offspring are concerned, IBM’s announcement of photonic storage by 2015 is 16 years too late.
All this silicone chippery comes with a downside lugged round inside the backpack full of power supplies, connection leads and plugs to fit every electrical outlet socket in the world. Even including the ones run on yak dung in Turkmenistan and those far off places seen on Diplomacy boards. This year, one of my offspring decided to be clever and to charge everything up via his laptop. One slight problem – he forgot his laptop’s charger. A quick Christmas Eve trip to Maplins showed that not all leads are the same, especially for old Dell Latitudes with proprietary sockets. If only he had brought his iBook instead. Never mind, the US doesn’t celebrate Boxing Day so the missing lead was sent from his office, ordered 2pm GMT (8am USA) and delivered 9am a day later by FedEx.
One thing to note is that neither of my kids use Sat-Nav devices. If one works for a group who sell them and the other makes the maps to go on them maybe there is something to be learned from this? Or it could be like father like child because I haven’t got one either.
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