As an option for my new garage door opener -- a device for which I have never had a need before now -- I was offered a laser spotter. For those of you who don't have cars or don't park 'em in a garage if you do, spaces therein can sometimes get tight, and to avoid pulling too far into the garage and maybe crunching your bumper against the chest freezer or mangling the bicycle, it is wise to figure out where to stop short of doing those things.
The little laser device mounts on the ceiling and when you drive your car under it, kicks on and puts a little red dot onto your dashboard. You pull forward until the dot is on a pre-determined spot and voila! there you are. Twenty bucks, and a testament to how ubiquitious lasers have become. I can recall making one for a science project as a youth, and it required buying an industrial ruby, and constructing a circuit board with soldered connnections, resistors and all like that, into a device the size of a shoebox. As I recall, it ran about fifty bucks, in 1962 dollars, and you were lucky to be able to see it across the room.
But even though I have techno-toys out the wazoo -- computers, cell phone, iPod, electronic guitar tuners, electronic cameras and all like that, I opted for the low-tech solution to the parking problem. Park the car where it is supposed to be, then run a string through a tennis ball and hang it from the ceiling so that it just kisses the windshield. Probably many of you analog-people have seen this one before -- you pull into the garage and when the tennis ball touches the windshield, you set the hand brake and turn the engine off.
Cost is about seventy-five cents, given what I paid for a case of tennis balls for the dogs to chase, and six feet of string. And I don't have to worry about the power going out -- or the gadget mutating into a death ray ...
Sometimes the old ways work just fine.
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