‘Twas the Night Before iPad
This is a wonderful age in which we live. Were Douglas Adams alive today, I wonder which piece of modern consumer electronic devices would draw his attention in the same manner as the widespread adoption of digital watches did at the time he wrote the Hitchhiker’s Guide.
My guess would be electronic toothbrushes, but thats just because I believe Mr. Adams would find the existence of the term ‘manual toothbrush’ deliciously absurd and ripe for lampooning. More likely, he would choose a device with a similar impact on the social landscape and similar ubiquity. The iPod, perhaps.
Its funny to look back and the impact that that one single device has had. As a music lover, its hard to divorce the concept of digital music from the player, itself. I wonder what the iPad will come to represent.
I’m not going to take this opportunity to make any wild predictions about the future–I’ll leave that to the fine editorial staffs at publications such as FastWiredCompanyCrunch. Rather, I’m going to take this opportunity to take a nostalgic look back and remember the electronic devices that have impacted my life.
In somewhat autobiographical order:
- The Walkman (road trips with my parents just got better for all parties involved)
- The Nintendo Entertainment System (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, B, A, Select, Start)
- The original Discman (which still works)
- The Palm Pilot (anyone remember how to write in Palm-script?)
- The Motorola StarTac (still the most reliable phone I’ve ever owned)
- The Palm V (my first purchase off eBay)
- Several crappy phones (honestly can’t remember what happened to the StarTac)
- A Blackberry (email on my phone? wild.)
- About a half dozen iPods of various shapes and sizes
- A Gen 1 iPhone (still in service)
And a look ahead to the device I most want to own in the future:
- A Hot Tub Time Machine (its a hot tub that travels through time)
In the spirit of the dawn of a new technical modality and in recognition that I will own an iPad when I can devise some sort of use case, no matter how preposterous, I have developed a way to celebrate April 3rd: The University Avenue iPad Drinking Game.
My thoughts are as follows:
Go to University Ave in Palo Alto, and find a bar with outdoor seating that is situated between the Apple Store and a coffee shop (Joya, for example).
- Every time someone passes by the bar with an iPad box / Apple Store bag reasonably assumed to contain an iPad, you take a drink of your beer.
- Every time someone walks directly from the Apple Store into a coffee shop within eyesight, you take two drinks.
- Every time someone walks directly from the Apple Store into the bar you are sitting in and begins to diddle with his new iPad, you take a shot.
- If you spot Steve Jobs, its Apple Martini time.
Who’s with me?
Darth Capitalist Theoretically in the Black
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Andrew Shriner
DarthCapitalist.com
Palo Alto, CA — October 7th, 2009 — Darth Capitalist has just learned via Google Alerts that DarthCapitalist.com, the Internet’s 9,731,859th most popular destination, has an estimated worth of $248.20 according to WebsiteOutlook.com.
Apparently, if Darth Capitalist were to run advertising it would yield $0.34 per day. Given our hosting and domain costs and almost 3 months of operation, our IRR would be 8.01%.
“I would like to thank our dedicated team of production, editorial and research staff for their hard work and dedication in reaching this milestone in theoretical enterprise value,” said Andrew Shriner, founder of Darth Capitalist.
Given Darth Capitalist’s hypothetically cash flow positive balance sheet, it joins the ranks of FaceBook and other highly successful Silicon Valley digital media companies to have recently reached this milestone.
Gates to Build Weather Machine, Sort Of
I love this news item. Bill Gates has filed a patent for a system to neutralize hurricanes. The science goes a little like this: Hurricanes are powered by water vapor evaporated from the water’s surface. The water condenses, warms the air and in the absence of wind shear, a low pressure system forms and wind begins to swirl. The theory is that if the water can be prevented from evaporating, the hurricane’s power plant shuts down.
In collaboration with Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO, founder of Intellectual Ventures, and all-around smart guy, Mr. Gates proposes a system that will pump cold water from the ocean’s depths and use it to lower the temperature of the water’s surface. Apparently, reducing the surface temperature by 4.5 degrees at the eye of a hurricane would be enough to deactivate it.
The technical and logistic complexity would surely be high, but the economic and human savings of preventing another Katrina are compelling. But what I like almost as much as the potential to save human lives is the sheer ambitiousness of it all. I have often spoken to friends of my plans to amass a great fortune and then invest it in the development of lightsaber technology, but apparently I’ve been thinking small.
Mr. Gates has certainly proven to be an conscientious steward of his personal wealth. Rather than eating California Condor egg omelets and using the works of Carl Fabergé for target practice, he has been thoughtfully attacking some of the world’s largest problems. That being said, in the future I hope to see his name attached to patent applications for (in order of importance):
- Lightsabers
- A Time Machine
- Warp Technology
- A way to prevent any more Terminator movies from being made
But for the time being I’ll have to be satisfied that when a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, Mr. Gates may have something to say about what happens next.
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