Apple Harvest

Katherine's family is an Apple family!  It's also a family of lots of different and diverse conversations going on constantly.  There is no television.  There are those who say, or at least think, that computers are anti-social.  I would suggest a stay chez Katherine.  Every conversation is likely to involve learning and every bout of learning will involve reaching for an iPhone or an iPad or a MacBook for the purpose of finding information or solving a quiz or learning a language or......the list is endless.  I feel so very at home.

Thankful Thursday: Apple

Why is it that blog posts are like buses: you wait for ages for an idea and then three come along at once?  The 'Apple' I'm talking about is nothing to do with the fruit trees that surround The Cottage for hectare after hectare in this, New Zealand's fruit bowl.  No it's the Apple.

0500 hrs this morning and my iPad 'rang' and woke me.  My iPad rang??  How come? It is wifi only.

One of the beauties of the iPhone is that it has a programmable sound notifications so that I have it set for no 'ringing' during the hours of midnight to 0630.  It's also programmed to take calls from designated numbers or people or from anyone who tries twice in quick succession.   However Apple has Facetime which enables people using an Apple device to contact each other orally and visually over the internet free via their Apple device.  It is only recently that a friend in Australia (Fiona, daughter of one of my oldest friends who lives in Canada who is not into modern technology and doesn't even have a cellphone) got me to start using it.

Fiona is in Canada at the moment.  Fiona is trying to persuade her Mum to get an iPad so that she can communicate more effectively with her daughters and friends scattered throughout the world (Fiona doesn't have a landline telephone).  To that end they were in an Apple Store in Canada.  Who better to demonstrate Facetime on but someone in New Zealand.  They miscalculated the time and were quite surprised when a rather sleepy voice answered his cellphone wondering how it could have rung and why it was still dark.  It was, in fact, the iPad that had rung but my sleeping brain hadn't computed that.

Frances Garrood would, I am sure, say that that demonstrates all that is bad about modern (ie post 1970) technology (see Pre-1970s - The Best Inventions) but for me it demonstrates all that is good with the ability we now have to communicate with each other in this physically large and yet very small earth.  

So whilst I might have some misgivings about being woken at 0500 I am very thankful for the ability to communicate with my friends so easily.