In the year 2000

Every now and then I have to stop and marvel at what technology gives us. This evening I was in my parents' basement watching the Oklahoma-Oklahoma State football game with the sound down. My dad pulled up the Dayton-Marquette basketball broadcast over the internet. I considered bringing up the Blue Jackets radio call on my laptop. My mom watched a movie she was streaming from Netflix. My brothers were upstairs either playing a game on the Wii or watching Notre Dame and Southern California on the gridiron.

There's nothing all that remarkable about what we were doing. I suspect many other people in this country and around the world do the same. That's what is so amazing if you stop to think about it.

Where to begin? I don't remember exactly when we got a computer at home, but the IBM-compatible with the 5 1/4" floppy disk drive (maybe two) didn't appear there until I was in high school. I recall typing some papers on an electric typewriter, so I'm guessing that it may not have been until my junior year. Compare and contrast that with tonight's set-up. I count four computers, two of them brought by us kids. That doesn't even include the Wii or my iPod, both of which have more memory and processing power than that old computer certainly possessed.

The availability of entertainment, movies in particular, has changed dramatically too. I remember being excited when we got a VCR. It was 1985, if memory serves. Home video libraries were basically unheard of as the market was definitely rental-driven. Now you don't even have to leave the house to have a wealth of movie options at the press of a button.

It used to be that if you were beyond the broadcast signal of your favorite sports teams, you couldn't listen to the games. At best you wouldn't have known the scores until later that night, if not until the next morning. Now it practically doesn't matter where you are to be able to listen or watch live.

Granted, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but stop and think about how amazing this is. Technology becomes so invisible in our lives that we lose sight of the fact that we're living in the future of our dreams, minus the flying cars and personal jetpacks.

Here I am, a couple hundred miles from my childhood home and current place of residence, yet I can find out how my favorite teams are doing as they play. On a whim and without leaving the house I can decide to watch movies that I might not have been carried at a local video store. And I can write about my amazement and share it with readers worldwide as soon as I'm done. There's plenty of awful news out there and plenty for everyone to be concerned about, but seriously, isn't all of this pretty cool? Our twenty years younger selves would lose it over things we don't even blink at.