I admit to being a bit of a gadget geek. I like technology and I like the latest and greatest gear. Hell, I had a computer in 1982. What a piece of crap that thing was: Timex Sinclair 1000 with a whopping 4K of memory. Of course I had the optional memory expander that took it to a screaming 16K.
No monitor, of course, you hooked it up to a TV and it output a B&W picture. No hard drive, either. You'd write these little Basic programs and accidentally jiggle the power cord and lose all your work. You could save your programs onto a cassette tape using your portable cassette player. Then you had to load them into the computer whenever you wanted to use them. It had a chiclet keyboard that was a nightmare to use. All in all it was a lame excuse for a computer.
I think my second computer was an Amiga 500, which for its time was an amazing little piece of technology. It was the first personal computer capable of pre-emptive multi-tasking. In the beginning it also lacked a hard drive, but it did have a great display. It was a pioneering computer in terms of graphics. It had a set of graphics chips that handled all the display stuff and left the CPU to do the number crunching it was designed to do.
I've had all the gizmos and gadgets over the years. But there were some things I skipped or ignored. I never had one of those early cell phones that were the size and weight of a brick. First cell I had was a little Motorola, I think. I've had so many since about 1995 it's hard to remember.
It's funny, though, how I can't seem to get used to using some aspects of technology. Every day when I get dressed, two things are part of my ensemble: a shoulder holster holding my Glock 31 and my iPhone. That iPhone is always in my pocket from the beginning of the day until the end. But I can't tell you how many times I have not thought to pull it out of my pocket and use the camera to capture something cool I've seen.
Granted, the camera on the iPhone sucks. It doesn't have the resolution of a lot of cell cameras and it won't zoom (until tonight when I bought Camera Genius from the AppStore). Doesn't have a flash, either, but that's sort of incidental. Hi-res and zoom are much more important.
Last week on two occasions I saw a barred owl that was close enough to capture on video. Did I whip out my phone and snap it? Nope, sure didn't. Frankly, I didn't even think about trying.
So what does that say about my tech prowess? I'm not sure. Having the technology but not using it could be a sign of a crypto-Luddite outlook. Well, maybe not. Could just mean my brain hasn't been trained to think that way yet. The kids take pictures of everything--including themselves with little or nothing on--and send them to everybody. I just don't think of my phone as a camera. Mostly I just use it as a phone, even though I have about 30 apps on it, most of which I've never used.
Maybe I'm just a tech-savvy Luddite.
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