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Technology is my friend, and I am a stalker-friend of new, straight-off-the-assembly-line electronics — iPhone, I don’t love you yet, but grow a decent-sized memory and I’ll be yours forever.

But a recent technological dilemma involving my father-in-law and the death of an irreplaceable machine made me realize how unresponsive technology can be to people not currently residing on the cutting edge of the digital world.

Now, my father-in-law is not a Luddite, a bullheaded, technologically averse person who is one “Mosquito Coast”-style freakout away from churning his own butter and illuminating his grass hut with a candle made from the fat of a wild boar. He has digital cable and a cell phone, uses a computer sparingly, and his OnStar system made him a true believer after his Buick got T-boned two years ago.

But, he only replaces electronics when holding onto them is no longer rational. Until a year ago, he was the proud owner of a console television, and until the screen turned “night vision” green and started flickering like a bug light, he was happy with a TV that probably dated back to the series finale of “M*A*S*H*.”

And there’s nothing wrong with that, and I’m not just saying that because he’s my wife’s father. It’s not my way of operating, but I understand.

The problem began a few months ago, when a DVD player he had bought under my consultation stopped working completely. This was only a mild annoyance, since DVD players have such short life spans they should be marked with “Recycle” logos. But then the tuner on his VCR died last month, and for this enthusiastic tape delayer of football games, it was time to sound the emergency sirens.

As it turned out, the tech gods were conspiring against him. I didn’t think his needs were so great as to warrant a jump toward a DVR or TiVo, so my initial solution was for him to buy a DVD/VCR combination unit — something I would never own, but a short-term solution for my father-in-law. As his unofficial technology shopper, I went in search of a good replacement and discovered something that, at first, I thought seemed bizarre and conspiratorial: few of these DVD/VCR combo platters came with an on-board tuner, meaning you could not program them. These were exceedingly dumb machines.

My first thought was that this was an industry-wide conspiracy — the electronics manufacturers were forcing the last remaining VCR users to convert to digital life or be doomed to the tar pits of technological history. This is not without precedent: I was a perfectly happy vinyl user in 1989 until my music format of choice started rapidly disappearing from Tower Records — itself only a memory now.

Then it dawned on me: the electronics manufacturers stopped building these things without tuners because the old tuners will be completely worthless in exactly 567 days.

On Feb. 17, 2009, NTSC signals, the analog television broadcasts that most of us grew up watching, will cease to exist. All will be digital, and while the VCR is all but dead — I have two networked TiVos, and have not had a working VCR in my home in nearly three years — the headstone already has a date on it.

This week, I will be teaching my father-in-law how to work his DVR. It will be far more than he needs or even wants, but unlike anything else he could buy, it will record every University of Oklahoma game, every episode of “60 Minutes” and
every pundit prediction on “Hardball.” That old box full of gears and capstan rollers must finally be laid to rest, and our march toward glorious, gleaming technological perfection claims another victim.