Wouldn't it be cool?

I went to the gym today. Okay, there's nothing interesting about that.

I was wearing my heart rate monitor. Nothing particularly interesting about that, either.

But, as I was working up a very unladylike sweat, I was keeping half an eye on my heart rate and it occurred to me...

The heart rate monitor was bought online at a random purveyor of such goods. It is not the first one I've owned, and it is a completely different make from the one I had before. But the moment I step onto any of the machines in the gym, it communicates with that machine. Just as its predecessor did before it disappeared into what I assume must be the same black hole as a host of odd socks from the Romeis household.

All around me there might be people working out on the machines, each of them wearing their own HRM, with a variety of different types represented. And in each case, the machine is faithfully relaying the information it gets from the HRM of the individual concerned.

C'mon! How cool is that?

No one has to jump through any hoops to get their HRM to talk to the machines. It just happens.

A little bit different from when I go to stay in a hotel, and have to go through a whole series of steps before my computer can talk to the Internet. And when I go to visit a colleague or a client, if it is even possible to connect to the Internet from the site at all (which is rare), I have another series of back flips to do. Otherwise I have to use a dongle.

I know. I know. Security and all that stuff.

But wouldn't it be cool?

Wouldn't it be cool if my computer and the Internet service in every locale just greeted each other like old friends who pick up where they left off? If there wasn't even a pause as I left one building and entered another?

Just daydreaming...