Technology has become a driving force in my life, in more ways than
most might imagine. At the age of 5, I was diagnosed with Type 1
Diabetes, and quickly learned the importance of the little box that
managed to somehow tell me how much sugar was in my blood, just by
looking at the colors on a little plastic strip.
As a child, we had a computer in the house, ever since the Commodore
64. In the mid 1980's, we graduated to an IBM clone, and I learned how
to create documents with WordPerfect, and printed banners on the
tractor-fed dot-matrix printer we had.
We played on the Atari game console, and even the original Nintendo
(I still have one today). I remember dubbing my favorite songs onto
audio cassette tapes, and making my own compilations to play in my
Walkman.
When I was about 10 years old, I was prescribed a new technology to
help me deal with my diabetes. I became the 8th person under the age of
18 in Los Angeles County, CA to wear an Insulin Pump. Ever since then,
the wonders of a tiny computer at my side have made me truly appreciate
advances in portable technology. The little plastic strips for blood
tests have changed a bit, and the meters work in a fraction of the time
they once took, but that technology continues to amaze me.
I made my first professional advances into technology soon after
high school, when I was working for a technology company that was still
shipping boxes by peeling a label out of a book and writing the
information down by hand. I had already become well-versed with the
internet, using my "lightning-fast" 56K dial-up modem. I suggested to
the shipping manager that they should upgrade to the UPS Online Office
program, and print labels and track shipments online. It was an instant
success! Soon after that, I was asked to research the possibility of
bar-coding our shipments for some of our larger customers. After
developing that system, and deploying it successfully, I then took it
one step further and suggested that we label everything, and utilize the
labels for internal tracking. That, coupled with wireless, hand-held
bar-code scanners made the inventory process a snap.That experience was what helped me to decide that my career would
focus on technology.
Even my personal life has been shaped
by technology. Internet dating has become quite popular, despite the
horror stories and potential dangers it can create. My wife and I met,
though 1500 miles apart, through a chat room on an Internet dating
website. To this day, we still spend hours together, playing online
computer games, and working on projects on our computers.
Even now, years after I caught the
Internet bug, I am continually amazed by
the leaps and bounds that technology takes every day. It's quite a ride,
but this Information Superhighway is just the beginning. I can't begin
to imagine the things that we will be living with by the end of the next
decade.
