Bits, bytes and beyond

The irony is that, growing up, I never imagined that life in my time would be so totally different from my parents. I am sure they never imagined mine to be so diverse from what they'd known and believed. I am referring to this extreme proliferation of technology and computers in our daily life. When I went to school and even during my years of undergrad, I never guessed that I would belong to a generation that would use, exploit and abuse bits and bytes to the extent I know I do now.

All around me, be it the PDA, the ipod, the GPS, the laptop, the desktop, the digital camera, the multitude of flash cards, portable USB drives- you name it and one begins to use and adopt these gadgets into one's daily life like fish taking to water. I amaze myself some times at the ease with which I master the use of these. What is it that makes one bristle with excitement at the newest toy thats been announced? It always takes me a while to train my parents to use simple gadgets. It isnt even that I am a computer whiz, I know and understand the basic components, hardware and function- but for most part what I know and how I use is very intuitive. The only good thing(and this can be attributed, to a large extent, to my short attention span) the first thing I do when I get a new gadget is to read the manual end to end :).

I have a stash of Palm pilots, chargers, old cell phones that weigh a tonne, car charges and the like which I am just unable to sell- be it at eBay, Craigslist or the lamest yard sales. I guess the shelf life of gadgets is shrinking by the month(as opposed to years, only a short while ago). I cannot imagine a world without DSL(dial up sounds so archaic already!), laptop, cell phone, ipod and so on and so forth. Are we just living the cutting edge 21st century new age?

Hail Bits?