I just heard that February is a non-flying month for many. Apparently, there’s a group called the Feb Four, that promotes February as a non-flying month for moral, environmental, religious, and financial reasons. I must say that that was news to me. I’d never heard of the Feb Four before, but there are so many of these groups these days.

Anyway, I realized that if that’s the case, you haven’t seen Scanorama, the SAS in-flight magazine that I completely own in February, with the Henrik Lundqvist profile, and my usual Web & Tech stuff.

Being your Web friend, I had to do something. And this is what I decided:

Here’s the link to the Henrik Lundqvist story that I posted earlier. My February Tech column from Scanorama behind the “Continued” link.

Real-life Facebook
There we were. My son and I, on a road trip, traveling about a thousand miles in four days in our ethanol-driven Volvo V50. I was driving, my son was the copilot, taking care of the GPS navigator. When we had navigated out of the city, and were back on the highway, he turned his attention to the DVD player, and Monsters, Inc.

While he was watching the movie, and we couldn’t play the car games I had been looking forward to – “guess who I’m thinking of,” and “you get one point for every red car, I for every blue one” – I dug out my iPod from my pocket, and listened to my favorite podcasts, mostly radio shows, and checked my email on my Nokia E61,

So, there we were, traveling 100 kilometers per hour, father and son, and both completely in his own world, provided by modern technology.

One of my son’s favorite games to play in the car is “Dad, tell what didn’t exist when you were five.”

The first time we played that game, I felt old. It also seemed as if nothing existed when I was a kid. But the more we have played the game, the more I have come to realize that many of the cool, everyday gadgets are not brand new, just evolutionary steps.

Sure, we didn’t have a 42-inch plasma TV at home, like my father has now, but we did have TV. I remember that because I was scared of the Thunderbirds. The original TV series, that is. We didn’t have iPods, but we listened to music, and I wasn’t that old when the Walkman arrived. I was a teenager when we got a car phone.

We certainly didn’t have Facebook when I was a kid, but technology-based communities existed even back in the 1970s. I remember dozens of people gathering outside the appliance store where my father worked to watch a hockey game on the TV in the window. In the middle of the winter.

I still haven’t got my son to believe that.