Famous saying as interpreted by Swype

My (not so) smart phone has this feature called “Swype.” Instead of having to type each letter individually, I just move my finger from letter to letter and when I’m done with a word, I stop touching the screen.

Like many aspects of technology it is a great idea, but it has room for improvement. Swype will often guess which word you meant and then give you options. However, you can just swype away and it will fill in what it thinks you meant—often with interesting results.

For an experiment, I swyped in some famous sayings without trying to correct what it was guessing. Here are the results:

You can least a footwear to water bit you cannot make him Debbi.

A birth in the hand is Rupert two in the hush.

We have morph rip fear Burr dress outsold.

Am apple a day metros the donut away.

A penny fabric is a parent earned.

Sox of one, half dozen of the outlast.

A stick in tome access none.

A rose why outrigger name would angle a sweet.

All work and how past makes jack a dull bit.

I know or like the back of my hams.

My computer won’t let me

There are numerous books and movies that use the premise that man creates something in an effort to make his life easier. After a time, the creation turns against who created it.

Off the top of my head, I can think of several movies where that creation is a computer in one form or another: Tron, The Matrix, Blade Runner, WarGames, The Terminator and I, Robot.

The idea seems pretty farfetched, doesn’t it? After all, with all these movies warning us about the dangers, we wouldn’t let that happen in real life—would we?

I had scheduled an appointment for a technician from Time Warner to come replace our modem—our internet phone was having issues. The tech tried to call us to confirm the appointment, but couldn’t get through (Duh! We were having phone issues!) so he canceled the appointment.

When I called Time Warner (from my cell) because the tech didn’t show, they told me what happened. It was still early in the day, so I told them I needed to have someone come out that same day. They told me the next available appointment was the following day.

I escalated the call to his supervisor and then his supervisor. I got the same response: “I can’t get a tech out to you today, because all our appointments are scheduled through our computer system, and it won’t let me.”

The computer won’t let him? What?

When I did get a tech to show up (the following day), I told him the story. He shook his head in disbelief. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “all they needed to do was call my cell and I would have been right over. I was in the area yesterday.”

Where is my flying car?

In 9th grade, my Electronics teacher asked us a question. Actually, it was two questions. The first one was: "How different would your life be today if we didn't use electricity?" Now keep in mind this was the early 80's (there I go, dating myself again).
The obvious answer from the students was "No TV!" It took us a little longer to realize we wouldn't have light bulbs. And what about digital watches? Heck, some of the guys in class even had digital watches with calculators on them. Don't believe me? Here is a picture of one:



Never mind that we needed electricity to power the fans that blew warm air through the heating system--or to run all the different devices in our cars. Telephones? Nah, we wouldn't have those either.
The more we discussed, the more we realized how very different our lives would be. My teacher went as far as to ask, "How in the world could we live without electricity?"
I'll admit, it was hard for me to imagine.

And then he asked the question that really blew our minds. It was, "What hasn't been invented yet, or isn't commonly used, that 25 years from now, we are going to say, 'How did we live without (whatever)?'"

Well, 25 years (or so) have come and gone. Sadly, the flying car and transporter technology have yet to see the light of day. However, that doesn't mean that there hasn't been some big changes. Now, I'm sure there are some really scientific people out there that could write pages and pages about all that has changed. I'm going to focus on three primary things that are now common place that we didn't use 25 years ago.

#1 Personal computers. When my wife and I bought our first computer, it had an incredible 100 megabytes of hard drive space. The computer I'm using now as I type this? It has like 600 gigabytes. (If you aren't sure what that means, 1,000 megabytes = 1 gigabyte. So 600 gigabytes = well, you get the idea.) What's even more amazing to me is that we don't just have one computer. We have four. Granted, they aren't all brand new, but with our kids getting older and needing to do more and more homework on the computer, it was getting to be an issue.

#2 The internet. This may seem like the same thing as #1, but it isn't. Yes, computers use the internet, but they are two different things. Again, going back to our first computer, we had something called AOL. We had to dial into a local number, and then we let the fun begin--well, kinda. If we wanted to download any sort of item from the internet, we would click on what we wanted, go make a sandwich, walk the dog, take a shower, followed by a little nap, and then, just maybe, the item would have finished. And now? The web pages almost load before you get done typing in what you are looking for.

#3 Cell phones. It was a sign of prestige and wealth to have a phone in your car--or maybe something from a 007 movie. Then you could get a portable one--if you didn't mind carrying around a purse like bag that housed the phone.



The idea that just about everyone over the age of 15 has a cell phone is something I couldn't conceive 25 years ago. But more than them being used to make calls, the new "smart" phones can do more things than my first personal computer could do--by a large margin.

So, where does that leave us now? Well, I'll pose the same question to you: What hasn't been invented yet, or isn't commonly used, that 25 years from now, we are going to say, 'How did we live without (whatever)?'