Affirmative.

Coming back to the States only once or twice a year is pretty funny, because it's like flying into the future. I am constantly amazed by how wired everyone is in the States. In El Salvador, I literally don't carry a phone with me half the time. I have only rough estimates of what time it is, at any given moment.

Here in the States, our friends are constantly checking their phones to look up videos or to check train schedules on the go. In Los Angeles (where I was recently), literally everyone owns a GPS; my high school friend can't even drive around in our home town anymore, without her GPS. Our friends from NYC were talking about how there are devices that upload your TiVo online, so that you can log in and watch your recorded shows while you are away from home. The Kindle is also huge now -- I was sitting next to two different people on the subway, each reading their own Kindle -- Amazon.com is even releasing a new version that's $50 cheaper (around $135?) that will run solely off of wireless connections, instead of the 3G network. My friend Tim was just saying that now, instead of Netflix sending you DVDs in the mail, they just send you one generic software CD that you can pop into your Wii, and you can stream movies off of the wireless connection that is built into the Wii. Geoff and I just got back about 30 minutes ago from the local grocery store, where they have vending machines for DVD rentals. All you need is a credit card, and they'll charge you $1 a day for the rental, absolutely no subscription or storefront needed. Not to mention the 3-D television sets that are popping up everywhere (you can sample them if you go to a Samsung store near you, but they give me a headache, for some reason); our friend Yomi said that his company is working on figuring out how many cameras they are going to need to broadcast the Olympics in Brazil with 3-D technology.

It's pretty ridiculous how technologically advanced everything is. It's pretty awesome, in a way, but in a way it also creeps me out a bit just how reliant we are on technology. Is it just me? Are we going to start saying "affirmative" instead of "yes"? ZerozerozerozerozerozeroOne.