My relatives assume because I can program computers that I am automatically a technology bug and an expert on all sorts of gadgets.
My friends know that nothing could be further from the truth. I absolutely detest most technology, and I have very little use for it outside of my day job. I feel like computers will be worthless until they are so reliable and perform their tasks so unobtrusively that they become a refrigerator. Refrigerators are completely reliable and completely out of our daily thoughts.
What's caused this rant? Yesterday, I drove nine and a half hours to watch my son's last conference swim meet at his college. As he startd his race, I made a recording of his start and first lap. As he neared the end of the first lap, the view screen on the camera when blank, and one lone red LED started blinking. To make a long story short, the camera won't operate, and I suspect the mini-DV tape is tangled in the mechanism, as I cannot get the tape out of the camera. I was able to watch my son, but I wasn't able to record the look of triumph on his face, something he could pass down to his children.
That, in a nutshell, is why I just detest a lot of forms of technology.
But my protestations go a lot further than just this incident. Until recently, most DV and Cam recorders made it nearly impossible or extremely difficult to transfer your family's history to a safer and more reliable medium. It used to be transfer to VHS tape was the safest. Then, it become DVD, and today, probably an MPEG format is the safest. But all of these "safest" catagories take hours of our personal time, are fraught with the peril of failure and generally result in a slightly poorer quality reproduction than the original home movie. (As an alternative, I can invest significant capital to have a service transfer the tapes, but either way involves a significant and unplanned drain on either my time or my pocketbook.)
The problem as I see it, is that we spend significant capital to invent new technologies, but we invest zero capital to make sure the new technology can drag along the old content. For my generation, old content is celluoid home movies made on an 8 or 16 mm film, or recorded on a negative. For my generation, new content is the VCR tape. For my son's generation, old content is DVD discs, new content exists somewhere on a memory card. But what happens to the old VCR tape? Do you even have a device in your house that can replay your child's history?
Just something to think about.