I remember growing up, seeing the importance of the phone as I watched television shows. Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry depended on the phone. It was too far to head off to Mount Pilot every time he needed to get information, so he would call Sarah the Operator and she could not only connect him with the State Police office, but could catch him up on all the gossip.

We watched the boys and girls of Sweet Apple, Ohio share the news about Kim Macafee getting pinned by Hugo Peabody. Even Zach Morris knew you had to have a phone if you wanted to get ahead in the world. He would use his big, honkin’ portable phone to order pizzas, plan the undoing of Mr. Belding, or call up Kelly Kapowski to tell her how awesome she was.

Zach apparently knew a great deal. Since those days, we’ve gone from the simple little LED display cellular phones and progressed further than I ever would have thought possible. Portable devices (calling them cellular phones would be doing a disservice to these outstanding tools) allow us to stream on-demand music over the airwaves to our phones. Handhelds let us see the internet from anywhere we want. Blackberries allow us to receive our email automatically, no matter where we are. iPhones give us the ability to send SMS messages, map our location using GPS, and play SuperMonkeyBall. Oh yeah, they also make phone calls.

Early cell phones cost a small fortune to purchase and too much to actually operate. Today they are so inexpensive, you can purchase phones simple enough to lose or replace when you’ve used up the included minutes. Everyone, their mother, and their children has a cell phone. With the proliferation of mobile devices placing them now in the hands of nearly everyone on the planet, I find it hard to believe that anyone would be reluctant to use one in important circumstances. However, I am constantly amazed by the complexities of the human mind and it’s system for managing choices.

One such amazing feat of decision imprecision? Imagine if you were a home contractor of sorts, and you came upon a situation in which an important decision had to be made. You’ve come to a point in the project where, in order to complete a particular step, a decision must be made regarding the disposition of a 100+ year old plant. You, as the contractor, must make a choice.

1. Change the original plan to preserve the plant, possibly upsetting the homeowner because of the change;
2. Cut the ancient plant to make way for the project, possibly upsetting the homeowner because of the change;
3. Stop work on the project and wait for the owner to return home, possibly upsetting the homeowner because of the delay;
4. Pick up any one of the 6 phones on the job site and call the owner to ask “What would you prefer we do?”

All the technological advances you can fit in one’s pocket are of no help if you are not wearing the right pants. Or something like that.

I’m using this Tanita scale, which measures my body fat, BMI, and water content. Last time I got on it my weight was 250 and my BMI was, well, embarrassing. I only weigh myself once a week, as I’m told this is the best way to make sure not to be disappointed. I don’t know if it’s working. I still get depressed when I get on it. I think that’s related more to the fact that I have to look OVER my gut to see that I am overweight. It’s the Sunday Morning Weigh In Double Whammy!

When I go to the gym, I listen to and watch videos on my iPod Touch. They have 47 televisions in the joint, but I never like anything that they show CNN, Fox, NBC, ESPN, ick ick ick. Instead, I have my Touch with which I can listen to my podcasts, and catch up on my Olberman. The Touch is a great little device, and while I’m a big fan of free wireless, I’m glad my gym does not have it. I’d never exercise if they did. I’d be trying to check my email on the elliptical, or worse yet, trying to answer it.

I also use my iPod Touch to keep track of my weight with the help of a little robot application called Weightbot. Weightbot is a cute little robot that tells me my BMI is too high. I don’t care for the little robot very much, but I do like the interface on Weightbot. It’s got a slick calendar that scrolls along the bottom of the screen. Many of the other apps for iPhone look a little kludgy, but this is one of the better ones I’ve seen.

I’ve been using My Calorie Counter to keep track of what I’ve been eating and the nutritional values. It’s an online database with many of the most popular foods already listed. It’s not perfect (there are 22 pages of pizza, but I was hard pressed to find plain old slices of freshly prepared pizza.) My Calorie Counter doesn’t all of the fast food items in it’s database, but it does allow you to add any foods you have not found in a search manually. That’s how I added the Eggwhite Veggie Flatbread sandwich to my personal diet journal. My Calorie Counter was kind enough to let me add the sodium, which was over 600 grams! I was way over my sodium budget for the day, and you can bet that now that I’ve checked Dunkin Donuts nutritional chart I will not be back for anything but coffee.

I’m sure some of you have better solutions to share. If you do, please let me know. I can use all the help I can get. 50 pounds is a lot of weight to lose, and I can tell you from experience it comes off a lot harder than it goes on. No gadget I own can just slough off the pounds, but they do keep me company while I’m trying.

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Resolution 6- Technology as a Tool, not a Toy.
My best friend is my iPod Touch. When we are together, we find so much to share and so many fun things to do. It’s remarkable how she always seems to be there to help me forget what I was doing, reminding me that I would much rather be playing Spiderette or Penguin Lite than attacking the long-overdue items on my Remember The Milk to-do list.

I have a similar issue with my laptop. Here it becomes a bit of an issue, since my laptop is not only a tool for work but it is also the only entertainment I have. When I sit down to work, I am ostensibly sitting down at my TV, phone, and computer all at once. It’s very easy to say “I can just listen to a few podcasts while I work” which morphs into “I wonder what’s in my Hulu queue” and finally becomes “screw it, it’s too late for me to be working anyway!” My multitasking has now become a barrier to the completion of even the simplest task, and so I must resolve to limit my iPod Touch “playtime” to 30 minutes and my video entertainment time to 2.5 hours each day. That sounds like so much when you say it out loud, but it would be an incredible savings of time if I could do it. I could spend 30 minutes after work and still catch a couple of episodes of online TV before bed.

Resolution 7- Upgrades are not Manifest Destiny.
I am renowned for having a short attention span. My entire school career is littered with terrific first semester performance sullied by near inactivity in the second semester. Someone holds up a shiny object, a new activity, or something that offers a bigger challenge than finishing the last vestiges of a report and I am the guy who will run. If you want a long-term project handled, I am not your guy. If you need someone to keep 8 balls in the air without losing his composure, call me. I can make 15 decisions in 10 seconds, but cannot complete the last task on any to-do list.

This love of shiny things makes computer and equipment upgrades very attractive to me. “Ooo! A new mic would make my podcasts sound slightly better!” “Version 19.2.7 has to be better than 19.2.6!” I spend far too much time, energy, and money on incremental upgrades in my life. I don’t need the next big Social Media site. I don’t need a new mixer. I need to do what I can with what I have. When someone starts writing checks for it, THEN I will upgrade. So I resolve only to upgrade equipment and sofware when it is necessary for a paying job OR to maintain security and functionality of my current setup. To prove how true this is, as I write I am running FORMAT C: on my Toshiba laptop, trying to recover it from the debacle of installing XP on it. It’s built only for Vista, and trying to ‘fix’ by installing XP has completely ruined it. It’s a very expensive mistake caused by my endless quest for more more MORE performance.

If you liked these, you’ll like my resolutions for Family and Faith.

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And so we have the early years of Skippy’s life (and our Italy trip) preserved on 8mm video tapes taken on that first/second camera. When that camera’s batteries crapped out and could not be replaced, we bought a 8mm Sony Handicam, in the interest of keeping the same format. Well, saying that 8mm camera’s have the same format is like saying that all you need is one lid for all your pots. Just because they are the same shape doesn’t mean all the pots and lids work together. Luckily, I kept the old camera, which works fine with the adaptor (or it did 7 years ago the last time I tried it.) We can still ostensibly view those videos.

The Sony is still our family video camera, but we never use it. I have a drawer filled with video tapes from that camera, and the camera sitting in a bag in the corner. We never use it because we really don’t watch videos after we make them. It’s just not convenient to do. We have to set up the camera with all the cables, hook it to the TV, and watch.

It’s also been usurped by our digital still camera. The Canon Powershot A-series camera does video and stills. They are all saved on an SD card, and can be uploaded, edited, and shared on the computer. This is by far the most convenient way to deal with video. I can edit it together with still pictures, titles, music, and even screen captures. Who wouldn’t want to do that? With iDVD, I can even make DVD’s for the grandparents.

The Canon PowerShot is still not the best video camera (the video is a little low resolution) but it may end up being the solution for the time being. I’d love to upgrade, but I’m not ready to spend $300+ on a camera. That and I don’t have $300+ to spend. I looked at the cheaper FlipVideo Mino camera, but the quality doesn’t appear to be THAT much of and upgrade and I don’t want to be a slave to USB. I like being able to bring a pocket full of SD cards and sort it out at home. Plus, I already OWN a pocket full of SD cards.

What solution are you using? It looks like the Canon PowerShot A-series will have to be the one for us, for now. We need to buy another still camera. The budget says we may be getting a second PowerShot. It’s a great multi-purpose platform, if you want good still and decent video in one inexpensive package.