Random Thoughts 10/12/10

• I was under the weather with a headache all day yesterday, which fills me with regret over yet another wasted Columbus Day.
• Here's a noteworthy science project:  a father and son put an iPhone 19 miles into space and recovered the phone.  See the video here.  That's impressive and super cool (but the kid seemed a bit young to have been too deeply involved).
• Like Best Buy and Target stores, Walmart will now sell the iPad.  When I went into the local Target, the tablet computers were locked away on the bottom shelf in a cabinet below the iPods, the only hint that they were there at all was the abundance of iPad accessories.  Supposedly at Walmart there will be a display unit running a looping video.  A friend of mine recently got an iPad and has been using it at church and Bible study (which totally put the folks with embroidered Bible covers to shame); I'm more and more convinced that an iPad is probably just one generation away from meeting all of my computing needs and be a total home run in our homeschooling.
• Here's a great commercial from Microsoft.  It's supposed to be about the new Windows phone, but it's really about mobile computing culture and how distracted we all are by that much info at our fingertips.  Actually, I don't think the new Windows phone will deliver on the promise of the commercial, i.e. to get us in and out and back to our life. Nor does Microsoft want that to happen.  The reason we are so distracted by those things is that they do their job well.  Devices like the iPhone are not inefficient, on the contrary, they're a pleasure to use.  We get our information so effortlessly that we get lost in looking for more info… and more… and more… grinning like an idiot the whole time.  Nothing's broken here, in fact it's working too well.