But It's For the Family...I Think

We've established on several occasions that I'm a geek of many flavors, a moniker I wear proudly. I'm a computer geek. (Hell, I'm a programmer. What choice do I have?) I'm a video game geek. I teeter even on science fiction geekhood, reading Asimov and Heinlein joyfully, but never quite tipping over the brink (examples: I still can't name Asimov's three laws of robotics or tell you how many parsecs the Millennium Falcon can do the Kessler Run in).

One area I have managed to dodge, however, is gadget geek. I'm not one of those people who sees the newest things and drools longingly over it. I have a real old cell phone for example. It does one thing - it makes phone calls. I can't browse the internet. I can't take pictures. When it rings, it sounds like a cell phone ringing, not the latest rap hit. I'm actually okay with all of this, particularly the last bit, since I find it a little disconcerting that a cell phone ringing these days makes it seem like we all have discotheques in our pants (as opposed to just me).

Lately though, the lure of the toy side has been strong. Not because I'm weakening - I'm a rock, still unmoved by high definition televisions (I mostly watch Lost, and no offense meant, but I don't really need to see Hurley any better than I do now) or the latest gaming systems. No, it's because for the first time, one of these things actually seem useful.

The problem is that there is a particular object that I'm repeatedly tempted by, and I'm having more and more trouble differentiating it's usefulness from it's gee-whiz factor. See, now that one of the kids is in school, my calendar is constantly shifting. My lovely wife and I starting utilizing Google Calendars to manage it all, and now we're up to four calendars, one for each of us, one for school events, and one for home maintenance tasks. This is working out fairly well, but if I'm not at a computer, I don't see this stuff.

The other day, someone put a classified ad on our message board at work for a new iPod Touch, a gadget that, like most, I've mostly ignored for the last year. I clicked the supplied link to Apple (much like the one above) and, in reading, I realized that the Touch has wi-fi access I could use anywhere that wi-fi is available, which includes most places I go and my entire house. Using that wi-fi, I would have access to my email and calendar nearly everywhere I was, allowing me to manage our schedules whenever they needed to be updated instead of having to actually remember things until I got back to my computer or write them on my hand (a habit that both the Princess and my lovely wife have now admonished me for).

Oh sure, it's also an iPod. I mean, I guess it would hold 8 gigabytes of music and pictures or whatever, and that I could easily fit my entire Jonathan Coulton and MC Frontalot collections. But my real concern is the time management. That other stuff is just gravy, right? Right?.

So there it is. For all my good intentions, I now have gadget jones, an indescribable need for a thing. I just can't figure out if I want it so badly because I think it will truly help me manage things (which I really, really do), or if it's just shiny. Seriously, I haven't had a desire for the possession of an inanimate object since receiving my NES as a youth.

Do any of you have any experience with this sort of thing? Am I succumbing to the Apple cult? Does anyone make a patch or something?