Perspective

I was playing with my new Blackberry the other day, and pulled up the local radar to check the incoming weather. Up popped a full color map of Ohio, with the familiar green and yellow blobs of rain on its way across the state.

I turned to my five year old daughter and said "How cool is that? I have a picture of the current radar map here on my handheld."

And she looked at me blankly, like "Yea, so?" And it occurred to me that she has no perspective for how amazing that is. Of course you can check the local radar with your handheld wireless device!

I didn't get my first computer until is was 15 or so (An Atari 520ST - 512k RAM, and a blazing fast 8mhz processor, thank you very much), and I thought it was the most awesome piece of machinery ever invented. (Damn, I wish I had kept that.)

And I realize that the hand-me-down computer I gave to my daughter when she was two (!) -- which I couldn't use anymore because it was waaaaay too antiquated -- was more powerful than anything NASA had to use to land people on the Moon, much less my own first computer.

When I got my computer in 1986, there wasn't much to do with it other than word processing, basic gaming, and if you were really advanced and into exotic computer geekdom: creating BASIC programs. WOO! Good times. (I actually met Woody Hayes while attending a summer computer camp at OSU when I was in high school - but that's another story.) Al Gore hadn't invented the internet yet, so it's not like I was cruising the net. The rudimentary BBS's didn't exactly hold my attention.

And this is all when I am already 15 years old! So, every new advance -- like, say, a wireless handheld browser that displays real-time local radar -- is understandably appreciated by my generation with amazement.

But my five year old rolls her eyes when I exclaim the wonders of a handheld wireless web browser.

Kids.