I got this e-mail the other day, parts of which I’ve plagiarized unabashedly because I think it probably expresses some of the feelings many of us have:
“The Cellphone
When I bought my Blackberry, I thought about the 30-year business I ran with 1,800 employees, all without a cell phone that plays music, takes videos, pictures and communicates with Facebook and Twitter. I signed up under duress for Twitter and Facebook, so my seven kids, their spouses, my 13 grand kids and two great-grand kids could communicate with me in the modern way. I figured I could handle something as simple as Twitter with only 140 characters of space.
The Twitter
My phone was beeping every three minutes with the details of everything except the bowel movements of the entire next generation. I am not ready to live like this. I keep my cell phone in the garage in my golf bag. When I’m asked if I tweet my answer is “No, but I fart quite a bit!”
The GPS
The kids bought me a GPS for my last birthday because they say I get lost every now and then going over to the grocery store or library. I keep that in a box under my tool bench with the Blue tooth (it’s red) phone I am supposed to use when I drive.
The Cordless
To be perfectly frank, I am still trying to learn how to use the cordless phones in our house. We have had them for four years, but I still haven’t figured out how I lose three phones all at once and have to run around digging under chair cushions, checking bathrooms, and the dirty laundry baskets when the phone rings.
The Bags
The world is just getting too complex for me. They even mess me up every time I go to the grocery store. You would think they could settle on something themselves but this sudden “Paper or Plastic?” “Paper or plastic?” I just say, “Doesn’t matter to me. I’m bi-sacksual.” Then it’s their turn to stare at me with a blank look.
The Remotes
We senior citizens don’t need any more gadgets. The TV remote and the garage door remote are about all we can handle.”
Have a great summer and be sure to take your kids or grandkids to at least one holiday spot with no cell tower nearby — it will drive them crazy!
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We live at a time when hardly a day passes before some amazing discovery or invention is revealed in the media.
Take the recent news when we have seen a handgun that could actually kill things created on a 3D printer, a product from Google that facilitates hands-free photography by being able to take a picture with the blink of an eye and a material made with the help of Scotch tape that could in time replace silicon in electronic devices.
The last is called “graphene,” which was actually discovered in 2004 at the University of Manchester by two physicists who isolated a single layer of graphene using Scotch tape before going on to demonstrate its remarkable conductive and resilient properties.
Graphene is a one-atom thick layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice that is one million times thinner than a human hair, but 300 times stronger than steel and 1,000 times more conductive than silicon. Moreover, because it is only one atom thick, it is perfectly transparent and flexible.
Initial applications will find graphene replacing the relatively expensive metal, indium selenide in solar cells followed by products such as cell phones integrated into the likes of the clothes we wear, pieces of paper and in windows (the glass, not the MS type). And since graphene is transparent (it’s only one atom thick!) it will be found anywhere there is a need to embed electronic displays in our surroundings.
Maybe that plastic gun we heard about the other day could be printed from invisible graphene. Now that would be scary!
The Vernon PC Users’ Club meets the second Tuesday of every month at 7 p.m. at the Schubert Centre in the cafeteria. Meetings have wrapped up for the summer and will resume in September.
Call Betty at 542-7024 or Olive at 542-8490 for more information.
