Rumors abound about Apple coming out with a new iPhone type device. Here's my suggestion for our friends in Cupertino: Come out with a combination phone/iPod shuffle--A phone that clips onto your shirt and randomly dials anyone in the address book. They could spin it saying it's more fun and will lead to chance encounters, when in fact it would mostly lead to you getting your mother-in-law on the phone 90% of the time and having to excuse yourself and hang up gracefully. We can call it the Phuffle.
December 2006 Archives
This actually happened about a week ago, but I've had the blog-malaise and haven't done much reporting here (as I'm sure is obvious). Travelled up to Hartford to visit/help out Greg's parents, Eleanor and Dale Blake. Two nicer people, I've never met. Of course, when Greg was around, most of the things I heard about them was bitching, but that's usually the case with kids and their parents, no matter how old the kids (and the parents!) become. Greg hated asking them for things, and I'm sure they offered with great frequency knowing them better now. He SO valued living on his own, and I'm know that when he had to resort to moving back there because of a combination of getting downsized and his illness (and his utter lack of motivation to go find another job, but that was Greg...), he just loathed the idea. Still, I think it was probably a good thing is a lot of ways--his parents got to spend a lot more time with him in what they didn't realize would be his last year or two.
Anyway, I (and everyone I know that met them) find them sweet, charming, extremely bright people who give 'till it hurts, so the least I could do was schlep up there and help them untangle the mass of wires that any techie worth his/her salt would leave behind without a manual. Lord knows that if I go tomorrow, Kim will have a nightmare trying to figure out what's connected to what. That's like the new version of a Last Will and Testement--a manual of how everything is hooked up:
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I, Paul Meyerson, being of sound mind and body (sort of...), do hereby state that the component cables go firts into the receiver and then into the Xbox, but have to be swaped out in order to use the cable...
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Greg's setup was pretty confusing, but it helped that I was able to figure out his master password. People had changed things on his network since he's passed by wiping and reinstalling them because they couldn't get in and didn't know where to look for a password, so it had a bit of a crowbarred-into feel, but we got most of the stuff cleaned up. They were pretty pleased, and I got a rubbermaid container full of really good chocolate-chip cookies out of it, so it worked out just fine.
