Just Off the Info Highway
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technology
Train in vain
I rode on a berserk subway train the other day. At every stop the woman inside the PA machine issued a different Cassandra-like announcement: “this train is delayed due to weather” “this train is delayed due to mechanical difficulties” “this train is delayed due to signal problems” “this train is delayed due to passenger illness”
Raising the bar
Last week many news outlets carried a story about the 40th anniversary of the creation of the bar code. I found this puzzling because I recalled that a couple of years ago there was a story about the 60th anniversary of the bar code. And unless the bar code had defied the laws of aging,
Private eyes are watching you
I now have my fingerprints on file. This might be a good thing in case something bad happens to me (and a note to all: if the basement floor looks recently enrobed in concrete, please ask some questions). On the other hand I now have my fingerprints on file, which places certain constraints on future
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Hello, hello, is anybody out there?
I spend most of my day on the phone. I am not having conversations that are, like, awesome discussions about whether Justin Bieber is still hot or not. I am not texting my current whereabouts or dinner plans. I am not taking selfies and uploading them to Instagram. No, I am doing work or trying
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Don’t sit under the apple tree
Apparently January 2014 marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the Apple Macintosh computer. One thing that completely annoys me is the way the current day media talks at length about ‘digital natives’ and how much the millennials and their subsequent generations know about technology. I beg to differ because I doubt they would
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Call me
I am not sure if this is truly a coincidence or not, but this week was both the 50th anniversary of the touch tone phone and the 50th anniversary of Dr. Who, the latter of which as you should know is closely linked to the phone. But in fact today’s topic is not Daleks nor
Watch, look and listen
For some reason I missed the memo on the anniversary of the wrist watch last year. These days, we simply call it a watch and don’t add any information about its location on a particular body part. But back in the day (1912 and earlier), watches lived in pockets or on broaches. Apparently, the watch
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Video killed the radio star
The Yellow Pages arrived on my porch a couple of weeks ago. At first I wasn’t sure what brick of paper was blocking the top of my stairs as I thought the Yellow Pages had gone the way of the telephone booth. But no. Someone within the Yellow Pages organization still thinks a physical directory
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The writing is on the wall
Apparently hand writing is on its last legs (or more correctly, its last arms). Specifically, cursive writing is currently in the academic cross hairs, although block printing is probably not too far behind. Much like we no longer teach long division or the dreaded times tables because their efficacy has been eclipsed by calculators and
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