Confessions of a UCSB
'Gadget-Maniac'

This campus has turned me into a geek. I am not the only gadget-laden denizen on the broad sidewalks of UCSB. There are many of us. While I bike to work or stroll toward the UCen during lunch, I'm laden with a pocket radio, a palm computing device, and maybe even an Apple laptop that magically catches the free, airborne Ethernet. UCSB faculty and staff tend to be gadget-rich. Even the self-proclaimed Luddites or technophobes operate magnificent machines along the wired pathways of academe.

"If certain theories of nature are correct, then black holes would be produced in high-energy collisions of particles in particle accelerators," said Giddings. These theories go by the generic name of "TeV-scale gravity.

Admittedly, my passion for gadgets is a standard deviation, or more, beyond most of my colleagues. I find comfort in contraptions and (this could be a delusion) I believe they improve my life.

Take my Palm-compatible device. It is always with me. When I swim in the marvelous pool at the Faculty Club, it rests just beyond the water's edge. I've owned it for about a year and still feel a bit like a character in a J.K. Rowling book. It's magical.

Behind its tiny screen rests three months of my schedule, a large portion of today's New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired News, a journal for bicycle fanatics, a database of prize-wining and inexpensive wines, and the phone number of every person I've ever met. I know exactly when it is high and low tide from Crescent City to Tijuana. I even have a minute or two of video featuring my baby girls, Jane and Camille.

I didn't start out this way. The wires of my nerdy life can be traced back to North Hall in 1984. Some nice people from campus computing visited one of my undergraduate classrooms and offered us free accounts on some fantastical sounding, big iron computers called "Abbott" and "Costello." We were allowed hundreds of imaginary dollars in access and could print papers for our classes that looked as if they were phototypeset for real authors. I gave my professors the papers still wrapped in plastic--and enjoyed a leap in my G.P.A.

During my days as a graduate student and employee in Student Affairs, I continued to benefit from the technology and forward-thinking that surrounds us.

Now, when I make a conference presentation in a far-away city, I long for the friendly folks at Kerr Hall to appear to connect my laptop and tweak the data projector. I miss my division's help-desk and their speedy service. I wish for a computer department like the one at the UCSB Bookstore, with employees who positively fry all of their counterparts at any Fry's.

It is UCSB's research and teaching missions that create a large byproduct of gadget-mania. Our researchers can claim that they started the Internet and not get in trouble, and we have adept and creative users of teaching technology.

Our university's third mission is "service to the community." I suppose that these wonderful gizmos are, in part, a service that I enjoy as a member of this progressive institution. I'll think about that a bit more as I insert a headphone into my right ear to enjoy some National Public Radio on my digital tuner during my bike ride home in the bluish beam of an LED headlight invented by a UCSB researcher.

Don Lubach is a career employment
coordinator for Counseling & Career
Services who teaches a class on digital
video for SBCC Adult Education.