Top 5 Technological Innovations That Made My Life Better

On the new iPhone you can call your friends, listen to the new Beck album, send emails, Google ex-boyfriends, and even navigate your way to the closest coffee shop for a caffeine fix. The days of finding a payphone and then realizing that you’re out of quarters are long, looooong gone. Even announcements about turning off cell phones and pagers make us snicker.

I’d like to take this opportunity (5:30pm on a Tuesday sitting in a Starbucks…) to thank the techie gods for these five technological innovations I can’t imagine my life without:

1) The Laptop – I wouldn’t even be here, sitting in this Starbucks at 5:30pm on a Tuesday if it weren’t for the laptop. Mine is a black MacBook. It’s light, sleek, fast, and now that I’ve got a new battery, it holds a five-hour charge. As a writer I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to have to write papers, even novels, on typewriters. Writing a page and then realizing that there was a spelling error? The horror! Being stuck in a home office or computer lab in order to use a desktop computer? Never again!

2) The Cell Phone – My current cell is a black Motorola Razr (it matches my laptop, which was an accident), and even though I can call, text, and surf (the very slow) Internet, I can’t wait until my plan is up in September so I can upgrade to a new phone. There are so many phones now with speedy Internet capabilities, music players, digital cameras, even video cameras, you often only need this one tiny piece of plastic to get you through your day.

3) TiVo – Very few people I know actually own a TiVo machine, but most have a digital video recorder and we can thank TiVo for that. Now I get to start my day with The Daily Show and a cup of coffee, instead of having to end my evening that way. I can skip through the commercials for dishwashing liquid while watching Good Eats on the Food Network. And I can re-watch the season finale of Lost to try and figure out what the hell is going on with that wacky island. I never want to be tied down to a programming schedule or (gasp!) a VHS tape-recorded show, again.

4) The iPod – The iPhone has a music player and the iPod Touch has Internet capabilities, but I’ll take a regular iPod (now called an “iPod classic” That was fast!) any day. My life is richer now that I can walk to the subway station in New York listening to Of Montreal, and when I get in my car in Los Angeles, I scroll through my iPod to find the perfect song to drive to the beach to (Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” is a personal, pop favorite). I now have a soundtrack to my life and I can’t imagine my life without it.

5) Bluetooth – This is both a physical thing and a magical data transmission thing. I’m thankful for both. Physical Bluetooth devices, like the earpiece I carry in my car, are a life saver for two reasons: 1) I won’t kill myself while driving, and 2) I won’t get a $50 ticket now that California has a new non-handheld cell phone law. And I’m thankful for the magical powers of Bluetooth that can’t be seen, which help me to get photos from my laptop to my cell phone and visa versa. Now embarrassing photos of my sister are always around to share at the next family reunion.

Since it’s not a physical thing, I didn’t include Facebook on this list, but I think it deserves an honorable mention. There’s no reason to ever fall out of touch with someone now. I’ve got friends on Facebook that I haven’t seen since I was eight, friends that I see almost every day, and even an ex-boyfriend (or two) so I know when he has a new girlfriend (Ouch! They look so happy together! What a douchebag!). (Editor’s Note: And we can happily stalk people without ever being discovered!) It’s both a blessing and a curse, but one that I could never do without.

[Photo courtesy of pcworld.com]