Magic in your hand....

For a few years, I used to carry around an iPAQ, a little device that was about the size of a small cigar box, which would alert me when a meeting was to begin, whose birthday was coming up, a phone number for somebody, their address, e-mail addy, that kind of thing. Most folks know that’s called a PDA. It was a bit cumbersome, but it kept some semblance of order to my life. And, being an engineer, people expected you to have funny stuff hanging off of you. After all, I used to have a belt holster for my slide rule.

As years went by, the batteries in the iPAQ became less reliable as did my brain, and it all culminated the other day as I was happily driving along toward Sbucks, glanced over to a building on the side of the road and noted gee, there’s a lot of cars……Holy (insert explicative)! There was a little community kind of meeting that I was supposed to attend that had just evaporated in my mental schedule. Three lanes of traffic negotiated, I humbly walked in right before the “well, I guess that’s all for today” speech. Okay, that’s it. I’ve had it, I have to get something I can have with me. Now, I was quite aware that many of my friends had such various devices because I get a lot of e-mails with “sent from my…….” tagged at the end.

Not completely oblivious to modern technology, I knew there is a bewildering array of products out there that flip, tilt, open, slide, pop, and have virtual and real QWERTY thingies, which is probably what I would need. In the past, I would have conducted an exhaustive web search, talked to friends, looked at Consumer Digest (to discover the best model was made in Kazakhstan, with only 5 produced), scoured the local outlets, etc., for up to a month. Somehow in my advancing age, I have gravitated to the “S---w it, I want it NOW”. So, after just a little looking I decided that the DROID was for me. I know iPhones are all the rage, but to be honest, I do believe those red and blue maps so decided that the V source was better than the A network

So yesterday after a quick phone consult with a geeky friend, I marched into the local Verizon store and now am the proud owner of a little black device that is much smarter than I am. It used to be that the cell phones had an inch thick instruction book with them (only because there was a section in all known written languages, including Sanskrit), but this one only had a “getting started”. After fumbling around for a while and discovering that their idea of the size of my fingers was incredibly wrong, I was able to send a text message with something like: “HJellllop I hazwe aq Drtposd” . I also mistakenly called somebody and was unable to figure out how to cancel the call, so sorry for running your answering machine out of tape. But, i am learning...

I am still in amazement that I can hold this little thing in my hand, (allegedly) get e-mails, find the nearest Pizza joint, and it will give me directions on how to get from my current location (which it well knows) to that destination complete with the “turn left in…” directions. How to they do that? Amazing. It's magic.

I heard the other day that the average teen ager (whatever that is) now spends in excess of 7 hours a day “connected”. I am not sure that is horrible, that generation (whatever letter is attached) is growing up in a world that so different than ours was, that maybe they will be better equipped to be caretakers of it and us. I can only hope that a few of them are spending at least some of those hours learning something on the web, not entirely telling their friends that they just exhaled, or playing Godzilla XIV, so we’ll see.

Okay enough, I’ll be texting you or befriending you.

Oh, and just to reassure you that although I have entered the handheld cyber world, my traditional values are still intact:




And continue to put down the device when it’s time to

DFD