Welcome to another edition of Computers As Humans, the high tech blog that strives to make computers if not cool, at least not cold. While doing my preparations for today's blog I took a glance at the automotive section of the paper before logging onto the tech news on the Web.
Online I got a pop-up advert for the new Yahoo toolbar add on for my browser. Always being one to take advantage of any opportunity to put-off work, I downloaded and installed the app.
It's a pretty cool addition to the browser overall.
Among other things it allows you to keep track of your email, the weather and your Facebook constantly, from wherever you are currently browsing. So I figure the time I've wasted so far downloading and installing it will actually be made up in the long run, as I won't constantly have to check to see if I have new email or if anyone has commented on my latest exciting status update.
Anyway between the new browser app and scanning the car pages, I got to thinking about just how much our web browsers and homepages are like the dashboards of car. They are the thing we look out over as we gaze out the windscreens that are our monitors while travelling the information superhighway.
However unlike the dashboards of our cars, web browsers and home pages are much easier to customize. You can choose your browser, add a theme to it, put some apps on it. If only we could do the same with our cars!
Okay, maybe it's good that we can't actually because if I could put soccer news on the dash of my car, you know I would.
If a web browser is a dashboard then it's easy to see how computers could be cast as the cars we use to drive through the virtual world. Some people are driving fast, flashy new ones, others broken down old slow ones. And just as it is with cars, most us probably have something more in the middle (Although for the record I think my car has more comfortable seats than the one I'm sitting in now).
Wouldn't it be nice if we could all drive the car of our dreams, or at least have a newer computer? Of course it would be. But as the old song goes, "You can't always get what you want."
Well until then I guess we're at least lucky to have the new Yahoo browser toolbar.
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