augmented Life

Life Threatening

I remember Y2K. I had a big fight with my wife over the fact that I had bought two 5-gallon water containers. She thought I was over-reacting to the slight possibility of the computer systems going down at midnight of the new millenium. Turns out she was absolutely right – nothing happened, and while I …

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augmented Life

The Entirety of Suffering in 14 Words

Yesterday while doing some studying with Middle Daughter I was trying to adjust some electronics into what I had hoped would be my Road Warrior Writer’s kit. It consisted of an Anker portable battery which was charging my iPhone 6+ (in a very low-tech stand hack) via the Nomad ChargeCard while I typed using Daedalus …

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augmented Life

too much or just right connection

The Augmented Self at Rest Credit where credit is due: I first considered the idea of the “Augmented Self” during a conversation with my good friend J.P., a stage manager extraordinaire from Toronto (among other things). He and I were discussing how often we are carrying on simultaneous connections through various media – the instant …

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augmented Life

Quantify Hard

I don’t want you to think, from my last post, that I’m some anti-number Luddite. I’d love to have a Fuelband, I love the sensor on my nephew’s car that shows how many miles I can still travel on the gas in the tank, and I can spend hours playing with Google Analytics and feeling strange wonder at the …

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augmented Life

Backchannel

I was engaged in an interesting conversation with Karri, so I didn’t reach in my pocket when my phone buzzed. We continued talking until another remark across the room caught her attention, and she excused herself from the couch where we were sitting. Her husband Greg, who’d been doing something on his phone next to …

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augmented Life

Augmented Grandpa

I know what you’re thinking: Skype. To which I say, with grandfatherly verve, pshaw. Skype? That’s so pre-Mayan-apocalypse! The real augmented Grandpa is way beyond that. The Augmented Grandpa texts his Middle Daughter/Running Partner: “I have to watch Harvey tomorrow. How about we all go to the coffee shop before Natasha works, and we can run from …

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augmented Life

The Adjacent Possible, Part 2

When we last left our intrepid idea of life, things were looking a bit bleak. We had realized that social media and our “always-on” society had given us a constant supply of variable rewards – which I termed the “Gravy Hose.” That tasty gravy gives us constant stimulus, not only little dopamine jolts of connection …

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augmented Life

The Adjacent Possible, Part 1

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself…The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the …

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augmented Life

The Augmented Life

As long as I’m stealing being inspired by my friend J.P., I’m going to finally start a series of posts addressing this term he put to me well over a year ago. We were walking down the streets of Toronto, discussing some of the various technologies we both enjoy, and I commented on how it’s …

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