Recently I have started watching a show on the Travel Channel called “Hotel Impossible.” The star is Anthony Melchiorri, a hyper fellow who helps old hotels freshen up their look, straighten out their personnel, and increase their bookings and profits.

This past Christmas was another networking nightmare for this security professional. After the boxes and wrapping paper have been recycled, I am left with my family members demanding that I hook up their new devices to the existing Wi-Fi wireless LAN in our house.

As loyal readers are aware, my daughter and I are rapidly preparing for the upcoming zombie apocalypse. As fervent viewers of “The Walking Dead,” we came to the decision that the addition of a crossbow to our growing arsenal was in order. After receiving the weapon (there should be some way to limit the per-day dollars that can be spent ordering stuff over the Internet) we took the crossbow to our summer cabin in Michigan to have some target shooting fun.

The older I get the more stuff I accumulate. And while the saying goes that “opposites attract,” it turns out that my lovely wife and I are both minor league pack rats who keep just about everything; anyone for a Motorola brick cell phone, circa 1989?

There has been an avalanche of media material regarding the Navy Seals after their successful mission against Osama Bin Laden. Tell-all books, movies and television shows have been presenting America’s elite warriors, with details regarding their missions and training activities. I’ve read or watched them all, mostly while sitting at Midway Airport waiting for my next flight out of town.

Having watched the electronic security industry grow over the past 35 years, I found that what happened in the 1980s is here again. Before the introduction of the digital communicator around 1977, each alarm company had its own central station with leased, direct-wire types of connections to clients’ systems.

The other day I tried to remember every single car I have ever owned in the past 40 years. From the first one, a ’69 Ford Galaxie 500 (with the Cleveland, not Windsor 351 cubic inch engine) to the vehicles that currently occupy my garage — a Ford Mustang and a Jeep. While I have driven more than 10 vehicles into the ground in the course of the last four decades, one driving issue has remained constant for me.

A regular part of my workday routine is watching the gyrations of the stock market on CNBC. While the pundits screech about the value or lack thereof of various stocks, I twitch right along with the beat — Buy or sell? What and how much? I can either do something or do nothing, and either way I’m already too late to profit on whatever recent convulsion has hit the markets.

While rummaging through the closet searching for an Exacto knife to perform some minor self-inflicted surgery (splinter removal) I was confronted with another of my half-baked projects that never was completed.

As much as I dislike the idea of turning into an extra cranky version of the late Andy Rooney, as time goes on, I truly believe that in many ways the devices and technologies we used in years past were better than what we have today. Or, at least they were easier for me to understand and use.