f social graces. Some programmers forget about them entirely.
For all these problems there is now a single, happy solution. The savior is a package, from Dionne Diuretic Workflow Systems, called the Dionne Programmer's Friend. It's named in homage to a device, called the "policeman's friend," that's familiar to generations of traffic cops. (It lets police officers do things such as direct traffic for 8 hours straight without having to take a break--and without having to suffer distress.)
The Programme
r's Friend is a program for your PDA/scheduler. It monitors your intake of food and drink and beeps when it's time for you to go to the bathroom. When it's time for you to go to sleep, the Programmer's Friend tells you so.
When a nonprogrammer approaches you and makes a social sound, the Programmer's Friend tells you to say hello. This facility is what makes the package invaluable. Speech recognition, despite all its limitations, can reliably identify a stranger's hello. It's also a simple matter to detect the long silences characteristic of programmers' speech. When a silence extends beyond 20 minutes, the Programmer's Friend tells you to say, "How ya doin'?" Thus, the device successfully turns the most taciturn coder into a social animal. A lower-order social animal, perhaps, but well up from the bottom of the social food chain.
In sum, the Programmer's Friend will improve your metabolism, your bladder, and your social life. Best of all, it occupies well under a megabyte of disk space. Who could
ask for anything more?
Cyber Babewatch
Cyber Babewatch (CB) is a new product for imminent parents. CB lets you watch your child develop and grow in the womb. This nifty package includes an ultrasound device that you hook up to your PC to watch the baby. We could say that CB is endlessly useful, except that its usefulness ends at the time of birth. However, CB makes the whole process so fascinating that many parents will race to conceive another baby.
The most obvious thing to do with CB is to take ultrasound photographs of the coming kiddo and send them to friends over the Internet. Even better, you can take several photos each day and compile them into a QuickTime time-lapse movie. So, it's now a snap to document junior's first--and let us assure you, cutest--gestures.
The manufacturer, Cyber Belly Products, touts CB as a safety and health product, and surely it is. The wireless modem has three options:
- sends ultrasound pictures of the developing fe
tus to the parents' health-care provider, thus reducing the number of costly visits to the doctor's office. It takes the idea of having a sound monitor in baby's room and extends it both visually and aurally to mommy's womb.
- Daddy can go about his daily activities and watch baby develop merely by glancing at a little video device. The tiniest model even builds the viewscreen into a wristwatch, à la Dick Tracy. In practice, most people turn the sound off, as it tends to be dominated by maternal stomach rumblings.
- will thrill fathers and delight mothers throughout the pregnancy's final months. Tiny tactile transducers attach to both the mother's and the father's stomachs. Every time baby kicks mommy, the CB parental transducer kicks daddy. The sensation is fun, at least for the first few times. For mothers, it can be profoundly satisfying. This is technology at its best, enabling a couple to truly share the sensations of pregnancy.
Marc Abrahams is the editor of the Anna
ls of Improbable Research. You can contact him by sending e-mail to marca @improb.com.
Advances and Retreats in Computing
