Saturday, November 14, 2009

Little Bits of My Life

Yesterday was an amazing out of the ordinary day that was in fact quite ordinary, except that I think that I lived it to the fullest.

I was up at 4:30 AM and dressed. I went down to the studio, where I had make-up applied to my face for the first time in my life. I appeared on Bahamas@Sunrise where I think that I said just one sentence on television.

I was kissed by five women yesterday. It's not as dramatic as it sounds. For four of them, it was just a peck on the cheek, but being kissed by five women is extraordinary in any given day for me. I don't usually see that many people in one day in my tech-tortured life. You can tell that I am a geek.

After that it was airplanes and airports, where I saw a couple of amazing things, and they all had to do with children and technology. The first was aboard the aircraft. I sat behind an extremely well behaved little girl. I prefer sitting behind children rather than they sit behind me, and kick the back of my seat throughout the entire flight.

This little girl sat quietly throughout the whole flight, selecting movies and television shows for her to watch. When the flight landed, I watched her as she navigated her way back to the start menu, chose an arcane menu item and dutifully turned off the screen. I had never before seen the screen turned off completely. I have been flying since those audio-visual screens came into existence on the back of aircraft seats, and I did not realize that the screen could be turned off. How this little girl figured it out is beyond me. Her mother who was sitting next to her did not know it either, and the little girl turned off her screen as well.

Then we were sitting in a major airport. As I was waiting for the Lovely One to buy some soup, I was looking over an atrium. In the middle was the display of an actual Toyota Prius hybrid car. There were kiosks front and back of the car, with a computer driven multi-media interactive display. A little boy and his father were walking by. The little boy was too young to read. However within seconds, he had figured out the controls of the multi-media display, and using his finger and the touch screen, he was rotating the car, taking the various parts off the car and putting them back on, and operating most of the functions of the interactive demonstration. And this kid was too young to read.

The first thought was that he was incredibly adept at deciphering the symbols, like the arrows to spin the car. The second thought was, that like the little girl in the plane, they were not afraid to explore every button and every option. It came naturally. Adults are conditioned not to touch a control they do not understand for fear of screwing something up. The third thought was that I must remember to design Graphics User Interfaces such that children who cannot read can decipher their functions.

This was all aptly summed up by the Lovely One who said "Their brains certainly are not like ours".

Yeah, yesterday was a good day in this journey called life. It is also good to be in an environment that is out of the tropics, and in a post-autumnal phase that has a starkness and beauty all of its own. I suppose that it would be a different story if I had to live it full time, but for now, I am enjoying it.

The photo is a photoshopped pic of mine of the catamaran yachts anchored off of Spanish Wells.

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