Happy Little Trees

Perhaps I am a tad bit behind the times. Maybe I am a Renaissance woman.

It's hard to keep up with technology. There is not a way to be ahead of it--unless you're Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. I wonder if either of them has experienced what it's like to have the coolest toy of the moment, and then find out that your bro next door just put his name on the waiting list to get something that's .1 cooler than what you just bought.

On this occassion, I'm frustrated with DTV. I tried being a paying cable customer. It was a semi-satisfying experience, but after my special offer for being a new customer expired, I realized that the inflated fee was too much for the too little I would get from being a cable TV user.

Now, I'm back to watching local channels, and I'm actually okay with that (I do still want my MTV). I didn't grow up with cable television. We lived too far from the cable station to be eligible customers. My cousins' solution was to have a huge dish in their yard that could also be used to track UFOs.

In the town where I grew up, cable is still not available. Dish network did offer services (and the dish was much smaller than my cousins' old school one), so my family took advantage of it for several years before my mom moved to a town with cable access.

I finally went to the dtv.gov site and figured out that in my current zip code, I can get about 23 channels using a converter box. Just for curiousity's sake, I checked on my homefolk in my old hometown. The results weren't as promising. The only station that was listed above being a weak signal was PBS. If this a government ploy to educate the people of Kentucky, it's not a fair way to do it. They need MTV, too, but actually this would mean that ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX might not be able to be viewed.

I guess like we were once forced to sell Trigger, our horse, to get a car to fit into society, eventually, we will all have HDTVs. The technology pushes seem to come faster these days.

In my lifetime, I've seen a ton of new gadgets added into what the typical American household should have. It gets really blurred between the needs and the wants in our society. For fun, here are technologies that I've seen added during my lifetime (and that my family or I actually purchased):

-Pong
-Atari
-Microwaves
-Cordless phones
-Cell phones
-VCR
-Fuzz buster
-Apple IIe
-Home computer
-8-track player
-Cassette player
-CD player
-DVD player
-Walkman
-iPod

--That's a lot of tech junk! And I consider myself and my family to be pretty modest purchasers of technology!