I went on a wild time machine ride the other day thanks to a song on satellite radio. It had been on the first CD I ever owned. I got it the same Christmas I got my first CD player. It must have been 1987. Two CDs were all I had, and one of them was INXS. I was blown away by the sound. The perfect sound. Clear. Powerful. The plaster in my room cracked. And there was no hiss. Cassette tapes had hiss. Records had hiss. But not CDs. I didn’t even realize you could make music without it! For me, it was revolutionary technology. As I listened to the song, I thought about our high tech world. How it’s all around us. Ever-changing. Even assaulting. Yet, how much of it is truly revolutionary anymore? Like that first CD player?
Toaster texting madness
Hahahahaha … wait a minute … seriously? Someone really — REALLY! — hooked up his toaster to Facebook? Set it up so it can tell him (and I guess all his friends) when his toast is ready? Because the little bell that goes “ding” wasn’t high tech enough? I read it in the Wall Street Journal. An article titled, “Now, even granny’s fuzzy slippers are texting you.”
Skyping away those childhood dreams
There I was, sitting at the computer having a video conference across Skype with a guy in Nicaragua. He’s the designer on the college magazine I edit, a former college professor who picked up and moved to Central America because the surfing’s good and it gets him farther away from me. We Skype a lot. If you don’t know, Skype isn’t a kind of fish, but a program that lets two people video chat across the Internet. It’s almost as good as being in the same room, only I can’t reach across the desk, grab his shirt and scream, “Where are my pages?” (I miss that part.) So there we were, chatting it up like I’ve done dozens of times before when the grandest of revelations occurred to me: “Holy time machines, I’m in the future!”