Living in the future

Got into Boston from Europe Saturday night. It was a strange 7-hour flight back. The person sitting next to me didn’t do anything the entire flight. He didn’t watch a movie, didn’t read a book or magazine or newspaper, didn’t play video games on the seat-back monitor, and he didn’t sleep. He did eat the in-flight food. But mainly he just sat there, staring straight ahead. Creepy.

The weather was superb this weekend and I got to eat dinner on my porch Sunday night with the de Icazas and the LeSages. Robert and I went to New York yesterday to meet with one of our customers. Due to some mainly inscrutable logistical reason, all the shuttle flights back to Boston were canceled, so we ended up renting a car and driving back. Bored on the car ride, we made videos with my new phone and SMS’d them to Miguel. He in turn recorded himself sitting in his office and sent replies to us.

(You can view these videos with Real player)

It was cool, sitting there in the car watching Miguel sitting there in his office.

Later in the drive, we called Joe on the speakerphone and he gave us an aerial tour of the region using Google’s satellite maps. It went like this:

Joe:	There’s a golf course on your right.
Us:	Cool.
Joe:	Huh, what’s that strange building coming up on your left?
Us:	It’s a Marriott.
Joe:	Oh. Cool.

My new phone is pretty awesome. It can take 1280×1024 stills, videos, it has a voice recorder, it plays MP3s, AACs, and MPEG4 movies, you can put 1GB of MMC memory in it, it has a radio, web browser, IM client, IMAP client, POP client, walky-talky feature, word-by-word translator for six different languages, and of course bluetooth with GPRS so I can dial up from my laptop with it.

 [nat@booyakasha ~]$ hcitool scan

 Scanning ...

 00:13:70:A8:8A:62 Nat 00:13:70:A8:86:EC love machine

It took about five minutes to setup Bluetooth with SUSE 9.3; I just enabled the service in Yast, set a PIN, and then configured a PPP connection to dial-up via the bluetooth device.

Oh yeah, it can also place and receive phone calls.