It's taken many years to acknowledge it, but now I'm aware I absolutely love playing with hardware and software. This situation is not shared by the majority my friends and colleagues. To put it more succinctly, I have never personally known another nerd. That's a little sad, I know. I don't consider it a personal problem however; rather, it's just a failing on the part of others.
I teach English to adult learners. I have been doing a similar thing, in different situations, for over 30 years. I would humbly suggest that I have been one of the better classroom instructors in most of the programs in which I've taught. Yet, I have never been able to find colleagues who share my interest in technology. For example, I would think if teaching writing skills, one would desire to be up to date on the latest in Internet social networking. After all, isn't that the place to 'put into practice' all those silly grammar worksheets? I guess not really. Perhaps it is easier to just do things the way one has always done in the past. In my view though, a man or woman with no inclination to learn about technology by playing with it, cannot be a good teacher.
Right now, because the sky is fairly clear, I wanted to go to the park to write this. My phone can act as a 3G wifi spot, so I am typing on the netbook. There's a duck about a meter away looking for things in the grass. So, I guess I'm not the only unusual creature here in Tipperary Park right now. This netbook as served me well for a couple of years. It's one of the very first Acer One models and still going strong. I've not only used it during every class I teach, but slipped it into the end pouch on my carry-on bag when travelling on various continents. It's so old it runs Windows XP.
When playing with Chrome extensions yesterday, I discovered one called jolicloud and it looked interesting, even though it's to be updated soon. When visiting their site, I also noticed JoliOS, a type of packaged Ubuntu for the cloud. I decided to give it a go. The netbook is set to duel-boot, so I can choose between it and Windows upon start up. I am definitely liking what I'm seeing. Anybody want to talk about it with me?