Technology a great invention or a complete pain?

I must admit I am a bit of a gadget person. I have always been amazed by new technology, from the first games console we had as kids to the latest smartphones.
There is no doubt that the advances in the past 20 years have been huge, but at what cost overall?
The first bit of tech I really remember was my personal stereo, by todays standards it was bulky and clumsy to use, but at the time I thought it was fantastic. I remember recording the sunday night top 40 onto cassette so I could listen to the songs over and over again.

One day my Dad brought home a new games console which allowed you to play various games on the TV and all you had to do was change the static overlay screen to go from tennis to hockey. It kept us entertained for ages with a blip, blip, blip of a cursor shooting across the screen. I don't think it would keep my family entertained for 5 minutes compared to the wii, ps3 and x-boxes of today.
Imagine then how they would cope with spending ages trying some BASIC code into the super duper ZX81 with its hi tech touch pad keyboard, only to find they had made a typo, or the book was wrong in the first place. What about the high pitched whining of loading up your favourite game by tape......yes kids games came on cassettes in the dark ages, waiting for the game to load, only to find it had been chewed up by the player.

I suppose that is where my love/hate relationship began, and I guess it is one that will last a lifetime. Now we have technology everywhere, apps on your phone whether it is apple or android. We can travel the world in seconds with google earth, and with street view you can see exactly where an address is. Maybe we can have too much of a good thing, but for me, keeping up with technology is something I look forward to for a long time.

We had a coffee morning at work a while back and since I rarely bake now unless I can give most of it away, I took the chance to make these fantastic Rocky Road Bars from the Hummingbird cookbook, deliciously decadent and dangerous, but oh so worth it.