high tech

I'm not the highest of high-tech people. I try not to get left too far behind, although I have a tendency to hold on to high-tech toys long after they ought to be replaced. In my defense, I've gotta say that sometimes, if you wait awhile, the prices drop from outrageous to merely unreasonable and it's time to get the new toy.

Case in point: Flat-screen TV's. I don't mean those cathode-ray TV's that happen to have flat screens. I mean the truly flat, plasma or LCD television sets that look like they are painted on the wall and give you pictures that knock you out.

The first one I ever saw was in a showroom in Boston. The price was something like $10-12 thousand dollars and I would have bought one on the spot but it was too big to take home on the airplane. That, and the fact that I couldn't afford the down payment, kept me from enjoying a picture so perfect I didn't know such a thing could exist.

Happily, the prices have dropped over the years to the point that they can fit into the budget if you eliminate frivolous expenses like lunch. Santa Claus has decided that our tired old TV, the one that we fine-tune by swatting it on the side whenever the colors fade to black, is ready for replacement, and he's thinking of making an early delivery before all the stores sell out. Santa is a smart old bird.

I have another high-tech story for you. I work for a government (pronounced "gummint") agency, but I'm not in the main building. I've been wishing I had a TV in my office so I could watch meetings live but that would entail running cable into my office, probably at my personal expense. I was pondering that problem when I discovered that our meetings are now carried live over the computer by means of a thing called "streaming video." This is very cool. I've been able to listen to the audio, which means I can grab my jacket and hustle over if I need to be in attendance for some reason, but now I can watch, too.

We work with computers and e-mail, and rely upon e-mail to get work done. I've exchanged significant work product with employees I've never actually met. The dark side of that is that our system gets deluged with spam, to the tune of 30,000 pieces of spam per month. Our system of moats and dragons keeps almost all of it out. People who generate such garbage should be dragged into the streets and shot, but don't get me started on that.