Look at the picture at the top of this column. What does it say to you?
I've always thought it's very unflattering, puts at least 15 year on me. I'm disappointed when I meet people for the first time and they say: "Ah yes, Frank, I recognised you from your picture in the paper."
But what does it say to you about me? Does it say: computer whizz-kid at the cutting edge of developments in information technology?
Or does it say: ageing hack more comfortable with a hammer and chisel than with a touch-screen?
Far more likely the latter. Like many of my generation, I labour to get to grips with technology. At Christmas I gave my brother-in-law an iPad as a gift, while he gave me a BlackBerry in return.
Within 10 minutes his iPad was fully connected and functioning and he was directing a movie on it, or something like that; my BlackBerry was still in the box, and it stayed there for many days. I think I was a little frightened of opening it.
I've since learned to love the BlackBerry, but it's been a slow process. I felt a little thrill of pride the other day when I managed, for the first time in my life, to attach a smiley face to a text message. Pathetic really, but that's me and technology.
I get a great sense of achievement when I accomplish the smallest, most trivial task, but realise I have a mountain to climb before I become a real technophile, and will probably never get there.
As the husband said when his wife presented him with a new shirt that was obviously a generation too racy for him: "I'll wear it when I'm younger."
I am not as bad as some, though. I have a friend in London, an eminent and eloquent barrister, who has never in his life used a key-board of any kind. His fingers have never stroked the keys of an Imperial typewriter, let along the touch-screen of a Samsung Galaxy.
He either writes long-hand with a very expensive gold pen with real ink, or for longer pieces of work he dictates verbatim to his PA. He says his many hours of Churchillian delivery to his assistant have helped him hone his courtroom style and, having seen him in action in the Old Bailey, I can only agree that he's a master of the art of advocate oratory.
So I judge my own tech-expertise partly by his standards. On a spectrum of competence that extends on the one hand from my barrister friend, to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook on the other, I guess I fall somewhere in the middle: sufficiently accomplished to allow me to live and function in the modern world, but I will never be a whole-hearted enthusiast.
For one thing I've never got into the social culture that goes with technophilia. Yes, I text and e-mail, but I've never joined Facebook, Linkedin, Friends Reunited or any of those other social networking sites. I don't Tweet, or blog. I'm probably wrong, but I just cannot summon up the enthusiasm for it.
For much the same reason, I didn't rush along to see The Social Network, the Hollywood version of Mr Zuckerbeg's rise from spotty nerd to multi-billionaire genius. But recently Goldman Sachs did a share deal with Facebook that put an eye-watering value of US$50 billion (Dh183.63bn) on the company, and I thought I had to see what it was all about.
I got the opportunity on a London to Dubai flight, and was not alone in my new found interest in Facebook. As I walked down the aisle in Emirates Airline business class, virtually every seat-back screen was flickering away with pictures of Jesse Eisenberg, the actor who plays the (kind of) hero Mr Zuckerberg, or Justin Timberlake, who plays the (definite) baddie, Sean Parker.
As portrayed, if Mr Zuckerberg and I happened to find ourselves in the same carriage on the trans-Siberian express, there would be many long silences. I could see nothing appealing in the movie character, who came across as a shallow, one-dimensional egotist, obsessed by the minutiae of the computer world.
When he moves outside the view of his laptop webcam, the Zuckerberg character becomes worse. He can't get on with women, he loses friends because he's cheating them in business deals, and he's generally a double-dealing smartass who would betray his closest to keep his Facebook. Not an attractive person at all.
I knew my teenage son had seen the movie and wondered what his take on it was. Patrick, soon to celebrate his 14th birthday, is a master of all things technological. I sometimes feel ashamed when I have to ask him to do simple things for me, like turning on the video machine.
But at the same time he's a clever, inquisitive young man who's interested in everything from sport to academia to art, a real all-rounder.
On the Zuckerberg character he said: "Yeah, great wasn't he? I want to be like him."
What do I know?
