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Finally!
by
Brian Sorrell
Finally! I Can Send Pictures
From The Phone To The Toaster
(Or, how to spend a $6 Billion research budget)
I can't count how many mornings I've stood watching the auto-start,
auto-grind, auto-sweetened, auto-drink, auto-clean-the-liver and
wake-you-up-right-friggin-now coffee maker make my coffee and thought to myself,
"Wouldn't it be great if the toaster could see what I see?"
But alas, until recently, such conveniences have not been possible. Until,
that is, the advent of the camera phone. That advent was, let's be honest,
Earth-shattering.
I remember an advertisement for camera phones (think way back — like six
months or so) that featured a car wreck. "My insurance adjuster will never
believe this!" "Hang on!" Fumbles for camera-phone-toaster-oven — snaps picture.
"Poof! There's proof!" Of course this is a common scenario — all too common, and
obviously worth pumping billions of research dollars into an efficient and
productive solution. It's a social cause.
crazy happy
However, this advertisement misses the obvious. Consider the following:
Car wreck. "Hang On!" Poof. And then a piano jumps off a local skyscraper (jaded
and depressed about its recent replacement by the Motorola slim-line
mini-concertina- keyboard-cellular-amplification-midi-pod), barely missing your
head, but clipping your phone hand, spraining your finger (close scrape there)
and crushing the fresh digital representation of your staggeringly unfathomable
fender-bender. Now you're really screwed because, clearly, the piano incident
will go unnoticed by the incredulous adjusters, but the fender-bender photo
spilled out all over the pavement in a puddle of ones and zeroes is gone
forever.
What's missing? If you could have instantly beamed the Man-Ray Masterpiece
photo to your toaster, microwave, or any of a smattering of smartie-pants-devices
on your local wireless 8011.j.8675.309.ne plug 'n' play MicroWare Daiquiri
Spinner, you'd at least only have to pony up the deductible. Talk about really
screwed. And we haven't even gotten to the piano disaster.
That's the thing about synthesized modern commodified music: it's
dangerous. Look at how one little, forgettable, lip-synching, hoe-down
live-television appearance can kill the Alka-Seltzer buzz of a seasoned
professional like Ashlee Simpson. How do you think pianos across the universe
feel to know that midi-recorded digitized plugins are taking their jobs. Not a
good feeling, you can bet! And when the saxophones get wind of Kenny G, you
better take cover, Mister.
But about the camera phone. I read this in a recent article about Bill
Gates' appearance at the Consumer Electronic Show:
In one successful demo, [Conan] O'Brien took some photos of Gates with a
Nikon D2X digital camera, and these were beamed seamlessly, wirelessly and
automatically to a photo album on a Windows Media Center PC. Later, someone
showed how the same photos could be browsed remotely using a Windows Mobile
smart phone.
-- Gates Grins And Bears It , Guardian
This is important stuff, the stuff of huge productivity advances and not
to be underestimated. The problem is, the technology is only useful if you have
a lot of friends who might be interested in pictures of your interview with Bill
Gates (highly unlikely), or if you're stuck in a quandary with a smashed piano
next to a benign fender-bender, your insurance adjuster solely interested in the
latter.
So really, the technology is all about friends and pianos. I did a little
research to get some more insights into the topic. There's a place called
"Steve's Piano Service" that seems to specialize in accessories for moving
pianos. For example, they offer:
Self-Lifting Piano Truck
Since 1901, this self-lifting moving truck has been used to move grand
pianos easily and efficiently by two people.
-- Some Link About Piano Moving
The point is, the Self-Lifting Piano Truck is made for you and me.
Literally: it's designed for enabling two people to lift a piano, because, let's
face it, you're not going to be able to gather up a Coalition Of The Willing
(Piano Moving Division) no matter how much pizza and beer you offer. Even smooth
British Pub Ales.
I contend that it's much the same with the camera phone. Consider the
universally-understood torture of holiday snapshots, slideshows, home movies and
the like. A good technological investment would be in developing ways that only
two people had to ever bear witness to such things (carnage?), much as two
people can move a 3,000 pound piano by rolling it on empty beer cans and pizza
boxes.
Instead, Gates and company have been hard at work developing technologies
that spread the joy of candid snapshots so far that my food processor can now
share in my experiences with dental hygiene and acid reflux. Instantly. And
downloadable by everyone on Earth and even the Mars Rover who seems to be
holding up just fine we're all glad to hear. Will they be interested on an
intergalactic scale? I'm betting not.
In fact, if you were to ask me whether I wanted to see your candid shots
of DisneyLand's pre-packaged-processed-heat-and-serve historical theme park, I'd
say no. No thank you, that is. Even the totally cool-rad gimmick of getting them
streamed and beamed to my auto-peeler-juicer-drinker-pisser wouldn't sway me
beyond the intrigue of squeezable mayonnaise and spray cheese. End of story.
The deep irony here involves the piano. The history of computing starts
with, we all know, the abacus — an indispensable counting tool that got Men from
all cultures past 21. The abacus morphed into the slide rule, which was
developed by a trombone player. But the pianist in their jazz quintet argued
that he could build a superior counting device based on a concept he called
"keyboard" (the accordion player tried to make a similar case but was soundly
routed by the drummer (who could only count to 4 — so much the worse for him)).
Alan Turing, a huge jazz fan in his own right, caught wind of an obscure
journal publication about the ongoing "counting" debate and argued that he could
develop a machine (in concept anyway) that could calculate anything you threw at
it. Turns out this was only partly right because, conceptually, there was no
terminus to the calculations describing the rise of reality television. His
silly ideas, as a consequence, were largely abandoned. This made room for the
jazz quintet to continue in their pursuits of the ultimate counting machines.
Mr. Watt, the trombonist and lifelong Democrat, lost the "W" and spun off
into "AT&T", which was how he always spelled his name publicly in an effort to
stave off rumors that trombone playing causes stuttering. Mr. Pibm, the pianist,
lost the "M" and spun off into "Mr. Pibb" (piano playing does indeed cause
stuttering), a successful rhubarb-flavored cola. His wife, Mrs. Pibm, thought
that the computation device was a better business idea, lost the "P" (she was
old and had incontinence issues) and so "IBM" was born. In keeping with the
original concept — that the piano should be the foundation of all computation,
the PC was born. PC, of course, really stands for "Piano Counter".
And so it was that modern computing devices grew out of the piano — the
irony being that digital technologies now try to replace the 3,000 pound
monsters because it takes too many people to move them. Hence, the spate of
piano suicides (have you ever heard of one that was actually in tune) and the
need for camera phones that can bounce pictures off of the Mars Rover's
Jack-In-The-Box Antenna Ball, to the Wendy's drive through, a quick trip through
Google's desktop search, AOL's universal-rejection spam filter, and Home Depot
Self-Checkout lines, and into your insurance adjuster’s Wet-Dry Shop-Vac.
Truly, these are the best of times.
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