Entries tagged as ‘technology’
Friday morning I was feeling smug about being one of the people with electricity —but by 11am our household joined the nearly 200,000 in the region plunged into darkness by the ice storm.
Ann and Zack fled to a friend’s house, but I decided to huddle in the darkness and ride out the disaster. There I was with my glow sticks and headlamp, curled up with the dogs. At 1am I couldn’t sleep, so I texted Alex. I’ve written before about how long it takes me to compose a text message, so at about 1:15 he got this:
no electricity at home just me scarlett and maddy
Naturally, he was awake —probably out having fun.
haha why isnt there power
Hmmm. Somebody hasn’t been reading the paper.
ice storm widespread chaos will eat dogs eventually
The dogs stirred uneasily. He wrote back:
lol well cats before dogs
Good point. I fell back to sleep wondering about in which order I’d eat the pets. Let’s hope the power comes back on before push comes to shove.
Categories: Home · Modern Living · News
Tagged: current events, dogs, pets, technology, texting
There’s probably nothing that can stop you from drunk dialing, but now Gmail has a tool to prevent you from sending email you may regret later: Mail Goggles. This special feature tests your mental acuity with some simple math problems before allowing your message out of the gate.
I tried this today with the difficulty set at the easiest level, and while perfectly sober failed the test. You get sixty seconds to complete five questions —and fortunately the second time I passed and got my message through. Think of this as a breathalyzer for your email. If you have Gmail, go to Settings and look for Mail Goggles under Labs.
Considering some of the mail I get, maybe it would be a good idea if this were enabled on everyone’s email all the time.
Categories: Modern Living
Tagged: technology
So Ann says, “I went over my minutes last month.” You what? “I went over my minutes. Last month.” Really? How many minutes do you get? “Three-thousand.” After I wiped away the coffee that shot out my nose, I cleaned off the laptop and started doing the math. That’s a lot of minutes. It’s fifty hours, or if you prefer, two days and two hours. It’s a week at work these days —and seven nights worth of sleep. It’s a hundred episodes of Thirty Minute Meals.
I don’t think anyone has ever described me as “chatty,” especially not in regard to the phone. My calls are monosyllabic affairs of cryptic guy-speak: “Yeah. Uh-huh. Maybe. You got that right.” But Ann is obviously another story. She loves to talk and people love to talk to her. Sure, some of it is work, but mostly it’s what she does best, being a good friend to the people she cares about.
Maybe I can give her some of my minutes.
Categories: Marriage · Modern Living
Tagged: cell phones, family, Marriage, technology
