By Carolyn Slater

By no means am I a gadget freak, in fact I’m a (very) late adopter but I was struck by how many CE products I use in one day. 

Consider Tuesday – a momentous day – Election Day 2008. I should preface this with the fact that although I’ve lived in the U.S. for more than 23 years I didn’t become a citizen until December 2004. Frustratingly just too late for the previous presidential election. So it was with some excitement that I greeted the day that offered me my very first opportunity to exercise my constitutional right to vote. 

And here’s my CE product use lineup for Tuesday, November 4, 2008:

· My LCD TV connected to a digital satellite box and dish – to monitor early election day news.

· My home phone to answer the many calls from local volunteers reminding me to vote and asking if I needed a ride to the polling station (how kind).

· My car radio on the short drive to the polling station.

· A touchscreen voting booth where voting was initiated by the use of an electronically pre-programmed card.

· My mobile phone to text my son at school in California.  He made me promise to text as soon as I voted.  I went one better and took a photo of the “I Voted” sticker with my camera phone and sent it to him with the heading “No longer a voting virgin”.

· My laptop for monitoring late breaking news on the BBC website – the only news source I trust, if I’m completely honest. 

And once the polls were closing and results were coming in:

· My TV, satellite and remote control to flick back and forth between news channels and the comedy channel to see what everyone (especially Jon Stewart) was thinking and saying and to catch every update as it happened.

· My laptop and DSL modem to e-mail my aunt in the U.K. who used to live in the states and stayed up all night to follow the results along with me and celebrate the victory.

· And finally… my CD player to play some relaxing music to try to bring me down from my “first election high”.

So could I live without technology?  Were the “good old days” really better?  No way.  Back then, counting the votes and reporting them took days, now we all knew the outcome by 11 p.m. EST.

So come on share. How many, and which kinds of technology did you use on election day? 

My colleague and photographer Lindsay Goodman also captured a memento of her part in this auspicious day with a digital camera.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 11:08 am and is filed under CEA, DTV, Digital Images, Home Audio, In Vehicle CE, Wireless Communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.