New Technology & Parenting – Slackers Inc.

This picture is hilarious.  I can barely write because it’s distracting me with its hilarity.

The topic for today is nerdy babies and the popularity lately.  Many people around me are having babies – I’d wager that it’s the perfect storm for babies and we’ll see the result in the census results 5-7 years from now.

Gen X’ers have expressed their angst and apathy with the world, and now their rebellious and creative outbursts have landed them decent jobs (partially due to baby boomers retiring en mass).  The financial security which these jobs offer now leads them to consider having a family.  At the same time, Gen Y is bored with working for the man and feels that a life dedicated to working is no life at all.  Struggling to find balance, many focus on relationships and family, and still more have the ‘oops’ moments where it may not have been planned but they make the best of it.

Ok, enough psudo-analysis.  The commonality between these groups is that we now have the largest emergence of geeks with families we’ve ever had, and this gets passed down to the babies.  Obviously, babies can’t be nerds yet, but there’s no sense in fighting genetics either…  There are already some really funny nerdy onesies out there.  I’m really curious to see what the next generation of toddler toys will be.  Massive Multiplayer Stroller Games (MMSG)?

I’m sure I’m not alone in the geek world when I dream of a house I can control with my voice, and it can respond back with an informative answer or confirmation of my command.  Ideally, I would say something like “House, do I have any new emails?” and it would respond “Checking…No new emails since 4:07.”  I would then say “Excellent.  House, prepare the home theatre, I’d like to watch the latest Futurama” (this is my dream afterall, and Futurama would be back on the air in my dream.)

While my house isn’t this cool yet, I imagine it could be with enough time and money spent.  The problem is, most people (myself included) will indulge if it’s below a certain effort/cost threshold, but leave things relegated to dreams if it surpasses this mental figure.  That’s why I was excited to hear about the NetLinc. 

Essentially the NetLinc is an Insteon device (home automation primer or Insteon Wikipedia Entry) that contains a built-in webserver/control interface that allows you to control your home automation devices from any web browser or iphone/ipod touch.  The part that makes it cool is that on the effort threshold it’s extremely low…like, you just plug it into the wall low.  Ok, you need to plug it into your network too, but one cable and that’s it. 

I don’t have one yet, but take a look at this review: NetLinc (SmartLinc) Review and decide for yourself if you want to go the full-blown computer controlled route or if the lower effort route is better for you.  Either way, you’ve gotta admit – This is cool stuff.

There are perhaps a few people left out there who are not familiar with just why geeks find the phrase “All your base are belong to us” so funny. I will attempt to explain: In the 90’s video games were making their way into living rooms across north america, and as adolescents scrambled to get the latest games, the game producers around the world were happy to meet the increasing demand by pumping up their production schedules.

A major source for these games was Japan, and in the rush to translate the storylines for the english-speaking markets, some, um…quality assurance steps were missed. The result was games such as Zero Wing that had broken english phrases that would later become iconicized by now twenty-to-thirty-something geeks (including myself) that nostalgically remember the hours spent on these games.

Now that this same group is having babies of their own, what better way to commemorate the generational transition than something like this nerdy onesie? When I saw it, I seriously almost fell of my chair laughing… I think I may pre-purchase one for any future child of mine because it’s just too awesome to pass up.

Slackers Inc has been around since 1999 in various forms and has never really had a consistent, unifying theme.  For the early 2000’s it was a page to showcase a bunch of our lives and anything we thought was cool at the time.  The addition of a webcam to the mix made the site dynamic, a rare thing at the time.  Traffic picked up so much with just one webcam in our livingroom that we added a few more, and then a few more – Soon we had a half dozen in various places around the house including the kitchen, bedrooms, outside the house and even our tv feed (known as “watch what we’re watching”).  I’m quite sure we broke some sort of rebroadcasting rule there, assuming anyone was bored enough to watch.

Following this, the site languished for several years until it was converted into a photo showcase.  It seemed like a good idea at the time and was easy to maintain, so that’s what it stayed for several more years. 

Jump forward to the present and we have a blog for sharing the geeky and cool things we find.  We’ll see how updated this stays but I guarantee that it will directly correlate to how much effort is required.  We are afterall, slackers.