belt buckle, western saddleOne of the most tech savvy people I know doesn’t exactly fit into the nerd stereotype. He is actually opposite. Standing a solid 6’1 with tight crew cut, usually wearing tighter jeans with a belt buckle, Tim comes from a long standing family of ranchers. In his element they’ll be cowboy boots on his feet and a hunting rifle rung around his shoulder. I love going to his family ranch because we ride ATVs, shoot targets and fish on the small stream that runs through the back of their property. He has all the makings for a good ol’ boy. What makes him unique to the stereotypical belt buckle wearing cowboy is an obsession with the latest and greatest in technology. This is where we originally found common ground. After we started hanging out more often he saw that like him I also love the outdoors. Electronics and the natural world can coexist. They work well together. For instance, we went fishing on a local lake this past summer and Tim brought a fish finding GPS device to improve our odds. It worked and we had enough bass to last a week after that long afternoon.

He picked me up to grab a drink the other night and I noticed a new bit of technology in his truck. Seen above, he had the BLUEANT 60-5262-05 S1 SUN VISOR BLUETOOTH® SPEAKERPHONE clipped onto his driver side sun visor. I didn’t notice it at first until he had an incoming call. Hands on the wheel, he made a call to a friend we were meeting to let them know we’d be arriving about 15 minutes late. “Where’d you pick that up,” I asked. He went back to Jewelry Tack Room at http://www.jewelrytackroom.com/ for the new gadget inside his truck.

In California, police aren’t lenient on drivers talking with a cell phone glued to their ear. When I initially moved here from a state that had no law against talking on the phone and driving, I kept the habit of talking without a hands free device. The day those cherries lit up in my rear view as I ended a call with my girlfriend, was the day I stopped talking without a Bluetooth device. The ticket cost more than what Tim spent on a premium western saddle. Don’t let cowboy boots and a belt buckle let you misjudge a person. There is no way to really know what a person is like until getting to know them. Tim is just as proficient with a western saddle as he is with a computer.