So this evening I was playing around with my Centro, mostly checking what part of the world is in shadow in the nifty world clock app, when suddenly my computer made this bizarre noise and an icon popped up in the task bar saying "A computer is near by, would you like to transfer files?".
This came as a bit of a shock to me, to say the least. I wondered if I had fallen victim to some form of malware or trojan, so I quickly googled the error code and discovered that it was windows itself popping up the message, in response to a successful connection via IRDA.
It then occured to me that both my laptop and my phone have IR ports on them, a fact that I had up until this point completely and utterly ignored (and/or forgotten).
After a little bit of fiddling around, I managed to get the palm hotsync to sync my Centro over the IRDA connection. I've never done that before.
It's funny to think about IR port: a barely noticed flash in the pan of technology that had come and gone almost ten years ago, nowadays completely and utterly replaced by bluetooth and other RF technologies. Now, all these years later, almost entirely forgotten and on the eve of its final demise, the dusty corpse reanimates like a silicon zombie to wirelessly fling my bits of contact information back and forth over an invisible link.
I wonder: if technologies were really alive, what they would think of their passing... For me, it just makes me feel old.
2 comments:
And how do you think that makes me feel. I thought IR was still new.
I remember using the adhoc IRDA networking on my G3 laptop. If you put a bunch of lappys close together you could kinda get an adhoc appletalk network going. :)
My cell has IRDA too. Though I dunno how well it'll work now that the lens is completely scuffed up.
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