I sometimes hint at what a geek I am at heart in terms of technology, but maybe you need to understand that I am an all out lover of gadgets and cool new technology.

High speed Internet? Had that long before most of you, I got to be on a trial for Nortel’s proprietary high-speed modem. After living through dial-up, it was amazing (unfortunately it killed the project I was working on at Nortel, oh well). Gotta have high-speed  Internet, the faster and the larger the capacity the better. Currently I have a fairly good deal with Rogers, but when that expires, I am pretty sure I will be calling Bell to ask about their Fiber to the Home products (unless Rogers makes me another good offer).

Cell Phone? Got one of those earlier on, when FIDO was first starting out they had a great deal for Nortel employees. Great stuff, although I have taken a while to adopt using a “Smart” Phone, but I have now finally got up to an iPhone 5 (which I use for this website a great deal surprisingly).  Many of the pictures you see are from that same phone. As I said in my post about driving a hard bargain, I got a pretty good deal there too.

HD Television? My mother said I was a “TV Head” from the day I was born, and I do watch far too much TV, so getting HD TV seemed a normal thing to have. I am starting to think that I may throw my Rogers Cable out the window (if I lived in the US, I wouldn’t have Cable, I’d have an Antenna and a connection to the web (and maybe a NetFlix account). Cable needs to lower its costs or it is going to price itself out of a lot of households.

Home network? Yeh, no problem there, wireless and wired network, but my house is old enough not to have Cat 5 cable to every room (too bad that might be nice), so I rely on WiFi as my network connection of choice. My home network may need a WiFi repeater in it if my kids ever move back in (I think I have about 8 devices normally on the network and then when my kids visit many, many more).

What astounds me is that 20 years ago, pretty much all of this technology was unheard of, or not in general use. Given Ultra HD TV is going to happen quite soon, I have to wonder how Cable and Internet will deal with that much more data going through it?

I’d dearly love to understand X10 and other home automation type systems so that I could have a “smarter home” but for now I’ll wait until that becomes a little more standard, but it is interesting that a great deal more homes have wireless home surveillance cameras and home security systems (which seem to be the norm these days too).  I hope that this will be my 2013 project (i.e. surveillance and home automation), think it could get interesting, but I need to chat with someone who already has done it to learn from them (I think).

Tablet computers? Sure, got those too, very useful for my son, he loves his iPad, in fact his PC actually has a touch screen too. That technology could be an interesting change to see how folks use computers, given this generation is so “mouse centric” maybe it will take a while for folks to feel comfortable with touch screen technologies.

Mrs. C8j tolerates my geekiness, but she enjoys using technology and has become a bit of a geek herself (although I highly doubt she would admit to it).

It’s odd that I still subscribe to a printed newspaper, and I think it is mostly so Mrs. C8j can do the crossword puzzles. Maybe I should just cancel my print subscription and buy her a good book of puzzles.

My in-laws bought us a GPS for Christmas about 4 years ago, and I thought what a silly idea, and now I can’t live without the damn thing. It’s annoying and it has failed us once or twice (driving through New Brunswick it went berserk, but finally found it’s brain once we got to Nova Scotia). Mrs. C8j still keeps printed maps, and I will print out journey logs from Google Maps as back ups, but that idea may stop soon.

You got any technology loves I haven’t touched on? I’d be curious to hear.