I\u2019m not a big tech guy.\u00a0 There is some technology that falls into my skill level.\u00a0 Like my toaster.\u00a0 It has handles you push down after you put the bread in.\u00a0 There\u2019s a dial to set length of toasting time and a button that will pop your toast up on command.\u00a0 There\u2019s another button that I don\u2019t know what it does, but I figure I don\u2019t need that.\u00a0 I\u2019ve mastered toast technology.<\/p>\n
Technology more complex than my toaster gives me fits.\u00a0 Recently Pam and I were driving her Toyota and looking at the display screen that you are apparently not supposed to look at while you\u2019re driving.\u00a0 On the touch screen that you are apparently not supposed to touch while you are driving are the radio and climate controls.\u00a0 We\u2019ve figured those out.\u00a0 (When I was a kid, we had a heater in the car that we hope worked.\u00a0 Now we control the climate.\u00a0 That\u2019s quite a leap.)<\/p>\n
We noticed there is a button for \u201cApps.\u201d\u00a0 Pam touched it, and a whole spectrum of possibilities opened: weather, traffic, satellite radio, messages.\u00a0 Only we couldn\u2019t figure out how any of them worked.<\/p>\n
I wish I could report that was a unique experience.\u00a0 Alas, I am afloat in a world of things I don\u2019t know how to work, or even how to turn on in some cases.<\/p>\n
Part of that is being 63.\u00a0 But my lack of tech-aptitude goes back a long time.\u00a0 In high school, a kind and patient Mr. Blackstad tried to teach us some rudimentary computer skills.\u00a0 We were to write a program that would simulate the roll of a dice.\u00a0 This was 1973, and that\u2019s what counted as a video game back then.\u00a0 Matt Rausch and Patty Eckstein were part of my group and smarter than me.\u00a0 Still are, I suppose.\u00a0 I leaned heavily on their talents.\u00a0 Actually, they did everything and I tried not to look dumb.\u00a0 I did that a lot back then, with varying degrees of success.<\/p>\n
Flash forward to today.\u00a0 There is a technology boom in agriculture right now.\u00a0 If you walked around Farmfest, every booth had an element of incredible science that would have been unimaginable to my father who began farming a century ago with horses.<\/p>\n
I recently purchased a monitor for our eight-row planter.\u00a0 (Yes, there are eight-row planters.\u00a0 You don\u2019t have to go to a museum to see one.)\u00a0 This monitor tells me that seed is going into the ground, which I appreciate.\u00a0 But it could also map my fields with GPS, syncing with sprayer information and my combine monitor to create layered maps showing what variety of seed I planted at what rate in what soil type with which pesticides, receiving what rainfall and heat units that yielded how many bushels and how that compared with all my fields.<\/p>\n
It could.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t know how to do any of it.\u00a0 Using that monitor to only tell me seed is going into the ground is like owning a Corvette ZR1 and driving it in and out the driveway.<\/p>\n
I could go into Miller Sellner and have one of the young mechanics show me how to it works.\u00a0 These fellows are my kids\u2019 age, and I\u2019m embarrassed when I don\u2019t get what they\u2019re saying.\u00a0 Even.\u00a0 When.\u00a0 They.\u00a0 Talk.\u00a0 Really.\u00a0 Slow.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve noticed in talking with friends lately, we are all taken aback with how many people there are in our various occupations who are \u201cour kids\u2019 ages.\u201d\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t that long ago they were playing with toy tractors and Pok\u00e9mon cards.\u00a0 Now they\u2019re programming software and administering anesthesia.\u00a0 How\u2019d that happen?<\/p>\n
A while back, I wanted to connect my phone to Bluetooth in the aforementioned Toyota.\u00a0 After sitting in the car flailing away at the various screens involved for half an hour, son Ezra came by. \u00a0He took my phone, thumbed a couple dozen rapid taps and handed it back to me.\u00a0 Connected.\u00a0 I felt sheepish; I might as well have been back there with Matt Rausch and Patty Eckstein trying not to look dumb.<\/p>\n
If technology would just stand still for a decade or two, I might be able to catch up.\u00a0 I\u2019ll use television to illustrate.<\/p>\n
When I was a kid, we got Channel 12 in black and white.\u00a0 We had Gunsmoke, Walter Cronkite for national news, and Chuck Pasek for local news.\u00a0 I knew how to turn on the TV and adjust the volume.\u00a0 Life was good.<\/p>\n
Then we got a color TV and began to get stations out of the Twin Cities.\u00a0 I still knew how to turn on the TV and even change the channels.\u00a0 Now we got Star Trek and the Game of the Week.\u00a0 Life was still good, and really, what else could anyone need?<\/p>\n
After we got married, we bought a VCR.\u00a0 I could put in a VHS tape and play that for the kids.\u00a0 But it could also record things from the television at preset times.\u00a0 Here technology began to race ahead of me.\u00a0 I never figured that out.\u00a0 Later came a DVD player.\u00a0 The TV channels had to go through the DVD player.\u00a0 Or the DVD player had to go through the TV channels.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure.<\/p>\n
Next came some device so we could watch things off the internet on the TV.\u00a0 That ran through my son\u2019s Xbox.\u00a0 By now the cords behind the television began to look like spilled spaghetti.\u00a0 There were a couple times I had to ask how to turn the TV on.\u00a0 We were getting a bunch of channels, but I missed Gunsmoke.<\/p>\n
Around then, I started to fall asleep on the couch watching whatever was on anyway.\u00a0 When a storm bent over our antennae, I was ready to let the whole complicated mess go.\u00a0 We haven\u2019t had a working TV since.\u00a0 The Twins are on the radio, Pam watches Netflix on her iPad, and I fall asleep reading just as well as I used to watching television.<\/p>\n
The inventor Buckminster Fuller created the \u201cKnowledge Doubling Curve.\u201d\u00a0 He wrote that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today on average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. \u00a0It is expected that the \u201cinternet\u00a0of things\u201d will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.<\/p>\n
I see where this is heading.\u00a0 Even if my brain maintains what I know, and that is iffy, I know less of what there is to know all the time.\u00a0 If at some point I could claim to be at least half-witted, that would be a quarter-witted in 13 months.\u00a0 I\u2019ll be lucky to be one sixty fourth-witted pretty soon.<\/p>\n
This is all upsetting.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to go make some coffee.\u00a0 Let\u2019s see.\u00a0 Water, filter, one button on my coffee maker.\u00a0 I\u2019ve got this.<\/p>\n
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I\u2019m not a big tech guy.\u00a0 There is some technology that falls into my skill level.\u00a0 Like my toaster.\u00a0 It has handles you push down after you put the bread in.\u00a0 There\u2019s a dial to set length of toasting time and a button that will pop your toast up on command.\u00a0 There\u2019s another button that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[162],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weeds-by-randy-krzmarzick"],"aioseo_notices":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-22 14:42:06","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114552,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114551\/revisions\/114552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}