just to catch everyone up, hmc went to nyc/new haven for the week for her sister’s law school graduation. originally we were all going to try and go, but snapper and i ended up staying home instead. i was going to try and figure out how to work in a visit to my parents during my time off but they decided to come up here instead. it was great: they got to spend a whole week with snapper, and then every night after snapper went to bed and we ate dinner, we’d watch basketball, either lakers/spurs or pistons/celtics depending on what day it was. we took some walks, went to the park, and tamed the agave overrunning the front garden. plus, the endless home-cooked food!
out of this, i realized two things:
1. my dad is mostly fine.
he seems to be more or less recovered from the stroke or whatever it was. he’s sometimes still a little forgetful or says the wrong word, but you can’t tell whether it’s still side effects from the s.o.w.i.w. or just because he’s getting old. what i do notice is that he is old all of a sudden; it’s like he was able to hide it before and not show it so much, but the s.o.w.i.w. took so much out of him that he aged overnight.
again, i don’t know if anyone else really notices. but it’s strange to see him going a little slower now, and looking a little more grey.
2. my parents will probably never understand tivo.
the whole concept of not having to be wedded to when a certain show comes on and instead just watching whatever you want whenever you want to is just totally foreign to them. it took them several days to figure out what was going on when we’d watch the day’s basketball game, and why suddenly we were watching the beginning when it was clearly later then that, but not yet over?
in the end i didn’t even really take the time to try and explain it to them because it was clear that they didn’t need it or want it. yes, it can record stuff you want to watch, but you need to know what you want to watch beforehand so you can tell it to get it. and it can even suggest stuff, but i don’t think they even want that or even care that much. it’s not like they even really have favorite shows or anything. if it’s interesting they’ll watch it, usually golf or something during the day if they’re not out or working in the garden. at night they probably just flipp around prime time until the news comes on. it’s not really about finding good shows to watch or collecting things to see. it’s about filling the time until you go to bed.
so much for giving them that spare tivo.
it makes me realize that at a certain point, there’s some paradigm that you don’t need to and won’t buy into. whether it’s just because it’s too meta for you or you’re just too ingrained in whatever you’re used to; you just don’t see the value in it and it’s not worth the effort. i see tivo as being this for my parents. i just spent yesterday geeking out on the faviconize tab extension, and realized that this would not only make no sense to them, but i probably couldn’t explain to them why they would need tabs in the first place.
i look around and try to figure out what could be my equivalent. perhaps it’s the news comes from newspapers idea that i can’t seem to shake. i can’t really take news from blogs and rss feeds that seriously; i can only follow sports news and tech news using those. everything else is either from a real newspaper (nytimes), or some online replica (sfgate) or amalgamation (my yahoo!).
someday there will be a web 5.0 plugin where you get news piped directly into your brain, and i’ll say, “eh, what do i need that for? i get the news right here every day on my doorstep!”
Posted at May 28, 2008 10:01 PM| TrackBack