Mark H. Granoff

"My name is Mark and I'm a technology junkie."

It's said that the road to a cure begins with admitting you have a problem. But I don't want to be cured: I love toys! Adult toys. Fast toys. Toys with plugs. Toys without plugs. Toys that make you blurt out, "Cool!"

Toys are the embodiment of technology to me. Technology is "where it's at" and I like to be right on the bleeding edge! Well... maybe not right at the bleeding edge; that usually costs too much.

I don't usually acquire new technology, way cool though it may be, until its been proven to some extent and has a price appropriate for what it is. For example, I got my Apple Newton MessagePad 100 in December '94. It was the right price, but more importantly it does everything I wanted a portable electronic gizmo to do for me. Okay, perhaps its more whizzy than useful, but wouldn't you like to be carrying around a gadget that actually recognizes your handwriting?! I thought so.

As neat as the Newton is, I replaced it in April '98 with a PalmPilot Personal Edition. It has all the same major functions as the Newton, except handwriting recognition. and its about a quarter the size and weight. The PalmPilot has something called Graffiti, which is sort of like handwriting recognition, except it recognizes specific strokes of the pen for each letter. So, entering data on the device is much faster and accurate since it has to work less hard to come up with the right result. So, the Newton is relegated to my personal museum of old technology, right next to my Osborne I. (Who remembers those? :-)

In November 1999 I bought a new TV for my family room -- a Sony 32" FD Trinitron. Its a beautiful, vertically and horizonally flat screen direct-view television. (This is not a flat panel display; those are just too expensive). With it, of course, comes a remote control. While this purchase effectively reduced the number of remotes I need to run my home theatre, I still had too many. So, I bought a Philips Pronto universal remote. This remote is just too cool for words! Its touch screen interface is completely programmable, including the ability to program buttons with multiple infrared (IR) commands and to add custom graphics (as buttons no less!) like television station logos. I've only programmed it enough to make it work for most of the things we do with the home theatre most of the time. I still have a way to go before its "perfect." :-)

How cool is this?! Digitally record television shows and watch them in any order you choose. And that's not the half of it. This is very cool technology. While its been around for some time, I only picked one up (a Sony SVR-2000) in July 2001. But its changed the way we watch television -- for the better! In February 2003, I traded up to an 80 hour TiVo-brand Series 2. Its faster and has more memory. It also has USB ports which allow me to connect it directly to my LAN; instead of using a phone line to make its daily call, it does so over the Internet.

I remain on the lookout for neat gizmos utilizing cool technology...