I bought a VCR for $18!
Now I can finally start coverting my VHS collection that spans as far back as 22 years and includes roughly 6 gazillion tapes.
Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste.
That series of AT&T commercial from 1993 seems to be making the rounds again…
…along with people talking about how accurate the ‘predicitions’ are some 17 or 18 years later. (Damn! Was 1993 really that long ago? Kids graduating next year – and maybe the earliest ones this year – were born after Kurt Cobain died? Fuck, I’m old.)
It is fascinating to see how much of what was considered ‘futuristic’ then has come to be part of our everyday lives, but those are hardly predictions. Or at the very least they’re loaded ones coming from a company developing the tech – which I think is the greater point. It’s more commentary on how long it took those new technologies to go from concept/development/early stages to mainstream, everyday stuff.
Still is neat though. I remember those commercials like yesterday.
1993. 18 years ago!? Really!?
I’m losing my fucking mind here.
I’m not some illiterate fool when it comes to computers and technology. I’m quite adept, if I do say so myself.
Last Xmas when we got a couple of new laptops, I figured it was finally time to set up some sharing between PC’s. My desktop has the printer attached and an external drive that holds all gazillion mp3s we have. I simply turned on file sharing and printer sharing and in no time had the laptops accessing our music collection and printing from the desktop.
Fast forward approximately 11 months.
All was fine until a few weeks ago. My daughter suddenly couldn’t print. It wasn’t anything major so I kinda blew her off. A few days (a week or two?) later she needed to print something again and kept getting an error. I asked if she could access the music and she couldn’t. So I grabbed my laptop and had the same issue.
So this weekend I finally got around to trying to figure out what’s up. 4 days later and my brain hurts. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be working. It now wants a username/password. There isn’t one set-up and it never needed it before. I’ve tried a million combinations of things and nothing works. At one point while messing around I got the printer to spit out a bunch of stuff from her laptop, but couldn’t make it happen at will.
Then today I was messing again (because this is driving me nuts) and tried printing from her laptop. Nothing. I went to mess with the desktop and closed her laptop and suddenly the printer came to life and spit out my test print. I opened the laptop back up, clicked on her name to get back to the desktop and was able to print whatever I wanted. I then tried to access the mp3 drive and had no problem.
I had a hunch though.
I rebooted her laptop. Then I tried to print. Nada. Then I tried to access the mp3 drive. It asked for user/pass.
ARRRRGH!
And I can’t replicate whatever makes it suddenly spit out prints. Not sure what was common in the two times I managed to get it to work. I think it was closing the laptop, but that alone doesn’t do the trick when I want it to.
It’s literally eating away at me. I hate when shit isn’t working.
Forgot to mention this a couple weeks back.
My daughter got a kindle for her Birthday. The next day she went out and bought two hardback and two paperback books that she’d been wanting.
Sounds like a great irony, huh? I can’t fault her though. The hardbacks were just $3 more than the Kindle download of the same book and the paperbacks were the same price or less than the download. My daughter is an avid reader and is kind of old-skool (like her father) where she appreciates books – the physical book – and having it in her hands.
Where we expect the Kindle to shine is with schoolwork. She’s in honors reading and they have much assigned reading. For books she doesn’t care to own and needs to study on academic level the built in tools (dictionary, search, highlighting, etc) will really come in handy. She’s also downloaded a bunch of freebies – mostly classics and public domain stuff that she wouldn’t necessarily buy, but will glance at for free.
But other than that, it’s a glorified dictionary for when she doesn’t have her laptop nearby. (which is never)
All in all, I’m glad we didn’t buy it for her because it seems to be exactly what I suspected it was – a unitasker (to use Alton Brown terminology). And in this day and age, that seems like such an antiquated idea. Kindle, phone, GPS, ipod, laptop (or netbook or iPad) – how many fucking things can you carry around? I’ve reduced my life to 2 devices that do all of that – my phone and my laptop…and I can’t wait for those two to merge into the one final device we’re inevitably heading towards. Seems like the ability to declutter – all of your records, tapes or CD’s (depending on your age) on one device and all of your books on another, and all of your maps and directions in another all of your contacts addresses and phone numbers in another has just led to a new kind of clutter…device clutter. It’s a pet peeve. What can I say?
So yeah, the Kindle seems to serve a pretty specific purpose (it’s an iPod for your books), but doesn’t necessarily save money or add convenience unless you wish you could carry your entire library with you…and to me it’s not like carrying all of your music with you because you’re most likely not going to read hundreds or thousands (or even more than a handful) of books at a time.
Maybe I’m just too old and don’t get it?
Copyright © 2012 Lord Gonchar