Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster) by Dave Barry Page A

technology. I am not some clueless old fart shouting “HELLO! HELLO!” into a mobile phone he is holding upside down. *
    I
love
new technology. I am what is known as an “early adopter.” Over the decades I have spent tens of thousands of dollars adopting new technology that I used for periods of time ranging from one week to as long as three weeks, at which time it ceased to be as new as it once was, leaving me with no choice but to buy a newer one. I have boxes and boxes filled with old new technology, and still more boxes containing dense, tangled snarls of cables and power adapters that I would need if I wanted to make the technology work again, which of course I never would because it is old.
    I have been buying GPS units since the days when they had tiny black-and-white screens that said only: YOU ARE PROBABLY IN EITHER NORTH OR SOUTH AMERICA. I have owned “mobile” phones the size of LeBron James. I early-adopted every single version of the Windows operating system, including “Vista,” which summoned hell demons who possessed your computer and played pranks such as changing all your verbs to adjectives, and I
continued
early-adopting Windows versions after that. If Windows came out with a version called “Windows Stab You in the Eyeball with a Fork,” I would adopt it.
    I currently own seven electric guitars. Seven! Not because I am a good guitar player; I am a bad guitar player. I have seven electric guitars because they are
electric
. I am a huge fan of anything that uses electricity. I have one guitar that, using electricity, tunes itself. You press a button and it makes a noise like
WAAAHOOOOM
, and somehow it is in tune. This is something I have not been able to make a guitar do in over fifty years of turning the little pegs by myself. Tragically, I still have to physically
play
the guitar, so it sounds less like a musical instrument than a device that a sheep rancher would use to repel predators. I hope that someday there will be a newer model of this guitar (which I will buy) that tunes itself and then
plays
itself, so I won’t even have to be in the room.
    Like many men of the male gender, I believe I have a natural intuitive grasp of how technology works. I am the “tech support” person in my household. Whenever my wife or daughter informs me that some electronic device is not working properly, I utilize my superior knowledge by (a) turning the device off, thereby allowing the bad electricity to drain out of it, then (b) turning the device back on, thereby causing fresh new electricity to flow in and heal it. If this fails to fix the problem, I buy a new one. This always works.
    The point is, I consider myself to be pro-technology and knowledgeable about gadgets. So when I heard about Google Glass, I wanted it. I wasn’t sure exactly what it did, but I knew it was new, and it apparently involved electricity. It also involved Google, of which I am a huge fan. Google has basically replaced my brain. There was a time when, if somebody asked me a question—say, “Who is Socrates?”—I had to manually think about it. Whereas now I just Google it and, boom, I have the answer. (“An ancient dead person.”) Google makes thinking SO much easier. If Google had existed when I was in college, I could have spent the entire four years getting high and listening to Moby Grape, instead of just 87 percent of the time.
    So anyway, I got Google Glass. It cost $1,500, which sounds like a lot of money until you realize that it’s 100 percent tax-deductible if you write about it in this book.
    What is Google Glass? It’s a lightweight electronic device—sort of like a high-tech-looking eyeglass frame without lenses—that you wear on your head. On the front right side of the device is a tiny camera and a miniature screen that you can theoretically see with your right eye. There’s also a tiny microphone and speaker. It connects