Being good with technology is like being the guy who owns a pickup truck; everybody wants to be your best friend when there’s heavy lifting to be done. Face it, the question "Can you help me move?" is substantially the same as "Can you get my internet working?" The only real difference is that when you help somebody move, they're more likely to provide pizza and pop at some point during the experience.

As the tech-guy, I've been called upon to rebuild computers, hook-up satellite television systems, and program VCR clocks so they stop flashing twelve. Once word of my mad skillz gets out in the neighborhood, it's open season on my free time. If I lived next door to CERN, I would have been asked to help debug the Large Hadron Collider.

After all these years of being drafted to solve other people's problems, it feels good to finally speak the truth and say ... I don't mind.

Really.

As far as my cars are concerned, my primary function is to take them in for maintenance as often as possible. My mechanic shares their viewpoint, except he also sees me as the guy who pays for that maintenance. If I could figure out some way to extract myself from the middle of this arrangement, we'd all be a lot happier.

Except then I'd have no cars to drive, the cars wouldn't have anyone to take them to the mechanic and the mechanic wouldn't have all of my money. Actually, giving up those last two wouldn't be bad. It's the transportation thing that I can't get past. Like most people in challenging relationships, I've decided to take the bad with the good.

My relationships with new cars are always full of hope and promise.

Maybe it's a bad case of nostalgia; or maybe it's the fact that my kids are getting older; or maybe it's because I can’t afford the gas to drive to the edge of town. Whatever the reason, I've been thinking a lot about road trips lately.

A road trip is an express ticket out of your rut. Back home you may be bored with the routine. You know every local McDonald's and Walmart and Radio Shack inside and out. A trip to a new town will expose you to new and exciting venues. Like early Presidential Primary Season, a road trip is positively stuffed with promises. Of course, when you arrive, you'll find the new McDonald's is pretty much like the old one; a "nice" Walmart is still a Walmart; and the inside of one Radio Shack is much like another.

A road trip isn't about the destination, it's about the journey.

Really....

In case you missed it, the world didn't end when they turned on the Large Hadron Collider on September 10, 2008. It would be understandable if you missed this. The so-called major news outlets barely gave it a mention. They also routinely fail to report that the sun has risen or that no asteroids have hit the Earth today. They're too busy reporting on trivial things like the the latest Hollywood gossip, the weather, and who won the Presidential Election.

Of course, as my correspondent called Mainframe points out, all of the news stories about the world's biggest science fair project ignored the real question; is it a collider designed to work with large hadrons or is it a large collider designed to work with hadrons. This is the kind of ambiguity that makes the public suspicious of scientists. After all, if they can't tell us what they're actually building, why should we trust them?...

I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about the serious issue of the fiscal crisis in the United States. I'd like to, but I'm easily distracted so before I really got going I'd probably wind up talking about something entirely ... hey! Do I smell pizza?

You see what I mean?

Years of excessive mental stimulation have left my attention span so withered it can't hold any one idea for more than fifteen seconds. Even if I suffered from the illusion that I was qualified to write about the fiscal crisis, I'd have to start by doing research which would probably mean using the internet which would mean in about twenty-minutes you'd find me watching YouTube and singing along with the video of 99 Red Balloons...