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Glowing in the twilight
Jul. 3rd, 2008 09:20 amI picked up a chap from Fraser yesterday evening. One of Canberra's fringe suburbs, maybe fifteen minutes' drive from Civic, assuming no congestion, which is a safe bet most of the day and all of the night. There's one street which is open on one side. Parkland, stretching out into farmland flowing over the border into New South Wales, the rolling hills rising into mountains in the distance.
A very pleasant outlook. I passed a chap sitting in the twilight beside the road, just sitting on a bench, the glow of a laptop open on his lap. And a little glowing white apple symbol. He was using a MacBook Air!
Maybe he was checking his email, maybe writing up some university homework, maybe composing a sonnet to his love. I was too far away to see more than a glow from the screen, but whatever it was, it looked so very romantic in the fading twilight, the land spreading out before him.
What a science fiction world we live in nowadays. Twenty years ago, the thought of a computer small and light enough enough to slip into an envelope was fantasy. Nowadays, the average mobile phone has about the same processing power as a Cray supercomputer. Teenagers buy a fresh one every year.
My cab is full of cameras that see in the dark, computers that link me with bank networks, little boxes that communicate with satellites to tell me exactly where I am. In another few years, I joke to my passengers. There won't be any need for a cabbie. Just a GPS system, a cruise control button, and a credit card slot.
I dropped my passenger off at a club - it was the big game on television tonight, the deciding match in the interstate football series - and found a quiet rank, where I had a few minutes to pull out my own MacBook Air, plug in the wireless modem, and upload a new program file to the FaceBook application I'm working on.
What a world we live in.
A very pleasant outlook. I passed a chap sitting in the twilight beside the road, just sitting on a bench, the glow of a laptop open on his lap. And a little glowing white apple symbol. He was using a MacBook Air!
Maybe he was checking his email, maybe writing up some university homework, maybe composing a sonnet to his love. I was too far away to see more than a glow from the screen, but whatever it was, it looked so very romantic in the fading twilight, the land spreading out before him.
What a science fiction world we live in nowadays. Twenty years ago, the thought of a computer small and light enough enough to slip into an envelope was fantasy. Nowadays, the average mobile phone has about the same processing power as a Cray supercomputer. Teenagers buy a fresh one every year.
My cab is full of cameras that see in the dark, computers that link me with bank networks, little boxes that communicate with satellites to tell me exactly where I am. In another few years, I joke to my passengers. There won't be any need for a cabbie. Just a GPS system, a cruise control button, and a credit card slot.
I dropped my passenger off at a club - it was the big game on television tonight, the deciding match in the interstate football series - and found a quiet rank, where I had a few minutes to pull out my own MacBook Air, plug in the wireless modem, and upload a new program file to the FaceBook application I'm working on.
What a world we live in.
