{"id":118,"date":"2005-05-08T06:55:43","date_gmt":"2005-05-08T10:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/05\/08\/beautiful-experience-technological"},"modified":"2005-05-08T06:55:43","modified_gmt":"2005-05-08T10:55:43","slug":"beautiful-experience-technological-and-social","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/05\/08\/beautiful-experience-technological-and-social\/","title":{"rendered":"Beautiful experience, technological and social"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I just had the most beautiful technological experience. After giving away my old Elph because I never used it and felt it was wasteful to just have it sitting around, I needed a camera a few months later, and got one. I promptly lost its battery charger, and a cable whose purpose I can no longer remember. (I thought it was needed for the charging — maybe it was, to cope with the different power supply there? — but having gotten a replacement since which plugs straight into the wall, I am having doubts.) In any case, I was hemming and hawing about getting replacement parts from Canon for a good chunk of what the camera itself cost, when I remembered that we have a wide open market out there on the Intarweb. <\/p>\n

Beautiful experience part 1: Ebay turned up a new battery for $10, and a local camera shop had an original Canon charger for $30 or so. Within three days, packages arrived and the camera was functional again… mass production somehow winning out over efforts to make incompatible hardware and corner the market.<\/p>\n

So I brought the newly-working camera with me on my current trip to DC, to stretch its legs. This morning I can’t sleep, and wander the city a bit looking for a place to sit and work outside. Here’s
\nwhere it gets good…<\/p>\n

2) Your view of a city really changes when you start sitting on random front steps and public platforms, when noone is around and it’s just you and the city skeleton.<\/p>\n

3) I had been annoyed that I couldn’t go wake up my hosts and ask for various things like toothpaste and new insoles and a replacement screw for my glasses. Even if it weren’t 4am, I wouldn’t have done that. So wandering around, I find two different 24-hr pharmacies. Fantastic. I joyfully drop a sawbuck; walk outside and find a protected alcove with a nice breeze; and replace, polish up, and improve my flagging toolchain. # of people woken up or vaguely bothered by the noise: 0. <\/p>\n

4) I figure I should go find somewhere to sit and write. There’s what looks like an all-night bar nearby, but it’s a bit noisy, and sitting outside I get nothing. So I wander side-streets… aha! A restaurant that’s left its chairs and tables out. I walk up to its front door to look in, and a motion detector clicks on, then starts blinking a large red light. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. I back out onto the street and look around. It was such a nice spot, too… <\/p>\n

4.5) The light stops blinking. Tentatively, I come back. I sit very quietly at a table and slip out my computer. No troubles with the motion detector this time. Could there be? There is! Second time’s the charm; there’s an open access point with a strong signal. <\/p>\n

5) I log on and start to write. I wish I could just pipe the fine view from here into my blog. Well, I \/do\/ have a camera. And it works now. But I didn’t bring my multi-format flash reader with me. I’m not even sure where that gizmo is. And then– My spider-sense tingles. “What?” I think to myself. “Stop tingling. You’re just chilly.” But despite myself, I scan the sides of my laptop. There’s a suspiciously small flat port next to the headphone jack… I pop out my photo card and slide it in. There are my photos, piped as neatly as you please to my desktop.<\/p>\n

And here you are:<\/p>\n

\"View<\/p>\n

It’s now half an hour later, noone’s come by save a drunken trio and a hurried biker, and I’m still laughing about this process of finding a hotspot. If I actually lived in DC, I don’t think I could bear to wander the streets looking for a place to get online; I would just buckle and get a broadband connection in my apartment, and miss out on these great open-air sunrises!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just had the most beautiful technological experience. After giving away my old Elph because I never used it and felt it was wasteful to just have it sitting around, I needed a camera a few months later, and got one. I promptly lost its battery charger, and a cable whose purpose I can no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-la-mod"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}