While I've been away at school my parents have carried on with various forays into modern technology, at times without the direct supervision of my brother or myself. A few weeks ago my Dad got a camera phone, so now I get pictures of the dogs in my e-mail every once in a while. This is innovative in a way, as the intended use of a camera phone is to take blurry, washed-out snapshots of car accidents and morons making strange faces. As I always suspected, they invested in a new deadbolt lock as soon as my brother and I were out of the house. This is notable because the can be locked with an infrared remote keychain. In order to open the door you must have the key in your hand, meaning that you cannot be wearing night vision goggles when approaching the locked door. You also can't make references to a game that only one other person you know has played.

Another fun technology that I got to mess with is my Dad's new car with a GPS navigation system and DVD audio sound system. The whole deal is voice activated, which is supposed to make it easy to use, but the way it works is more akin to programming. To tune the radio to 98.9 FM, I hit the button and said "FM nine eight point nine." It repeated this back to me in a neutral female voice (with a familiar disinterested tone) and tuned to the proper station. The way I said it was like running a program or script in a command line: radio\FM <98.9>. This is a good deal more complicated than just hitting a button on the radio. The GPS is kind of funny because it doesn't know how to get around Fort Wayne any better than any other non-native. The DVD audio sounds nice, and the car came with a mix DVD from Acura to demonstrate how different genres sound. The funny thing is, the track listing includes "Do You Realize?" by the Flaming Lips, "Let's Get it On" by Marvin Gaye, and some Faith Hill song. Such an amorous mix is sort of odd from a car company to a customer. It also has a truncated version of "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burana by Carl Orff that sounds really cool.

I'm not really sure that DVD audio will catch on in a big way, though. I recall seeing an article in Wired that showed how most current music is recorded and engineered to be loud without any volume variation- everything is constantly spiked. Also, the big trend in music sales is compressed digital audio files with mid-range two channel quality for use in digital music players. There doesn't seem to be a way to have anything more than two channels with headphones, and DVD audio has more than that at a bitrate well beyond 128 kbps. It seems like a great idea that came at exactly the wrong time. I suspect that the new format was intended to boost lagging music sales and to try to create a format that can be easily copy protected. The thing is, the standards for the format were established in 1996, before copy protection in general was rendered useless by the power of internet hobbyists who break encryption for fun. I'm interested to see where this format goes. It sounds fantastic, that's for darn sure. Something epic, like the Raiders of the Lost Arc score would sound great. On the other hand, something like "Never Mind the Bollocks" is meant to be two-channeled and fuzzy. Miles Davis would probably sound great.