iPad this, iPad that

Remember that Lu was saving up to buy himself an iPad?  Well, he did it! And his little package arrived this week.

Amazon doesn't deliver here, so he had to wait until someone was coming down from the US.

For weeks, all I heard about was iPad this, iPad that.

And then, it was here.

We don't see much of the "latest technology" out here, so it's pretty foreign (to me anyway). But Lu, like all children of these times, no matter where they are in the world, come with magic techno fingers. Have you read about the experiment they did with iPads and a group of rural Ethiopian children?

It's like their little fingers just know what to do, as if the machines were telepathically instructing them on their usage. Of course, if you're my age or older and are technologically gifted, you probably think I sound ridiculous - but my kind do still exist.

 

 Alien child from the future.

Anyway, he's totally psyched about it. And I'm very proud of him for saving up (for months), and reaching his goal - even though I am not a big fan of tiny portable devices that connect you to the virtual world, whilst disconnecting you from your physical reality.

But I have to admit, I can see the advantages.

He's now reading Voyage of the Dawn Treader, downloaded for free. I have the whole series in paperback from when I was a kid, except this one, which I lost somewhere along the way. So, that was pretty handy. 

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I remember being ten years old. It was 1985. And I remember calculating with a friend how old we'd be in the CRAZY-sounding year 2000. We wondered what it would be like. Would it be like the Jetsons?

The next year, in 6th grade, our school got its first computers, and we had those horrendously tedious classes that many people my age probably still remember with glazed eyes, as I do.

But I was actually around seven years old when I SAW a computer for the first time.

 Yeah. My mom cut my hair.

A woman across the hall from my dad's office had an Apple computer. He took me over to look at it, and she even let me push some buttons. It didn't really interest me. And when other kids started getting Atari games, it still didn't interest me.

I started knowing people with computers in their homes in the middle school years, but we never got one. Eventually, both my parents started using computers at work, but still didn't need them at home.

I did not own a computer until I was twenty-nine, and I had never really needed one. I was a dancer/choreographer, and ran a small dance school the old-fashioned way: on paper. 

This was the year 2,000,

and we still didn't have flying cars.

Boy oh boy, did my life change when I got that computer. A Mac. I learned Photoshop, music and video editing, and all the other super neat-o things they do. 

Living where we do, it is easy to lose touch with the modern world. I can go months without running into modern-day scenarios, but sometimes it happens, and when it does - like when we go to a bigger town, to a restaurant - it pains me to see so many people looking at screens, rather than at each other. It makes me feel like I'm from another world, in another time - a world that Lu, and all generations to come, will never know.

Do you remember those days?