It’s not until something goes wrong that you realize what a role technology plays in our lives these days.  I’m a self-confessed gadget girl and I joke that I’ve outsourced my brain to my iPhone but I’m starting to think it’s increasingly true.  My iPhone has my calendar and my to-do list (love checking off those little boxes and having an electronic to-do list keeps them front and centre) and my notes on things I want to buy or see or read. My DVR tapes my TV programs, my computer automatically backs up my files and organizes my music and my photos. The internet lets me talk to friends all over the world and see what’s happening around the globe, research obscure topics for my books and provides entertainment when I need it.

Being more organized and keeping a bit more order amidst chaos is one of my goals this year. I’d be pretty unorganized without technology. But I also still love notebooks and pens and writing things down on paper, particularly book notes and plot ideas. I love going to stationery stores and feeling the paper and finding a pen that writes well so it feels like the words flow easily. I have a paper diary as well as my iPhone (which may be overkill but it works for me – after all, you can’t tuck bills into the pages of an iPhone!

So I guess I’m not ready to go completely cyber yet, even if sometimes it feels that way. My iPhone had to go to the iPhone doctor for a few days last year and having a regular cell phone was decidedly odd but my paper got me through the crisis.  Don’t even mention the times when there’s no power or the internet goes down. The thought of losing one of my paper notebooks is also pretty scary.  I need a scanner so I can have virtual copies of those.

So how about the rest of you? Are you list makers? Calendar schedulers or do you like to play things by ear? Do you love gadgets or does the thought of figuring out how to make your phone talk to your computer make you want to run screaming from the room? Are you a high tech digital guru or a devotee of low tech paper or ink or like me, somewhat straddling the two, finding the middle way, and hoping I never have to pick just one or the other?

Okay, I admit it:  I’m a geek.  (This doesn’t exactly come as a shock to those of you who have known me for a while!)  I have a degree in mathematics and design websites for a living.  It’s a little hard to hide the geek factor there.    I married another techie, and we live in a house with approximately 2 computers per inhabitant.  We think this is perfectly normal.  We give techie gifts to one another:  One year, hubby gave me a laptop for Christmas.  I gave him a Blackberry for our anniversary one year.  So geeky gifts are kind of par for the course around here.  We like our gadgets!

So my husband’s gift to me this year wasn’t really an exception.  I’d been desperately wanting to upgrade my ancient cellphone, but have put it off for a variety of reasons.  I was in serious lust with the iPhone, but I wasn’t willing to switch cell providers to get one.  I tried out a couple of other touch screen phones, but I seem to have bad luck with them.  (Kind of like those automatic sinks in public restrooms.  They work fine for the rest of the world, but I have to do some sort of bizarre rain dance in front of them to get them to work.)  My husband’s Blackberry had a keypad, but the tiny screen (and ugly rendering of websites) was a definite minus.  So I hemmed and hawed and dragged my feet.  In the thirty-two seconds of free time I had leading up to the holidays, the Droid television ads caught my eye, so I looked up the specs online. Large screen, slide out keyboard tray, good web rendering… plus a 5MP camera, since I never seem to have my camera handy when I need it.  It looked like a winner.  I filed that away and went on with my normal holiday panic preparations.

But hubby was obviously paying attention, because I found a Droid in my stocking Christmas morning. Now I am obsessed with getting it all set up and playing with all the gazillions of applications available for it.  (Haven’t found a DRM-capable ereader yet, but the Droid runs on the same platform as the Nook, so I have high hopes.)  It was the prefect gift for a geek like me.  (And yes, I wasted no time in telling my husband, “This is the droid I was looking for.”  Given that he and the kidlet were engaged in a lightsaber battle at the time, the reference wasn’t exactly lost on him.)

My husband will tell you otherwise, but he’s pretty good at guessing just what type of gift I’d like the most.  (He always prefaces his gifts to me with, “If you don’t like it, you can throw it at me.”  For the record, I have yet to toss anything back at him!) Over the years, he’s given me lots of lovely, thoughtful gifts, both geeky and, er, more normal.  And I guess I take that for granted.  I recently heard several acquaintances talking about the absolutely horrible gifts their significant others had given them.  Some of them were nice gift items, just inappropriate for the recipient.  And some of them were just plain awful!

So now I’m curious… what are the best gifts that you’ve received?  Even better… what are the worst gifts you’ve gotten?  Is your significant other good at guessing what kinds of things you’d like?