My Ambient Orb
September 11th, 2006
Reason #12 my job rules: they gave me an Ambient Orb. Now, while it’s true that the orb is of dubious utility, that’s not really the point. If you’re looking for pure utility, it’s hard to beat Apple’s Dashboard feature in OS 10.4. Every day with the click of my 5th mouse button, I immediately know the weather for the week, the current price of my Apple stock, and a host of other goodies.
But despite the fact that I use Dashboard every morning, I still get rained on – a lot. In fact, it’s a safe bet that if it rained this morning, I’m probably wet. Which is why I’m thinking the Ambient Orb is going to help me out. Here’s the plan: I put the Orb in the living room and put a umbrella next to it. If the orb is red or flashing, pick up the umbrella. It’s that simple.
Well, it could be that simple. For some reason, I chose to put the Orb in the kitchen. Actually, the reason is that I have completely maxxed out the outlets in the living room, and there’s a free outlet in the kitchen. The downside of having the Orb in the kitchen is that the kitchen is Faith’s domain. And if there’s going to be an alien-looking glass device in the kitchen, it had better well match the color scheme of the kitchen.
So instead of monitoring the probability of precipitation, day one of having the Orb in the house became a game of finding which data stream to monitor and which settings would constrict the color of the Orb to a lovely blue-green color to compliment the recently painted walls of the kitchen.
Needless to say, I was caught in the rain again this morning.
But the reason that I’m so entertained by the Orb as a gift, is that this is something I would never buy for myself. It’s hard to justify $150 for a glass ball that will tell you when it’s going to rain when you can just open Yahoo! Weather. But it’s so much more interesting to have an object in your house glowing with information, instead of punching in your zip code into your browser each morning.