Day 13: Technology

Does anyone else have the problem where when you hear the word "technology" you often begin to sing that ridiculous song that Kip made up for his girlfriend in Napoleon Dynamite?

You know I love technology,
But not as much as I love you,
But I still love technology,
Always and forever...

Just me then? Ok.

For this journal entry, you have to start by imagining yourself as an old person, sitting in a rocking chair, bending the ear of some youngster. "Well, sonny, back in my day, we had to get up and walk over to the TV to change the channel..."

In other words, answer the question: How has technology changed in your lifetime?

You may have noticed the terrible picture quality of the photos in yesterday's post. The colors are grayish, the images are grainy, they're just generally not good. Here's the camera we used for those pictures:

It's the first digital camera that Matt and I owned, and it's huge. We purchased it in early 2001 as we were planning our two month European backpacking trip. We wanted a way to take a couple thousand pictures without carrying around 60 or 70 rolls of film. The next digital camera I got in 2003 was so much smaller, more like the size of that playing card, and took much better photos. And now we all have phone cameras that take ten times better photos than that.

I'll share one more example of technology changing in my lifetime, and then I'll let you go about your day, hopefully with that Napoleon Dynamite song stuck in your head. (Muah-ha-ha!)

I did Model UN in college, where you learn all about another country and then go to a conference and pretend to be representatives from that country--in my case, Costa Rica--and attempt to solve a bunch of global problems. It was a small group, about nine of us plus the professor, and the class had a relatively laid-back feel because of that.
One Sunday night, the Simpsons had an episode where the kids did Model UN at school. I wanted so badly to show a clip of it to my class. We were meeting in a room that had a TV/VCR mounted to the wall, so I figured if I could get a taped copy somehow and cue it up to the relevant part, I could pop it in and show them my favorite scene.

Lisa: Point of order! If we want to learn anything, we must respect--
Bart: Point of odor! Lisa stinks.

A parliamentary procedure joke! That's gold, y'all!

I tried to figure out if there was going to be a rerun, so that I could program my VCR and bring the tape to school. In the end, I couldn't get it, and I was reduced to, "Hey, did you guys see them doing Model UN on the Simpsons the other day? It was pretty funny."

And what's the situation today? I'm texting with my siblings, and someone makes a comment about bacon, and two seconds later my brother adds a gif from The Office of Michael Scott with his George Foreman Grill foot burn.

It's a crazy world we live in.

PS: Here's the clip I wanted to show my Model UN team way back in 1998.