Is it just me, or does anyone else think that in some ways, we are letting our tech get out of hand???

I’m an acknowledged lover of most things tech (the geekier, the better, that’s my motto much of the time), but I can admit to being somewhat resistant to certain new trends. I’m referring to the increasing amounts of social media interfacing that’s being packed into the newest cars coming off the production lines, both stateside and abroad. Excuse me, but personally, I do NOT want my car telling all of my Facebook friends exactly where on the Interstate I happen to be at a given point in time, and I most certainly do not want it telling the local authorities how fast I am driving around the Charlotte Motor Speedway… uh, I mean I-485. (Some of us here clearly think that these are one and the same, but I suppose that is irrelevant to this rant.) Nor do I want my spouse’s Volvo placing itself in a Google+ circle with every other car in the condo parking lot, or tweeting to strange 18-wheelers that are on our tail. Call me old-fashioned here, but I will settle for the fact that my Chevy truck starts every time I turn the key, and does an admirable job in the western Carolina mountain snow if I happen to be in the area during the winter and kick the trans into 4WD. I do NOT want it talking to Facebook. EVER.  The trend just seems rampant of the kind of technology that we’ll someday regret. Perhaps it’s due to the flashbacks of the out-of-control NX-5s chasing Will Smith in the tunnel in the movie, “I, Robot.” Although I will admit, when I first saw that film, I sooooo wanted the Audi that Smith was driving. Still do…

I built go-karts as a kid, and a moon rocket that, on launch, caught fire and burned in the Jamaica, New York driveway of my childhood home. (When Dad got home from a hard day of bolting wings onto Navy jets out at Grumman Aerospace, he was not amused by the burn stains my little imitation of Saturn-V had left in the driveway, but I digress). Anyway, a group of San Francisco Bay area high school students have used the cockpit of an old piper Cherokee, a pile of computer hardware, a bunch of LCD screens and some fierce programming skills to build a simulator of, of all things, a Battlestar Galactica Viper of the 1970s-era TV show “Battlestar Galactica.”

The basic idea is, they mounted the cockpit section of a small plane, a Piper PA-28 Cherokee, to a platform that can rotate 360° across two axes. They added flight controls driving motors that spin the cockpit, along with LCD screens to simulate what you would see from a Viper’s cockpit (if a Viper existed). This has got to be one of the geekiest things ever constructed in the history of man, and yes, I’m envious- wish I’d had this in my driveway at age 15. Check it out on mashable at http://mashable.com/2012/03/22/battlestar-galactica-viper-simulator/.