Two islands, actually.

I couldn’t e-mail in my Tuesday journal because Monday we were on Cape Lookout shooting a lighthouse story and Tuesday we were on Shackleford banks with the wild horses. (Sunday we were sailing on a pirate ship, but that’s a different journal.)

But this problem runs much deeper than that. And thus the title of today's journal: “Me not techo good.”

I’m a caveman when it comes to computers. I type (if you can call it that) with only the middle finger of each hand. I can turn my laptop on and off. I can send e-mails. That is the end of my technoshpere. Beyond that, darkness. The I-T guys at work roll their eyes whenever I approach.

My son, it seems, has a wireless chip in his head. He absorbs all this stuff. When I was 17, I drove a car that had an 8-track player. An 8-track! Just think about that. And I thought I was cool. I played “Chicago V” over and over and over. Just ask my buddies Rob and Jerry. They’ll tell you how cool I was… um, maybe we shouldn’t bother them. They’re very busy people.

Anyway, after mowing lawns for a summer I took my hard earned cash and upgraded to a Pioneer Supertuner with a cassette deck and Jensen 6x9 Triaxial speakers. I ruled the world from the driver’s seat of a 1967 Volkswagen Squareback. Rob and I drove that car from Ohio to California when I was 18 and he was 16. That was not a good idea. Looking back it’s remarkable just how many bad ideas I have.

My son has a video iPod loaded with 8 million songs (and TV shows!) that sits in a space age holster plugged into the cigarette lighter. This iPod magically commandeers any car radio and plays through its speakers. What? How can it?… Where does the?… Um, cool… dude.

Yes. Me not even close enough to comprehend techo good… ug.

So last week I somehow broke my computer’s wireless card… which actually looks nothing like a card. It looks more like a thicker than normal spackle knife. Which is all it’s good for now.

I’m pretty sure I would have been fine if I hadn’t bent my wireless card. Or maybe I would have been fine if I just didn’t try to bend it back. It cracked in two in my hands. As a result I needed to run a hard-wire from my laptop to a data port in the wall, any wall, to connect to the internet. As it turns out 150-year-old lighthouses and wild horses aren’t wired for that.

And–Yippee!--hotels these days are all wireless. So there’s no place to plug in a wire.

Basically my 1970s brain and my 1990s computer are out of place in the 2000s.

I do have a snappy James Bond-like Sony P910i smart phone which I can use to read the latest news on the internet. If you ever saw me doing that you would think, “Wow! Look at Mr. Fancy pants!” But it’s much simpler than you can imagine. It has a button that says “INTERNET.” I click that button and a news website catering to cell phone users pops up. I don’t have any idea how or why. All I know is I click a button.

There is a whole box of adapters and related devices that came with my phone. I think one of them connects my laptop to my phone so I can use the phone to send documents from my computer. And that is a truly amazing feat… but those gadgets are still in the box where they were the day I bought my phone a year and a half ago. No earthly idea how to use them.

Sure, I’m as smart as any other Golden Retriever in the park, but I only learn the absolute minimum amount of technology to get by. Stubborn? Ya think?

Perhaps that’s why I type with my middle fingers. Sort of an ongoing “Up yours!” …a subtle protest to technology.

Okay, I have to give my middle fingers a rest. All this protesting is wearing me out.

Don’t forget to read Andy’s journal on Friday’s and watch the show every Saturday night at 7:30 here on WCNC.