“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke
Last week I gave a talk at the Manly Warringah radio society entitled “Your Life As A Radio”. It was about how our thoughts and feelings generate energy which affects our thoughts and feelings. This in turn creates our life experiences which affects our thoughts and feelings – but I digress!
I had prepared a lovely PowerPoint presentation with great images to illustrate my main points. I was quite proud of what I’d put together. When I arrived at the club room (with 15 minutes to prepare – plenty of time) I started to set up my equipment and very quickly realised a couple of things:
1. I hadn’t brought the power cord for the laptop – not too much of an issue as there was still enough battery for the time I needed (at least I hoped so).
2. My wonderful PowerPoint presentation was at home and not with me. Now that could be a challenge. My immediate response was “Ohhh Kaaayyy – this is going to be an interesting talk. I’m going to have to improvise VERY QUICKLY”. Fortunately, my friend Ben Ramsden was there and started to ask about ways to get the file. Clearly, there wasn’t time to go home (half an hour each way) so we needed to get creative.
What we did was:
1. Set my phone (an HTC Legend) as a WiFi hotspot.
2. Link the WiFi setting on the laptop to register on the phone.
3. Ring Danita and ask her to copy the file into my Dropbox account*
4. Wait for my Dropbox folder on the laptop to syncronise with the web version
5. Say the magic words and …
hey presto! the PowerPoint file appeared on my laptop. All in under 10 minutes. Now that’s magic!
From a nomadic perspective – the fact that we can relocate – pack up and re-set up our office with phone, internet etc all within a few hours is also magic.
* If you want to know about Dropbox you can email me and I’ll send you an invitation** to join Dropbox or go to dropbox.com and sign up.
** I must declare my pecuniary interest here – by signing up through me I get more space on my account.