Today my day was announced with the bonechilling chime of the alarm clock. The dark and warm surroundings of my dreams where shattered by the shrieks of this little tempest, Heralding a new day and reminding me that I had once again had too little sleep. Leaving my sleeping beauty behind I got up and embraced the day wrapped in a big warm bathrobe. Summer is fleeting away and while the afternoon may still be filled with the glowing embers of the summer, the dawn is chilly and cold to the touch.
The dinner table downstairs is littered with gear I need to take with me on my daily journey. To honor the silence of the morning I prepped everything in advanced, making sure not to make too much noise stomping around the house at 6am in order to get my gear together. Ipod : Check, Cellphone : Check, Workphone : Check , GPS unit; Check.. Logitech MM50 speakers for ipod : Check , Remote for the MM50 : Check .. Line cable between GPS and MM50 Check, Headphones : Check , Laptopbag : Check .. The list goes on and on. For somebody who wants to ‘keep technology simple and let it work for me’ i’m a surprising slave to technology .. Wobbling away with all this gear and spending 3 minutes hooking everything up. True, once the whole routine is finetuned its gonna be a matter of snapping up the ipod and hooking everything up in the car.. but the last 2 nights have been spent at home behind the computer, configuring all this stuff and looking to get it all working smoothly.
Tomtom Update: For Example, yesterday evening most of my time went into downloading speedcamera locations, map updates and new voices onto the GPS unit. Never mind the fact that it took me AGES to get the whole Tomtom Jukebox Function working (Jumping through hoops to copy one single mp3 file into the right directory) I also had to download map updates, and select a nice cool voice to replace the standard TOMTOM announcing voice. ( C3PO is now directing my route AND calling me master !)
Ipod thingamajiggs : One of my major sources of information (and entertainment) is of course my Ipod, Updating this thing (and making sure it is sufficiently charged) is also a daily chore I need to get done. Never mind the fact I need to clean up my podcast subscriptions (or rather ADD SOME) because I have become so higly demanding of content that I have chucked out about HALF of the subscribed podcasts and that NEW subscriptions seldom make it passed the first episode. I want quality content !
The entertainment core. As I said : The car I have does not have a line-in function. Thus the MM50 is the ideal solution. No cigarette lighter plugg is available so some wire-splicing is required to get both the MM50 and the TOMTOM hooked up to the cars powergrid. Add to that that I need to run a "line in" cable from the TOMTOM to the MM50 etc etc .. the word "simplicity" is replaced by "cable hazzard" and the cars dashboard starts to look like the patch panel of the server room.
Communications : Cellphones is another Issue : I have both a work phone and a personal Cellphone. The question is : Which one do I hook up to the Tomtoms bluetooth Carkit ? And when doing so ? Does it always work ? More hassle … more problems.
At the end of the day I’m starting to wonder just how much "technology is working for me" The more and more functions and functionality gets built into technology, the more chances there are of things going haywire. The paradox is that you have simple devices doing just what they are supposed to do (like a phone) but that means that you have to dragg around a lot of gear. Or you have devices that do several things (like smartphones) but most of the things don"t really work properly (ever tried using a mobile version of acrobad reader on a tiny screen ? …) The challenge (i suppose ) is to tinker and fiddle to streamline everything and get an integrated satnav, ipod, cellphone, entertainment system to work in a car that is not designed to support that functionality. With minimum cables, hassle and distractions. I have no doubt we shall get ot working sometime this week.