High Tech, Low Tech, and On-line Afflictions

Jeff and I go to the gym early every morning. Since it’s still dark out when we leave, it’s been pretty chilly lately. This morning when I turned the key in the ignition, the dashboard starting flashing. It also began to beep—a subtle bing, like the musical “fasten your seatbelt” bing that you hear on airplanes. “Great,” I sighed, “something else is broken.”

Jeff, never one to presume the worst, leaned over, looked intently at the dashboard, and said matter-of-factly, “Nothing’s broken.” “It’s not?” “No. It’s just a snowflake,” he said. “What’s just a snowflake?” I asked. “On the dashboard. Look at the temperature,” he said. It read 39 degrees. And there it was—a cute little snowflake.

Apparently Volkswagen was thoughtful enough to alert its drivers when it’s cold outside. Having driven the car only in Southern California, we had never seen it before. If this keeps up, I’m gonna have to ask my mom to let me borrow some of those gloves and scarves I gave to her when we moved here.

One of the things I feel is emblematic of being a California Girl is the love of cars.  The Peterson Automotive Museum is having a Low Rider exhibit right now.  Bitchen, right? Personally, I can’t wait.

My earliest memory of the low rider culture was a song by Thee Midniters, probably the first significant Chicano rock bands to come out of Los Angeles.  They had several hits, like Land of 1,000 Dances, but anyone who grew up loving music and cars in the 1960s couldn’t forget “Let’s take a trip down Whittier Boulevard, yeehaa, Arriba , Arriba!” It’s part of my DNA just as much as the love of surfing. In fact, when you listen to the song, it has that early surf sound.  That reverb electric guitar Dick Dale made famous.   But that’s a whole other story for another time. 

After just 24 hours I'm more impressed with this device then I thought I would be and that says something because I was already sure it was a game changer. Most of the time when you have high expectations for a restaurant, movie, or gadget they rarely match and never exceed – but the iPad delivered.

Here are a few wow moments for me so far.

VIDEO: I know Jobs has influence over Disney but I'm still blown away by the free application ABC put out that allows you to watch in beautiful HD episodes of so many shows. I don't even mind the commercials since the content makes it so worth it. How other networks, (hello NBC, CBS & FOX), didn't jump on the initial wave is beyond me. If I ran a network I'd have every episode of a serial type show like Heroes up on this device yesterday on the chance it would intrigue some viewers to get back into the show. Other great apps such as steaming Netflix and MLB should also help deliver on the experience.

SURFING: Based on every review and the demos I saw I was expecting to be impressed by Safari. It was even better than everyone says when you are looking at sites you have seen every day.

As much as I hate to admit it, my husband Dave was right. It hasn’t happened often in our over ten years together – married seven with nary an itch – but it has been occurring more frequently, much to my dismay.

However, I guess even he has to be right some of the time and in the instance of his “insane” (my words) purchase of the video game ROCK BAND last November (2007) I would actually say he was a genius. If you haven’t heard of it you must not have teenagers or been living under a rock. We, like all of our friends’ kids, are completely addicted. In fact, the upcoming release of ROCK BAND 2 has us almost as excited as we were about the iPhone.

What’s crazy about our behavior is we are not video game people. Actually, we both were in the arcade heyday of the 80s, but now most of the games have too many buttons to push and too much violence to lure me into wasting my time. Though Dave’s the King of Technology, except for the Wii, he’s rarely tempted into the gaming world. That fateful day in November changed everything. He suckered me into going to the Best Buy on a Saturday by promising to let me purchase a new game for our Wii console. I don’t know if he was already planning on buying Rock Band, but once he saw they had a few kits in stock, he just had to have one. It was rumored to be the “must have game” of the holiday season and Dave is never one to be behind the technology curve.