Wed, 08 Apr 2009

Losing Sight of the Incredible

It occurs to me that we often lose sight of some truly incredible technologies. They get buried in the hurry and bluster of the workaday world, and we seem to forget that things have not always been as they are now.

A couple of weeks ago we found a deal at a local grocery on Oregon brand canned red raspberries. The kind in heavy syrup, used for tarts and pies. So Lorraine dug out the cookbooks and was looking up tart recipes, when I remembered an appliance that I had bought some twenty years ago, moved several times across several states and hardly ever (if ever) used. It was a Black & Decker Shell Maker, designed for making pastry shells! And sure enough, there it sat, still in our cupboard!

But without a manual. Or instructions of any sort. No visible temperature sensor or gauge. How do we use the damn thing?

Five minutes on Google later, and we had found a complete instruction manual, scanned in by a user and saved to PDF. And now we're working on raspberry tarts with more than just a vague idea of what we're doing...

Before the Internet, before Google, we would have had to tried to find an address or phone number for Black & Decker and either called or dropped them a note, requesting a replacement manual. They may or may not have had one, and even if they did may not have bothered sending it. Or they might have charged us for it.

But now we have it. Think about it. Twenty five pages of dense text from a booklet last published 18 years ago just popped out of a machine on my desk. At essentially no cost to me whatsoever. It seems so simple. But it's nothing short of incredible.

There are lots of other examples we all could come up with if we thought about it. If we took the time to notice. Maybe it's just my recent "news strike", or maybe it's an effect of my age, but I seem to be noticing things a lot more nowadays than I used to. And that, in my not so humble opinion, is a Good Thing™.

/Technology | 2 writebacks | permanent link

On 4/8/2009 21:55:23
Erik wrote

On 4/8/2009 23:26:29
Jennifer wrote

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time