Well it may not impress many of you, but I’ve just been heading North from London to Edinburgh and the train has wifi (though like most things in the UK it doesn’t work very well). In any event, on line I found Ken Parish burning the midnight oil and have been gasbagging to him for a while. Then he downloaded Skype and I was able (until the modest wifi bandwidth conked out) to activate the video and give him a look out the window as we zoomed past Berwick on whatever it’s on.
The world is zooming, just zooming along. Just coming into Edinburgh – no kidding – must get my connection to Aberdeen. (Aberdeen Angus already spotted munching near the golf courses.)
Nicholas has stopped chatting on Google talk now. Pathetic. What sort of bloke can’t type while getting off a train??!! But I can’t help being an awestruck naive geek about this stuff. Fancy being able to talk live to someone for free on the other side of the world while they’re travelling on a train, and even watch the scenery they’re seeing out the window. It was a bit blurry, and strained the bandwidth to breaking point quite quickly, but it works. And with fast mobile 3G etc broadband I imagine that almost perfect video contact will be possible from just about anywhere in the world and at effectively zero cost.
It impresses me, Nicholas. Modern communication never fails to impress me. Even that I can call home or anywhere on my mobile for not much money impresses me, let alone skype and google talk and all the rest.
I’m young and yet I’m old enough to remember my parents placing/receiving operator-assisted calls (my memory fails at which or if it was both).
You’re not only one marveling at what the IT revolution hath wrought.
http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/04/leverage-2-welcome-to-future.html
Last night in a beer garden someone said
“Oh, I’ll just google the url on my iphone. And follow up with a twitter”,
a line that would have been incomprehensible to anyone even ten years ago.
My contribution to the techno-orgy was when someone said the main menu was was on a blackboard in the very crowded back bar and so we’d all have go in and read it.
“Nah, just photograph it with your camera, bring it back out and when everyone’s decided what they want, we’ll email ’em.”
By the way, have fun in old London town Nick? It really is, for all its faults, one of the world’s alltime greatest cities.
nic – one of my brothers lives in Aberdeen. He is in the oil game. At the moment they are all waiting on the names of the 18 who died in the helicopter crash. Txt me if you want a guide or a trad music night at a pub (he’s a good mandolin player) and I’ll give you his mobile.