Wednesday, October 15, 2003Seductive Electronic Gadgets Are Soon Forgotten. People are buying many more electronic gadgets in a well-intentioned bout of self-improvement, but many of the gadgets are rarely used, if at all. By Katie Hafner.
Gadgets - there's lots of cool toys out there. I'll admit it - I collect lots of toys... well, I have collected a lot of different types of toys. I've tried to get less useless toys during the last couple of years.
I have some great gadgets - The Apple IIGS was a great computer for it's time... and my Newton made a great paperweight for my brother. I'm not sure that I can call the Leaf-Hog a self-improvement gadget. It was kind of fun to use for the first ten minutes... and days later, it's fun factor had significantly declined - at least the leaves disappeared last spring. And the good old nintendo 64 works great along with the dreamcast and the old playstation which was upgraded to a ps/2. I put the atari jaguar in a box... but it's so cool and tempest 2000 is really a lot of fun. The second lynx worked pretty well for quite a while there... now where did we put the games for these systems?
I used to have more new useless gadgets. Yep, I have a webcam in my desk drawer at work, it's next to a USB serial adapter that I used for a couple of months. Bruce has the spiffy palm pilot keyboard. I actually used to the hardware IDE mirror at my last job - it was a great gadget, sat in its box quite happy until the time I needed it.
Sometimes it's just the extra parts that you have no idea of what to do with - things like the extra cheap speakers that came with the last computer we bought. They're too spiffy to just toss and not spiffy enough to use everyday. Like the Pentium II 266Mhz processor - I just can't see tossing it out... but it's too slow to use as a computer. So, I have a couple of boxes filled with high tech extra parts.
And then you add in the things that worked until they broke. I really liked my iPod. It worked like a champ and played lots of good music. Being a klutz, I just couldn't help it... the iPod jumped from the table, or dresser or desk or someplace a couple feet above the ground straight down and plop - eventually just didn't survive the fall. My iPod was one of the early 5Gb models and we never added AppleCare to it for it to get fixed. Now you can get a 40Gb model. Can't just toss it out - looks too spiffy, but it probably won't ever get fixed... so we save it in another box of broken, but too expensive to fix and should be replaced soon box. I'm thinking that the old HP 722c printer that gets jammed all the time should probably be tossed... but it could come in handy some day.
I like audio visual stuff - so the collection of AV stuff just keeps slowly building. Sometimes it will take years before the next addition... a good thing here is that we actually use all of it. Except for the TV we gave away to Maureen's folks and the old Sony I used as a monitor for the IIGS. The ReplayTV has worked great for years and DirecTV is really cool. Is DirecTV a self-improvement gadget? We had to add the latest PC to be able to create DVDs of recorded shows... honest.
Our church is showing a movie soon and I got volunteered as the AV person. I tried to work out the details of what we needed. Last year we borrowed someone elses sound board and nearly all the rest. The projected was from our church and we used our DVD player, but the rest we borrowed. A friend of ours needs to have their band recorded. So, take those two things together and it seemed like a good time to get a cheap, small sound system that could do what we need. I'm not thinking that the sound system is for self-improvement - it's purely a toy that makes it possible to do some cool stuff. So, I just had to get the cheap parts. It'll be fun to play with and who knows when I might need to mix sound someplace else?
I'm sure Maureen just loves her spiffy palm m105 that I gave her a couple years ago. I've even tried to keep live batteries in it on occasion. I dig it up from where it's buried, dust it off and see that it's just like new.
Other times it's just to collect the thing that comes along - like disney related lionel train cars. I got a bunch of them - I even have a whole train set from the 1970's. I have a transformer and even a lighthouse with a fog horn sound. But I don't have a single piece of train track... I haven't run any of these train cars yet. Just too cool and you gotta collect these different kinds of trains... and the disney collectables look great in their boxes in the closet. I'm not touching the book subject. Lots of books - skipping this subject.
Yes, yes, yes, a thousand yes's. I collect toys - at least I try to keep using them (and it's not about self-improvement :-)
5:06:37 PM # comment [] trackback []
Copyright 2006 Dave Kopper
Theme Design by Bryan Bell
