I'm a man who loves gadgets and technology, although I prefer to only keep a few of them in my belt holster at any given time (the iPhone in Canada might change that). So when Father's Day came along, my family knew that any sort of beeping, buzzing, or flashing item would be received with much warmth and affection (there would also be some warmth and affection to the gift-givers). So Sunday morning after a round of "real world" golf with my own Father (who is less of a technophile than myself), I came back to find that I was being showered with gifts of the technical variety. Specifically, it was one gift, and it came in the form of a digital picture frame.

Very cool indeed, especially for someone like me who tends to fill up SD cards faster than my wife fills up a shopping bag with shoes.

However, after unwrapping, unboxing, and undisassembling my techno-photo present, plugging it in, and inserting some select pictures of the family, I was left with a mild feeling of disappointment, not for the present which was wonderful, but rather for the very poor resolution of the digital photo frame. My wife, not being inclined or interested in gadgetry, except when her iPod needs "refilling", didn't pick out a quality digital frame product, and so my children's heads and faces were somewhat blotchy and indistinguishable from glowing energy aliens.

I was going to return the digital picture frame to the store and upgrade it to a better product (with no offense to the family), however I quickly realized that I had no knowledge or experience with this type of technology (shocking I know!), and so I had to find some resources in which to educate myself on digital frames. Although it took me a little bit longer than Neo learned Kung-fu in The Matrix, I found a few sites that had a better understanding of digital photo presentation, and I was able to read some digital picture frame reviews and get a little bit more acquainted with these devices.

If you work with computers in your business or line of work, you know that there's nothing more frustrating than accidentally deleting a file, or worse yet, losing your data entirely because of a hard drive crash, a power spike, or you do something careless like leaving your laptop in a coffee shop. But if you're like me, you take precautions, and you backup, backup, backup.

But even if we are systematic in our data storing habits, sometimes we forget to back up our work when we need to the most, and zap, hours of programming, writing, or number crunching does right down the drain. But fortunately, there is a lot of capable technology available for us to recover and save some of our hard work, data recovery software that can save our geeky asses when there's a critical crash. We can't predict when some technical glitch will cause some hardware failure, so lucky for us that file recovery programs are available to watch our nerdy backs when we neglect to secure our data.

As a computer geek (I prefer to call myself a man with an appreciation for redundant technologies) my desk has always been filled with monitors (four at present), and there's always room for more (well, there isn't, but I could always get a bigger desk). I use my monitors for a variety of tasks and pleasures, but I can never quite utilize the space the way professionals do, like stock traders. These forex wizards have charts, graphs, and updates running on multiple monitors, with stats, changes, and reports flashing by so fast, it can make a gamer nauseous.

Don't get me wrong; I wouldn't mind getting into trading, if: a. I had the money ; b. I had a clue ; c. I had the money. Heck, I'd do it if only to have an excuse for my wife to get more monitors!

Now, I'm hardly what you would call a metatrader expert advisor, but I suppose I could be if I took the time to learn. Of course this would mean sacrificing some of my precious monitor space for "business" use. Mind you, I'm certain I could manage all of my mindless addicting flash games in tabbed browser windows...

I've been around computers long enough to know that you can't be paranoid enough when it comes to backing up your data. Over the years, I've had cassette tapes crap out, floppy disks flop, hard disks go soft, and hard drives seize up like an old Studebaker. Hell, I've even lost lines of programming code on tractor-fed printout paper that had the ink fade into nothingness. Now, with all the irreplaceable data I have now, you better believe I have redundancies in place, and redundancies for those redundancies, so that if worse comes to worse, I have data recovery solutions that will keep me protected, even if I lose my main and my secondary data sources.