I love technology. In my actual life I'm a software engineer. Amongst software engineers, I am far from the geekiest guy I know. I don't care much for Star Trek, and I know just enough Monty Python quotes to drop them in where they fit ("Very small rocks", "I'm not quite dead yet"). Although I may not be that geeky amongst programmers, I do love the toys and conveniences that modern conveniences give us.
Last night I went to Wal-Mart to pick up some cough syrup, because I have a cold (I don't want to beat a dead horse, but modern technology has done NOTHING for the common cold, in fact things are getting worse because now I have to find an open pharmacy and hand over my driver's license to get real sudafed. The stuff that is currently available over the counter doesn't work as well. And by "doesn't work as well" I mean "throwing $4.37 out the window on the way to the store would be just as effective". Chicken soup is probably more effective).
On the way out of Walmart, I stop at redbox and rent a movie. $1.50 for a Blu-Ray disc. I was thinking about how amazing this is. My family got its first VCR for Christmas in 1985. This was kind of the year that "the rest of us" got a VCR. It seems like that Christmas every family I knew that did not yet have VCR got one. Also, video rental stores popped up everywhere. Some charged membership fees, and some didn't last long. I imagine there are people who are still angry that they paid a $50 membership fee to Pineville Video Rental in January, 1986, and they were out of business before the weather got warm. Whether they charged fees or not, I don't ever remember movie rentals being less than $2. And this was Blu-Ray, whose image is roughly 17,000 times clearer than VHS.
As I walked to the car my Blackberry vibrated. It was an emailed receipt from redbox. I was barely 100 feet away. This prompted me to think, "Wow, what an amazing world we live in. This is fantastic." Somebody, however, would have had this same experience and this would have been the thing that pushed them over the edge an caused them to go "off the grid".
As for me, I like the grid. Also, The Social Network is a pretty good movie, but I really recommend going to the source, Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires (as well as his other non-fiction). While I was writing this I received an email that told me my wife returned the movie to redbox. What a wonderful world.
If you want to leave a comment I'd love to hear from you as long as its not to have a cyber-argument because I have a BlackBerry. I don't have a phone-religion, but a good deal was a good deal.
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