My Thoughts on Technology

(This blog post took shape when flying on my way from Seattle to Florida for the Walt Disney World Marathon. That blog post is still being written, but this one kind of came over me. It isn't running related, but I hope you enjoy anyway. Marathon post forthcoming!)

In this era of Podcasts, RSS Feeds, ReddIt and any other number of new hip ways to be in the know I have a confession to make. I still go to cnn.com, or espn.com. While others are using their phones for this app, or that function I am stuck making calls and sending texts. This comes as a surprise to a lot of people when they learn that I am in the technology industry, and yet change and progress is something that I am sometimes slow to embrace.

For years I swore you would have to pry Windows XP out of my cold dead fingers, I have upgraded to Windows 7 on my netbook and can say that I am glad I made the change and am pleasantly surprised. NETBOOK you say? Seems a little too hip for me. Well, the netbook was only purchased after I finally gave up on recycling HP Pavilion laptops which were current when Y2K was all the rage.

I don’t play games on my netbook , because naturally the specs don’t support it. I am a console guy. I buy three games a year and play them on my two year old Vizio 42 inch plasma TV. I can’t tell you the refresh rate, or any other number of specs on my TV because I don’t know or care to know. I know that when I turn it on it works, and the picture still looks damn good for what I paid for it and how long I have had it.

I don’t use my Xbox as a media extender and don’t stream Netflix to my Blue Ray player. There are certain things I will embrace more quickly than others. I want a Blue Ray player, but it will more than likely be another year or two before I get one. My DVD’s in my Xbox (for those of you who care, it up scales to 480) look just fine to me.

I would never dream of doing away with cable and just watching TV through the computer, and I hate that EVERY single website that does any type of news reporting feels the need to include a video along with it. If I wanted to watch the video, I would just turn on the TV for God sake.

There are a lot of things I love about where technology is taking us as a society. The knocking down of barriers, the ability to give people a voice and a forum, and the way it allows people of all races, types and colors to communicate is amazing.
If it wasn't for technology being what it is today I certainly would not be employed. But that does not mean I you’ll ever catch me on the bleeding, or even leading edge of a lot of things.

Brad Paisley has a song called “Welcome to the future”. The opening lyrics are, “When I was ten years old, I remember thinking how cool it would be. We were going on an eight hour drive, if I could just watch TV.” Well, when I was ten years old and we were going on an eight hour drive, my favorite thing to do stare out the window, keep whoever was driving company and calculate what our time of arrival was going to be.

Without a GPS.