It is true, cities are exciting but not when enveloped with staggering heat and humidity the way New York is right now, and everywhere you go you feel as if the sun is constantly leaning on your back.
However, your family arrived from overseas and today is the day to take them shopping downtown in Manhattan.
It becomes extremely miserable being outside, wading through throngs of people holding on to water bottles(myself included) for dear life.
The subway is worst but imagine waiting on the platform for thirty minutes or more for a train to crawl into the station and you finally step into a car with no air conditioning...eyes wide and mouth opened not so much to utter something obscene (what tha' $#!...) but perhaps for ventilation purposes--the exhaustion cracks you and you're too tired to maneuver through the car to somehow get into another car, but you try anyway, (family, shopping bags and all) for chances are (and we
did try), that the other car is just as or staggeringly hotter than the last one.
The last thing you need at this point is to hear a baby screaming at the top of its lungs--as if the HeAt, and the train screeching on the tracks through the tunnels weren't bad enough.
By this time you're dying to get off the train and back out onto the street in the sun, mind you, because you figure there is a great deal more heat and humidity in the subway and relief is to be sought outside. The prospect is irresistible--besides, you need a water refill. You get off the train and climb up the steps in a mad rush to get above New York, happy to leave "below" in more capable hands.
Above, police cars line the sidewalks and a crowd gathers at a newspaper stand. Onlookers are drenched in sweat but you bypass the crowd and it takes you about five minutes to spot a pizza restaurant down the way and another five to work your way down the sidewalk and go in.
Ahh--the air conditioning feels great. You eat and chit chat and you hardly want to leave afterwards to go back outside but you have to. Determined that this madness must cease, you call it a day and go home via the subway no doubt.
Later...
FRIEND ON THE PHONE: "So how did your shopping go?" ME: "fine."
Mark Pilgrim has an interesting weblog: Dive into Accessibility in which he discusses and provides new approaches by which "bloggers" can design their Weblogs for people with disabilities.
Although his entries are quite long he really delves into the subject and even uses character sketches of five real people with various disabilities including technological, which makes it difficult for them to take advantage of the Internet.
It's a pretty interesting read, particularly when you get to the sections where he provides his 25 tips on making accessible sites. The tips are all compiled from his interactions with people with disabilities who listed the features they would prefer to use when exploring the Internet; for instance, web-safe colors, identifying the links for images and so forth.
Although we all know about the Internet and accessibility issues, I found it interesting that Mark targets the blogging community. Thoughtful though.
So there you are, hundreds of miles away from your office in New York in the Negril sun in Jamaica, and you're thinking that you can't wait to jump into your trunks and go bask on the beach where you can check your emails and still manage the office while you're away. How can you manage it? Via the new PC you invested in earlier that week of course, and which you'll finally get a chance to test out. You're thinking that vacation or not, business is business, and you've got to swim with the sharks to stay afloat so that's why you bought the PC.
So you slip out the Xybernaut Mobile Assistant IV and you strap the apparatus to your body--complete with head gear, keyboard strapped to your wrist, cables wrapped around your waist and other contraptions, (and don't forget your bath trunks), all of which you must wear, because afterall, the Xybernaut Mobile Assistant IV is not a fully functioning computer when not completely integrated with you.
Don't believe me, just ask Steve Mann , dubbed the "father" of wearable PC's and the inventor of "WearComp"--a wearable computer, and "WearCam"--an eye camera and reality mediator. He just might tell you (a story I read about), about that time in Boston when he got lost and was able to retrace his tracks by calling up some photos he had sent earlier, to his WWW homepage using his micro camera.
So what about the business man vacationing on the beach in Jamaica? I don't know--perhaps he realized that he would look pretty strange wearing the contraption with his bath trunks or perhaps he found another way to use it. Still, would you take advantage of this new fashion trend--Wearable Computers? I've been thinking about it myself...
(Personally speaking, at first I thought I'd be worrying about bulk--the extra weight it would seem I had gained if I wore one, but then I found out that it need not be that bad, that there's hope for the future--check out Beauty and the Bits, an illustrated fashion show, showcasing some PC fashion trends that people can actually wear in the future, courtesy of MIT Media Laboratory to see what I mean. (Quite funny I thought!). As I understand it, Mann wanted the wearable PC to be incorporated into your dress so that no one else would know it was there. Hmm... Robocop comes to mind...p> The Xybernaut Mobile Assistant for instance, involves wearing a head and eye gear with cables and other apparatus. Ron White, wrote an article describing his experience wearing Xybernaut's Mobile Assistant--I was lucky enough to save the page back when it was published as the linl no longer refers to his article but here's what he said about it:
"The Xybernaut Mobile Assistant IV... is 16 pounds of computer equipment that is the essential first step toward becoming half-human, half-machine." He goes on: "One of the cables connects to a head-mounted XyberView display. A one-inch color LCD display hangs in front of my face; it's actually pointed away from me but is reflected off a concave mirror that magnifies the image to look like the equivalent of a small desktop monitor... With a little practice I can manage my new double vision, "seeing through" the translucent image when I need to do normal tasks, such as avoiding walls, and bringing the display back into focus when I need to do computer tasks. After a half-hour's practice I can actually manage both at once if I don't mind the accompanying schizophrenia".
Well, suffice to say I'm still interested in investing in one--would be nice if I'm on vacation right? I'll let you know what I decide. In the meantime I've been checking out the following sites:
