Technology

I took my son Lorenzo into Best Buy today and wow! Ive always considered myself a pretty hip up to date kind of guy but I think I'm starting to fall behind. We were looking at laptops and the sales associate was kindly explaining the differences between models such as dual verses quad processors. RAM memory bits. Mega-bytes, mega-bits and pre installed Intel technology and 64 bit verses 32 bit. Me, not wanting to appear to be a total idiot, just kinda nodded and added a few ahhs and ohhs all the while nodding my head as if I completely understood everything he was saying. Then the questions started. What mattered most? Speed? Storage? Memory capacity? I was gonna say price mattered first but I held that one in. And I gotta admit, that voice of materialism started whispering in my head. "Get the one that will make him the envy of all his friends". The one that will have all his friends drooling and wishing they had a dad as cool as he did and was as willing to spend the Bens as I was. You ever hear that voice? I'll go years in a raggedy pair of shoes that are falling apart but I want the kids to have the cool in style pair. Anyway, we ended up getting a very good one that was on sale at a very attractive price and he was ecstatic. We had gone there "to look" but he didn't expect me to buy him his first laptop. Every now and then I surprise them I guess. But before and while he was looking at the computers I was looking around the store and started thinking how much technology had evolved in the past twenty or so years. I don't consider myself old by any means but when I was a kid we didn't have ANY of the things out nowadays. When I was a kid it was all about having a decent bike. We used to get a new kite a couple times a year. We played outside. I could climb any tree that was planted in the ground. Technology for us back then was a telephone in the house. A huge TV enclosed in a wood cabinet that got three stations and that was if it was a clear night and it wasn't raining or stormy. Dad had a big antenna screwed on a telephone pole outside the house with a big rotor dial control thingy by the TV that when you turned the dial the antenna would rotate in the direction you turned the dial. Some nights the picture was clear and sharp. Some nights you couldn't get rid of all the snow and all the characters had "ghosts' around them. And that was about as tech as we were growing up at my house. When we got a little older I remember my best friend Joel Wharton and his family were on the cutting edge of technology. His dad Ronnie was the first person I knew that bought and had one of those monster sized NASA looking satellite antennas installed in their front yard and boy was that thing off the charts! It picked up over a hundred channels! I would spend the night there and we would stay up all night watching movie after movie, show after show. It was like OD'ing on television! Soon after that they got one of those new gaming systems that you hooked up to your TV and could play video games. An Atari! That thing replaced the television viewing for quite awhile. We would play frogger, missile command and space invaders for hours! I would beg and plead my parents for one of them but they never bought me one. But I vowed to buy myself one when I had saved enough money which I did a few years later but then the Atari had been replaced by the Nintendo system. I bought that first Nintendo and literally stayed up all night for a week until I beat that dang Mario Brothers game that came with it. My love of video games stuck and the Super Nintendo followed, then the Nintendo 64. Then it was the Playstation 2. They are my weaknesses. I wanna upgrade again but to what? Now there's XBox, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3. I just don't know. I feel like I should get a big flat screen when I get my new system and that's something else I've been putting off. I still have my Magnavox 27 inch full size TV that would probably kill someone if it fell on them. It's old and heavy and if you try to pick it up to move it or dust under it and you don't use the proper bend knees and keep your back straight while slowly exhaling you WILL pull a muscle in your back but hey, it still works! I remember when my older sister Joy and her husband Gary bought one of those new gadgets called a VCR that actually played copies of movies. There was one place in my hometown that you could go and rent a VCR tape of a movie. They called it the video barn and it was a small portable shed will shelving added on the sides and they had maybe twenty or so movies to chose from. Joy and Gary would invite us all over and it was just mind blowing to be able to put a tape in that thing and watch a movie of your choice on the TV. It even had a twenty foot cable with a remote control on the end that you could use to rewind or pause or stop or fast forward the movie. It was amazing to our technology starved generation. Then today while in Best Buy I was looking at all the different kinds of 'Smart' phones. Do people really need phones that surf the web, send and receive emails, let you post on Facebook and Tweet? I don't, or I don't THINK that I do. Then again, I swore I would never own a cell phone and I did good for several years but I finally succumbed and bought one and now its pretty much a extension of my body. Where ever I am, my phone is beside me. Even typing this, it's two inches beside my computer. Just while typing this post I've received and sent a couple texts. My alarm went off a few minutes ago to remind me of something I had to do. My phone is part of me. If I was to lose it I'm sure I would go into full panic mode. Could you imagine a kid today trying to think back to ancient times when cell phones didn't exist? Like most other kids, both of mine have and have had cell phones. They can't imagine life without one. Last week when Emily was here her phone never left her hand. Constantly texting. She could probably text a sentence faster then I could say it. I got mad a couple times. "Put your phone down and listen to me", I would bark and she would but she would have it in her hands again within a few minutes burning up the keys. Today while looking at the phones in Best Buy I realized my basic flip phone and her sliding keyboard phone is nothing compared to some of the higher end phones. But do we really need it? Again, I don't think I do. Talking and texting keeps me busy enough! I don't need to be able to do banking or watch You tube videos on my phone. Looking at all the new products in Best Buy made me realize how behind the times I have fallen. 3-D TV's with built in WiFi. Computers that can download videos and movies in blazing speed. Phones that can do anything a computer can do. Blu-Ray players ( I'm just getting comfortable with DVD). Iphones, Ipods, Ipads. Gaming systems that you can go online with and play with people halfway across the planet. It's all to much for me to keep up with but hey, if I'm not sure about something or a certain product I can just ask my kids. I'm sure they will know!