Sunday, December 25, 2005

Technology for Christmas

It was a very pleasant Christmas for Lesli and myself. Started with a relaxed morning of caffeine and of coarse...Opening gifts! Santa did not disappoint this year. I gave Lesli a Tom-Tom GPS navigator for her Treo phone. Confused? So was I at first...The Tom-Tom consists of a wireless Blue Tooth GPS receiver and GPS street map software. Could come in handy in her line of work.
For me Lesli gave a Sirius satellite radio receiver. Very cool. After opening the receiver and skimming through the manual it became obvious that there were two ways of activating the radio - by phone or online. Lesli used her laptop and wireless connection to key in the SID and and of coarse, my credit card number...and in no more than two minutes we had Jimmy Buffet's Radio Margarita rockin the house.
In the afternoon we hit the road with our new gadgets over to my grandmother's house and then up to Kristen and Ross'. The Tom-Tom was great. Lesli programmed it with a voice named Ken, a dignified Australian male. With phrases like, "go straight on the motorway" and "take the second exit off the roundabout" he guided us to Barrington NH...Like we didn't already know how to get to my sister's house??
The treo was fully functional as a phone while running the street mapping program, it was also receiving the blue tooth frequency from the Tom-Tom that was at the same time receiving the satellite's microwaves! Freeky! That got me thinking exactly what frequencies all the gear on-board our truck was interacting with...Lets see. (total geek talk but cool) The sirius receiver was dealing with a similar freq from outer space and then converting it to 88.1 mhz and then the Toyota's radio was playing it for our listening pleasure. From time to time I was sending email from my phone to add to the saturation. If that weren't enough...Lesli's truck has sensors on the inside of the rims that send info to a receiver on the forerunner's axle then to the truck's computer to display the airpressure on the dash. Blows my mind how many airwaves were buzzing around us as we rolled up rt.95.

1 comment:

jeff said...

shiiittte beeyatch, you're bustin' da blog!