sans comic sans

The Campbell-Raws on a typical Saturday afternoon. Image via Boing Boing Gadgets

On weekends, both my lovely and talented wife and I turn our attention to any number of side projects we have cooking (sometimes literally). An ethnographer might more accurately describe “turn our attention to” as “race against the clock to create as much as possible before the Delta Waste Management dump truck arrives outside Sunday evening, makes a lot of noise, and serves as an effective but unceremonious reminder that the weekend is over.”

Anyway, our work is usually focused on the same goal or we have complementary projects going such that we can pretty much stay out of each other’s way. Maggie makes books, I design websites. No problems, even in a tiny Brooklyn apartment, right?

Not so! We often find ourselves competing for computers.

The Classon Computer Lab. In the foreground, my 12" Powerbook G4. Behind, Maggie sits on an ottoman in front of the TV, which is hooked up to the venerable GRAYBOX, an aging Windows XP computer.

Wait, what? Not only are we not wearing awesome single-piece jumpsuits, there is some sort of technology logjam right in the middle of our living room. Several explanations come to mind:

• We require more time online than the average couple
• Our apartment isn’t large enough for two computers and a TV
• We need at least one larger screen, which rules out a two laptop setup
• After ten years, we still aren’t very good at sharing

All of those things are undoubtedly true. But I have a hunch that there’s something bigger going on here: some part of that retro vision of the "living room of the future" may be coming to pass after all. Could it be that awesome buzzword from the 90s, convergence?

Of course, convergence in practice is not nearly so neat as we imagined it ten or fifteen years ago when WebTV and online video gave us a brief, misguided vision of a future without television.

We use our TV as an actual TV for about two or three hours a week, usually to watch the Seinfeld rerun at 11. We don’t have cable. We watch a lot of DVDs through a DVD player hooked up to the TV. The Windows computer gives us access to TV shows we’ve downloaded and DRM-laden services like Netflix’s “watch now,” and the occasional movie rental through Amazon Unbox. It also has a shared iTunes library which we pipe into our stereo. Finally, we use the TV as a web browser when the other has commandeered the PowerBook.

It’s one busy setup! A delicious stew of subscriptions, a la carte content, legally ripped and illegally downloaded content ladled over a five year old computer and small HDTV.

OK, so that wasn’t the best choice of words, but I’m cooking while I write.

This isn’t meant to be some consumerist rant about the lack of cool new devices that solve all my problems; I’m not naive, I don’t expect a single device will set our living room free. But as I watched Maggie sit in front of the TV ordering bookbinding supplies while I sat on the couch resolving a truly annoying problem with Google Apps MX entries, it struck me just how far our living room was from the Walt Disney-esque vision pictured above. The way we work in our apartment is truly comical and yet I can’t help but think that maybe we’re actually doing pretty well in making our technologies sing in tune.

I’ll end this essay with a happily illustrative description of what I’ll do once I’ve published this essay: I’ll put down the laptop, wake up the TV, shut down iTunes (Bob Dylan, Time Out of Mind), switch the input to the Oscars and then fiddle with the stupid HD antenna until it comes in.