Text messaging

I'm a technophile. I believe that the reason why we invent new, cool, useful (and even not-so useful stuff) is because we're out to make our lives better. Not necessarily faster, cheaper, more energy efficient... but better. I'm able to sit at home on a lazy Sunday morning, sipping some hot cocoa with water boiled from my electric kettle, checking Facebook and the news about the nationwide Sidekick outage, waiting for my laundry to wash and my USB drive to backup my work laptop.

Where would I be without technology? Honestly? I don't think I would be able to survive without an infrastructure that gives me my.... life support. Glasses? Contact lenses? Cochlear implant? Potable water, hot showers,? I can barely survive a week camping, let alone what may happen if zombie apocalypse were to happen....

Ooh, I've been hearing fun things about Zombieland - when is it gonna be capshuned in my backyard?

So this whole weekend, some phone company's somewhat popular phone service has been out, save for texts, or more specifically, SMS. SMS stands for "Short Message Service" where (for the benefit all you 2 or 3 people who've been hiding under a rock all this time and only came out to read my blog ;-) ) you can only send a message of up to 160 characters at a time. Admittedly, I mostly eschew SMS because of that limitation - IM, email, pictures, web, Facebook, and soon video by far leave SMS in the dust for convenience.

I'm wondering just how those people who are experiencing that Sidekick outage are faring - are they going crazy without their constant updates on Twitter? Are they experiencing Facebook withdrawl? ;-)

The nice thing is that SMS is a standard that will work just about anywhere there's cell coverage - which is why they're considering it for providing access to 911 via text. That's going to be interesting when that comes to fruition!

Off to the gym then to food shop. The Paramore concert on Tuesday is postponed due to the lead singer coming down with laryngitis. No orange hair sighting this week! Aw! ;-)