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This mirrors my special transatlantic relationship. But sometimes these Brits can be tricky and pretend that they don’t know that we know best. Yes, I’m looking at YOU, dear husband.

Posted via email from Ingrid’s posterous

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“Is this the Circle Line?” she asks.

“No, it’s the District line,” come the slightly sympathetic replies.

“But the poles are yellow,” she says.

And indeed they are.  Although the District line is green on the underground map, the structural accents are picked out in cheerful yellow.   And although the circle line is yellow on the map – not all trains decorated lemon are Circle line trains*.

Not the circle line

Although I can’t see her face, she’s clearly disappointed.  She’s got on the wrong train.

Several commuters pipe up:

“That’s a good idea, though.”

“A lovely idea, that would make sense.”

“Perhaps we should tell TFL.”

____

* I think the District Line and Circle Line share rolling stock, i.e. trains.

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Some of you have been more than aware…one person at least has said “I wish you’d just go ahead and get it so we could stop hearing about it.”  And there’s an important lesson on message saturation – isn’t it.  I was quite careful not to Tweet about it more than once a week.

Anyway, I did it.  I didn’t smoke. And true to his word, we went to get the Mac on the day marked on the calendar.

The experience

Yes, I could have probably ordered online and avoided the throng of Regent Street in the last few shopping days before Christmas, but I wanted to get the full experience… so I headed down to the flagship Apple store and milked it for all it was worth. The lovely Adam helped steer me to the place where consumer surplus was fully extracted.  He nodded sagely at the right points, although he did laugh when I said the last time I used a Mac was in the 80s and tried to sell me the full tutorial package.

Ha, ha screw that – I’ll just muddle through the way I always do and ask for help from my Twitter friends.  “Are you sure they won’t get tired of that?” he asked.  “Not so long as I’m a gateway for funding,” I thought.

And he was a little bit dubious when my husband demanded the academic discount and displayed his university staff card. “Students, I can understand,” he says – “But you guys are earning money.”  (But maybe not for long…thanks Mandy).

Full social media douchebag package

Anyway – we got the thing home and I decided to do the unboxing video…because I can – go on – it’s only 40 seconds.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNScLJ_2Mkk]

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1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

And I thought to myself….well, that ain’t right.  I’m not exactly an early adopter – but I’ve been kinda making a career around this social media thing for a little while (particularly as it relates to local government – I know snooze – if you’re interested you can check out my work blog where my latest blog posts deal with the complexities of applying for government funding, a host of links to data policy and a ‘fun’ post on library policy in the digital age).

I like to think of myself as fairly open minded and willing to think of the possibilities of new tech as applied to 1. my life 2. public policy and locally administered services.  I struggled to think of things tech that were invented after I turned 30 that I thought were dubious.  Frivolous and probably the recipe for softening the moral fibre of society, yes.   In violation of the universal constants as we knew them, no.

But last night as I walking up Victoria Street – I saw an add for wireless charging.  I’d read about this before but this was the first time I’d seen a genuine ad on a bus stop.

Ad for Powermat Wireless Charging

And I thought That just ain’t right.

How does it know where to send the electricity?  Won’t the electricity just be floating around doing strange things to our brains and nervous systems and turn us into weird half-human, half-portable electronic device susceptible to marketing messages delivered via electro-magnetic pulses.

And part of me is thinking, hey that looks kinda cool.  No wires.  You just lay your phone, whatever – on the mat and you’re charging.   But it’s not that simple…you can’t just buy the charging mat – you also have to buy a receiver (which appears to be in the shape of a case for your device or a battery door for Blackberries for example).   So, slightly less cool – and anyway – no doubt a contributor to the dissolute nature of modern youth and against the natural order of things.

________

Read more about inductive charging on wikipedia.

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Mister and I portrayed Thomas and Mary Elizabeth Ryman (as in the famous Ryman Auditorium) in a historical cemetery tour over the weekend. Part of his script talked about how Ryman and his dad froze flatboats full of water in the winter, then cut blocks of ice from the boats (and sometimes from the frozen Cumberland River) and stored them in caves & whatnot, usually packed in sawdust, till the summer.

Now, some of you who have been to Monticello have seen Thomas Jefferson’s icehouse, which is a big ol’ stone pit where they stored blocks of ice. So when Mister got to his part about the ice, I said……

“Mr. Ryman, that’s all remarkably fascinating, and I’ma let you finish, but Thomas Jefferson had the best icehouse of all time.”

From Ariedana

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