Shawn Connally
LAZY
PROGRESS
I’VE GOTTEN GREEDY, I’VE GOTTEN LAZY, AND I expect too much. I mostly blame TiVo for taking me down this path. If TiVo can figure out what I like to watch and let me rewind a scene to figure out what that mumbling actor is saying, why can’t my car stereo let me listen to a song from the beginning if I jump into the car as it’s ending? Why can’t my special shampoo chemically enhance the roots of my hair and keep my, um, natural blonde highlights looking natural?
The marvels of 21st century technology have made me look at my microwave, toaster, and yard sprinkler with disdain. It’s a bagel, stupid, not a frozen waffle. I’m defrosting chicken, not fish. My kids are outside playing — don’t you even have a motion sensor, you dumb hydro-dumping apparatus?
Way back in the 20th century, I resisted the mind-rotting capabilities of programming my home phone to remember all my important numbers for me. But now I demand a speakerphone on my cell-
“So now I’m casting aside my guilt and embracing my laziness.”
phone, remote access to the messages on my office phone, and one-button access to my answering machine when I’m sitting on the couch and too lazy to walk into the other room.
I can’t believe I used to wait three days before getting to see the photos from my last vacation. And I actually snail-mailed prints of the new house, kid, or car to each family member, instead of doing a mass email pointing to my latest online photo album.
Yet all this leaves me wanting more, more, more. One day, while looking through the galleys of the soon-to-be fourth volume of MAKE, it struck me — I am not alone in my greed and slothfulness. Everyone wants technology to work for them in hipper, better, more logical ways. Laziness is actually a terrific motivator for coming up with creative solutions: “How can I come up with a way to never have to clean my rain gutters again? Why, I could build a little robot that shovels out the debris as it rolls along!”
Makers on every continent, in every walk of life, and in every age bracket are creating — better yet, making — the things they crave. A regular alarm clock doesn’t get Gauri Nanda out of bed, so she makes one that crawls around the bedroom. Cold fusion trumps retirement; neoprene gets a new life; that thermostat is fooled with just a nightlight and some ingenuity!
So now I’m casting aside my guilt and embracing my laziness. I’m going to improve the quality of my life by making the technology I paid for work the way I want it to. Our Wi-Fi doesn’t work in the guest cabin — it’s a little too far away from the house and, as such, cannot be used as the home-office-away-from-home that my husband craves. Recently, I decided to jump into my technology and create a Wi-Fi mesh network (see Volume 01, page 132). This is going to be his Christmas present, and my headfirst jump into the maker world. And I’m making a blog for my sister so she can easily document her trip across the country. It’s not cold fusion or printed circuit boards, but it’s a start.
I challenge you to look around and make your world, or someone else’s world, a better, cooler, easier place to be. It’s the time for gift-giving, and it’s more fulfilling and a lot cheaper to make something, whether it’s as simple as a personalized photo album or as complicated as devising a way to make the radar detector in the car talk to the gas pedal so speeding tickets are a thing of the past.
I’d love to hear about the things you make: [email protected].
Shawn Connally is managing editor of MAKE.
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