This is cool, but what have you done for me lately?

Steven Levy muses on the process by which "Awesome!" techno-toys become "Meh":

When Arthur C. Clarke went to the great geosynchronous orbit in the sky last year, he left behind a huge legacy, not least of which was a quote oft cited by Silicon Valley visionaries and wannabes. "Any sufficiently advanced technology," the sci-fi master wrote in 1962, "is indistinguishable from magic." [. . .]

But what happens when magic is an everyday occurrence? Consider that the Flip MinoHD — a once nearly unobtainable piece of technology — is now a 3-ounce knickknack. Better yet, it's rendered so elegantly that its coolness is baked in, not slapped on. Barely a minute after opening my review unit, I had the gizmo fired up and ready. My first experiment was to grab a long tracking shot through the rows of Wired's cubicles. I downloaded the footage and was impressed that all was captured as planned. However, the handheld image was a bit shaky . . . maybe too vérité. As a result, my first thought was not so much "What hath God wrought?" as "What? No image stabilization? Where's the built-in steadicam?"

An example of when the human mind's adaptability is not totally beneficial.