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“It can’t possibly be all ones and zeros!” I’ve heard that phrase many, many times from my wife. After so many years of putting up with my passion for technology, she still doesn’t buy it. “If it’s all ones and zeros, why does it cost us a couple hundred bucks every time some new gadget comes out?”

For as long as I can remember, my passion — that thing that makes me happy — has been technology. And it’s not just hardware and gadgets, it’s software too. My God I love a good text editor. A woman I once dated called my laptop my mistress, but that’s a story for another day. Even a cursory review of my finances will show that I’m willing to put my money where my love is. A quick review of the gadget graveyard in my basement is even more telling: an Apple Newton, a Garmin handlheld GPS device, three generations of Palm Pilots, a Compaq/HP iPaq, two Blackberries, an Apple Macintosh SE (two, count ‘em, two floppy disk drives and zero hard drives), and more cell phones than I care to admit. Check out my bookshelf at home and you’ll see it is littered with titles like Agile Web Development with Rails, MySQL, and Shell Scripting.

These days I spend a lot of time trading up for software that makes my technical life easier. I already mentioned my love good code editors like TextMate. Years of accumulating files and source code are easily searched and indexed by tools like Quicksilver. Google Reader allows me to easily keep up on the 30+ blogs I follow to make sure I’m on top of the quick pace of change. My technical team here at Barefoot and I have been developing using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to get from idea to prototype to production much more quickly than other platforms. We all work on Macs because, frankly, Macs allow us to be more productive. Does an individual Mac laptop cost more than than an individual PC laptop? Very likely. But how valuable is my time? How many hours have I saved in the past week alone because I trade up for tools that make my life easier?

OK, fine. I’ll admit it. I think the gadgets, machines and tools are cool, too. It’s not all about productivity gains, it’s more about where I find happiness. To thine own self be true, and technology is what I rocket for, whether or not that makes me a geek.

So I’ll continue to spend my tens and twenties making all the ones and zeros do what I want them to do: convince my wife they’re real.