Kid toys (kids as excuse for nerd toys)

The kid has some cool toys. This
solstice I got him an electric guitar.
A small one. He learns piano from my
wife on an old Kurzweil that I repaired;
inside was a 68000 which amused me,
as I had once taught 68K assembly language
at UCI. He has a plasma globe --in college
they were museum things.

I'm fascinated by how quickly things change.
The kid will take DVD players, calculators,
computers, wireless phones, videocameras,
etc for granted. I'm not a "singularity"
fanatic, but change does accelerate, however
this neither means that we can't appreciate
the future, that robots will take over,
that we'll download our minds, or any other
uncritically suggested crap that is out there.

As an engineer, I can keep things working
well past when others would have tossed
them. I have Win95 300 Mhz machines,
and its 2005; but I run a web server off
it, on an alternate port because Cox blocks
incoming port 80. I have no WiFi
but a cat-5 cable runs down the hallway.
Only recently did I get a cell phone,
for peace of mind when driving; I owned
an illegal jammer for years before that.
I carry more storage on my keyfob, for
moving music around, than my entire
comp sci department had!

I thought I was the last white man in
SoCal not to have a phone, but a few at
work don't. Yet they are very skilled
engineers. I only recently got a DVD
player, $50 bucks. When CD players die,
I salvage lasers and motors from them.
I recently scrapped a scanner; and made
a light saber out of the CCFL and things
around the house for my kid.

He's currently watching a Rammstein movie,
which I KaZaa'd and moved to his unnetworked
machine via 100 MB Zip disks.

How many 5 year olds have played with
green laser pointers?

Or have played with rainbows made by
prisms salvaged from binoculars?

When he was young he got his head
stuck in the center of a 14" disk
platter I had once taken to Lytle
Creek and shot up --one platter with
black powder round ball, the other
with modern ammo. Fortunately I extracted
him from this twisted halo; can you imagine
the explanation to the fire dept or
ER room of a 3 year old with a shot-up
disk platter stuck on his neck?

Enough. BTW, these posts are brought
to you by Guiness. And all are true.