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Mobility is the new paradigm
Do you check email on the road? How about your cellular phone life? Making use of your ability to converse while you’re away from home or office?

Seems like a silly question, but hold that line. While some people leap ahead with technology’s offerings, others find themselves straddling bridges, surprised at the sudden unreliability of older options.

Depends on where you live
Jack’s parents live in a semi-rural area where it’s safe to say most people are dependent on landlines for their phone service. But they don’t have a landline at the moment, settling into their new place. The jury is still out on that decision. For good reason – there are so many ways to leapfrog through the technology, deciding where to put your money (and your time, and your faith in its reliability) is not simple.

Meanwhile, Jack is napping.

A crooked little path
Yesterday, we sat on the front porch where we could pick up a linksys signal on the laptop. Since the cell service is spotty and poor, we were using Skype on the laptop to call AWOS, the automated weather observation system, to assess the weather for landing at Gnoss airfield. Check that. A random wireless Internet signal gave us access to a free (or nearly-free) telephone line which we ran through free software on the laptop to listen to flight conditions back at the home runway. Did you know you could do that?

And we're headed... where?
What kind of zany little device will Jack have when he’s ten years old? We already have handheld movie screens (why?) that can also take our message and broadcast it to all our personal systems. And once we get the accessibility issues and the interfaces worked out, oh, that’ll be a nice ride. Jack just might sleep through this bit of choppy water.

Looks like we are just about to the point where we can employ technology to actually ease our lives. Up until now it’s been a big pain in the patootie. And it’s still a gnarly mess of options. Part of the problem is that it’s hard for new companies to get enough people on board to push their technology to the front. Lots of Boomers would love what they can do with the technology if they had any idea about its usefulness. That’s one reason why I write Web 55.0. Maybe with enough Boomers willing to play with the available options, we can straighten this out, and give ourselves a lot more time to play with Jack.

Right now, I think I’ll follow his lead, and take my brain on an "integration session." Mmm, napping.

So tell me. What would make it easier for you to communicate on the road?

Suzanna