Living the connected life

摘要

Listen to someone making fun of some new consumer-oriented technology and you can pretty much bet the ranch-or the Colonial or even the McMansion tricked out to look like a French chateau-that, before long, that technology will be ubiquitous. I remember when some of us braniacs used to make fun of VCRs. Hell, I remember rolling my eyes at answering machines. Think back to those days, and how weird it was. Everyone's outgoing message patiently explained that you should wait until the tone and so forth. Portable phones? Think of Maxwell Smart dialing his shoe, another comic fantasy that evolved into quotidian reality. Now it's the wired house. There are refrigerators with Internet connections, vacuum cleaners with wireless video cameras, rooms that sense your presence and change their spots to suit your preferences. Until recently, who took this stuff seriously? When my wife and I built our home a few years ago, the idea of running CAT 5 or coaxial cable all through the place seemed a waste of money. When it came time to network the computers and install a second TV, it seemed a pity we hadn't. But then Wi-Fi came along and my previous stinginess with wire seemed prescient. Turns out the wires didn't matter. What matters is the connection.