I suppose at my age (60 this year), I shouldn't be such a 'gadget geek', but I am. Frankly, I happen to LOVE that nice lady in the Jaguar dashboard with the lovely English accent (Would you believe she's fluent in, like, a dozen languages?). She has never once told me, "Well, go to hell! You're not getting any more help!" and then sulked the rest of the day, as my wife has. Besides, you gotta love a woman who tells you to make a U-turn instead of screaming while you do. She's also never complained when I'm driving a hundred yards off the paved road, whether it's because of a software update for a new road I don't have loaded or - well - because I'm driving a hundred yards off the paved road ...
Then, there's facebook. I use it daily to keep up. I find out on a daily basis who I've outlived; who's had more surgeries than I have; whose kids have been sent to jail or are getting divorced - all without having to dream up an excuse to delicately extract myself from a conversation. I can comment if I want to; and I can stop any time. It's great.
My phone does all that stuff and more. It's my watch (I quit wearing one when I had both a phone and a Palm Pilot that had the time.), my calendar (Once carried a DayTimer for a year or so - no longer. This one's 'cloud-based' and accessible by me and my assistant. We can both schedule anything at any time and see it immediately.), my notepad (another egregious omission from years ago), camera (I used to carry a ton of equipment to take mediocre vacation shots of places I forgot I went to because I spent so much time looking for the right shots.), address book, seismograph (Yes, really. Three separate axes can be displayed singly, in any combination, or as a vector. It also works as a bubble level.), and general all-around price guide and bet-settler (Because I can look anything up in Google.). It's also a nav system for when I'm riding with friends who don't have one (Ask my friend Dan if we'll listen to the nice lady's suggestion of an alternate route the next time she mentions it at midnight outside Chicago.) and I can track NFL scores in real time, even if the game's blacked out on TV. I'll watch YouTube videos on it when I'm really bored. Sometimes, I even send text messages so my wife gets one once in awhile.
Finally, I've got a Bluetooth headset. Two, actually. The stereo headset works great for walking the dog around the block listening to music or on long boring drives in my car without a radio. I can also make and take calls on it. The single earpiece keeps me from being one of those morons with my cellphone plastered to my ear while attempting to drive with one hand. I can answer calls with a single touch - or not - and carry on a phone conversation under any circumstance where I could talk to someone sitting beside me. The great thing about having a Bluetooth hanging from your ear is that it's an excuse. Say you're standing in a checkout line behind a dumbass. You involuntarily blurt out, "Ah, ya dumbass!" The dumbass will turn to beat the crap out of you, but all you need to do is point to the Bluetooth, roll your eyes, and say in a 'stage whisper' "My ex ..." and all will be forgiven. You can even throw in a final "Well, bite me!" at the end - because nobody knows you don't actually have a call going.
Now, I don't Tweet or Twitter or anything of the sort. Not because I don't know how. It's just that I've never had a thought I could express in 140 characters or less - except for the one I sometimes want to send to jerks that I don't like. That one takes only eight characters, of which the first is an 'F', and the fifth is a space. It takes nine if I add an exclamation point.
So the bottom line is, there's a lotta fun to be had from modern technology - as long as you take a little time to look for it.
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