Walkie Talkie

I got an Apple Watch on the first day they were released and since that time I’ve worn one ever since.   It doesn’t replace all the things a smart phone can do, but it’s very useful in a lot of other ways.   Recently Apple released the Apple Watch version four and it had been a while so my husband and I decided to upgrade.

As is typical with hardware and software, sometimes the things you’re most excited about turn out to not be that useful where as something you thought was silly later become integrated into your daily life.   Like text messaging.

Back, way back, in 1990 I was texting at IBM over the mainframe on a green screen.   It was a novelty, but still a good way to ask someone if they wanted to meet you downstairs at the cafeteria for lunch.   Did I envision texting would be such mainstream method of communication as it is today?   No.

FaceTime.  Television, movies and books have talked about video calling for decades.   And now it’s easy and integrated with a phone that fits in your pocket.   No special video calling phone necessary.   But it’s turned out to be primarily a special occasion calling method for the most part.  And programming your VCR to record shows at a future point in time.   Don’t forget that one.

Suffice it to say, it’s hard to tell what will catch on and become mainstream.   Back to the new Apple Watches and a new feature called, “Walkie Talkie”.   It’s just what you’d think it is: you hold down a button and talk.   When you release the button your message is transmitted.  The recipient can respond and you can chat back and forth.   Fun. Well, maybe fun.

There is no, “answering of the call” as in a phone call.   The message just comes through on your watch.   You won’t have random people blaring out on your wrist though as you have to grant permission to each other to have the feature work between you.   But what happens if you’re in a movie theater and your husband doesn’t know and he wants to ask you if you could get cheese on the way home from the store?

There are some beeps that happen just before the message and if you don’t want to hear it, you can put your hand over the watch and it disregards the message.   So it’s fairly constrained, considering my husband has granted me permission and I talk a lot.

We didn’t realize how useful it would be though.   Finding my husband when he’s down the street or even in the attic is easy with a, “hey, where are you?”   And he’s messaged me back and forth while at the grocery store asking if we needed one or two gallons of milk and what if they were out of the soup I had on the list, did I want a different kind?

I don’t know if it will become mainstream like texting, but it’s definitely useful.   My children think it’s great fun too.   They wanted to put on our watches and talk back and forth to each other.

The Big Boy Update:  Today was bring your parents to school for my son.   He showed us a lot of math work.   Some of which he was inventing, called, “CC Math”.   I thought it was sort of interesting he was coming up with his own ways of extending multiplication and division but his teacher said they have students do the same thing all the time.   She said she would teach him some additional ways to do problems so he could do that as well as his new math.   He’s able to understand numbers in an abstract sense now.   Today he did a math problem where he divided 5,487,328 by four.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter came downstairs from helping me with some work by sorting something into sizes and shapes.   She loves to sort.   When she got downstairs she called to me and as I looked over the bridge I could see what her problem was: her brother was in the chair she usually sits in to listen to shows on her iPad.   I asked her what she needed and she said, “my heart doesn’t feel like being anywhere other than the chair, but that’s where Greyson is.”