Spending two weeks in the Dordogne region of France with family was a retreat from the the Web and network technology. In a region famous for medieval castles, prehistoric cave paintings and canoe trips down the Dordogne River, there was nary a computer in sight. But in those rustic valleys I was introduced to one technology new to me: the "smart key" for the car.
This is a computer-based smart card that starts a car after it's inserted into the card-reader slot inside the vehicle, instead of using that more familiar legacy technology, the car key.
The smart key is supposed to make it harder to steal a car than one with a metal key. For years, Europe has been very keen on smart cards for all kinds of purposes, so finding them in cars shouldn't really be a surprise.
My brother and his wife had rented a French car, the Renault Scenic, that you started by means of a smart key placed into the slot near the driver. The smart key could also be used to lock the car. They brought the Renault smart key to my attention because it was malfunctioning.
Seems one of them had dropped the smart key into a puddle and now it wasn't quite as smart as before. The smart key wouldn't always start the car and it would no longer lock the car at all.
The smart key "isn't ready for prime time," commented my sister-in-law, a French-born scientist who is one of the best drivers I've ever seen.
One of the smartest things about this Renault smart key, though, is that it has a small metal key neatly tucked into the smart-key's hard plastic casing. It's the back-up technology, and you simply pull out this metal key to start your car when the smart key computer technology fails on you.
In the Dordogne, finding oneself removed from the Web's culture of instant information was at first a bit like caffeine withdrawl for a daily coffee drinker. But after visting the cave of Font de Gaume to view the painted masterpieces of 15,000 thousand years ago on its walls, it was plain to see our ancestors managed to share prized graphics well enough without it.
Still, I had to see what the Web looked like across the ocean, and I had the chance to do that from a hotel near Bordeaux which had an Internet-connected computer for use for a few Euros. (The French don't use the "QWERTY"-style keyboard so there was the fascination of a foreign trip just figuring out how to type my way from site to site).
The messages presented by the Microsoft browser as it periodically tries to explain what it doesn't understand (like digital certificates it doesn't comprehend, asking you if you care to take a chance on an unknown certificate), flew by in French, not English.
The Microsoft browser, which still has that odd way of telling you you're in the "unknown zone" when it can't reach an intended destination, was telling me I was in the "zone inconnu." A barrage of annoying pop-up ads was prattling in French. There was a lot that reminded me of the Web experience in America, and in the back of my mind, I had to wonder if it was real progress over cave painting.
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