Round Robin: The Way We Listened

For the Round Robin Challenge: Old Tech, New Tech, I asked to see pictures that showed a contrast between old and new technologies for doing the same thing. I don't know about you, but I'm old enough to remember a fairly long progression of ways to listen to music. My first recordings were mostly 45 RPM kid's records, mostly on the Peter Pan, Disneyland and Little Golden labels, but I distinctly remember one or two 78 RPM records in the mix. When I was a little older, the family record player had four speeds, and I used them all - on the same record! It was the last of my kiddie records, The Poky Little Puppy. Meant to be a 45 RPM single, it told the story of a puppy who "just pokes along and he looks at the breeze." Played at 78 RPM, the puppy was much livelier. At 33 1/3 RPM, he really poked along, and at 16 2/3 RPM - yes, there was such a speed! - he turned into a slow-moving oinker. Unfortunately, I don't have the record any more, or I'd show it to you here.

About the same time I was putting the Puppy through his paces, I was buying my first two LPs: More of the Monkees and The Monkees Headquarters.  Soon after that came my first Beatles album, Revolver, chosen because it cost a dollar less than Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band from my brother's record club. Some time after that I bought my first two "adult" 45s: Hair by the Cowsills and Dizzy by Tommy Roe. About five years after that, as I started working on collecting all the Beatles LPs, my brother was very proud of his 8-track tape collection. I'm happy to say I never went down that route!

Me at Rockarama circa 1982

When I was managing a used record store in the early 1980s, I was delighted to take home a 78 RPM single of Little Richard singing Long Tall Sally. The stereo we had at the time must have been one of the last ones that still played that venerable speed. At the time we used to drive from Columbus, Ohio to other major cities in the midwest to sell used records, imports, posters, buttons, etc. at record shows. On the way we listened to music - on cassette tape, of course! Eventually we had to close down Rockarama and I went to work at someone else's record store. I stuck around long enough to sell a few copies of mostly classical albums in a revolutionary new music format: Compact Discs!

I doubt that I still have that Little Richard 78. The vast majority of our LPs are inaccessible in crates in our storage room, and we don't have a turntable set up anyway. But we do have a few stacks of "to be gotten rid off--probably" LPs in our front room.

John left almost our entire cassette collection outside a year and a half ago, where it promptly got rained on in a huge storm. The few cassettes I still have are mostly either audio books or Doctor Who related, such as this novelty single cassette:

And we still have some treasured 45s.

And less-treasured 45s:

I still buy the occasional CD, but only Doctor Who-related ones. Here's my latest purchase:

Mostly, I listed to music on my iPhone, or occasionally my iPad. I don't even know where my iPod is any more. My Halloween music last night was courtesy of Pandora. Two years ago I played a CD on a boombox.

Still, there are some things that remain the same, more or less. The 1963 Beatles may sound better through an iPhone on a dock than on a mono HiFi, but it's still great music. Ditto the 1969 Beatles. And I still love to listen to them!

Now let's see what other old and new tech our Robins have come up with!

Linking List
as of Saturday, November 2nd, 2013
12:34 AM MST

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/mavarin

Ellen - Posted!
Ellen's Phlog
http://ellensphlog.blogspot.com/

Jama - Posted!
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Karen

Old Tech, New Tech and Just Plain Buggy Tech

Because my Dad is sick with a cold, we didn't spend the whole afternoon together. I took him to Quizno's for a meatball sub (which he didn't even almost finish) and then to Robert's Barber Lounge for his monthly pampering - a deluxe shave and trim, complete with hot towels and scalp massage and attention to nose and ear hairs, followed by fingernail trimming. When he got back, they were serving rainbow sherbet in the dining hall, which made for a nice surprise.

After dropping my Dad off, I was able to put in a belated appearance at a wedding reception, bring John some lunch, and take the dogs to St. Michael's for a late afternoon session of playing in the park and working in the office. St. Michael and All Angels is having its 60th Anniversary this year, and we've chosen our patron saint day, Michaelmas, for the celebration, transferred to the last weekend in September. I'm right in the thick of the preparations, updating the church website, coordinating the efforts of others on publicity, editing the 60th Anniversary issue of The Messenger, and posting about the anniversary to social media sites.

One part of the preparations that I consider of particular importance (is that enough "p" words for ya?) is research into the church's history. If we're going to celebrate 60 years, it's good to know and talk about what happened in those years. So parishioners Jo Leeming (of the St. Michael and All Angels Vestry), Ila Abernathy (of the parish's Guatemala Project) and I procured a key to the church's archives, which are stored in the Womble Library. We oohed and ahhed over our discoveries there, pulled out several of the more important notebooks and envelopes, and brought them to my office at church. This afternoon was the first chance I've had since then to take a look.

I only got through half a notebook, but it was mostly really important stuff. There were pictures from the church's construction, dated September, 1953. Two of them were dated September 14, 1953, exactly 60 years before the day I scanned them on my office computer:

 

This is the interior of the church, with a man looking up at the eastern wall. The walls had not yet been plastered, and the floor had not yet been laid. But the place was already rather beautiful.

This appears to be a view from the main entrance, looking north 90 feet to where the sanctuary would be. The white cross seen here was an opening in the original north wall, into which the stained glass cross would be added. The northern end of the church has since been expanded twice, once in 1964 to add the transept (the size sections in front) and apse (a place for the high altar), and again in 1998 to add the organ chamber behind the sanctuary. The glass cross is now in the western wall, near where the choir sits.

There were more photos from later in the month, but it's clear that the building wasn't finished by Michaelmas, 1953. The dedication and first service was held Sunday, November 29th, 1953. There was a newspaper photo of that, along with a few color snapshots. Another small batch of photos showed the church as of the day after Christmas, 1953.

 

I also found an expansion feasibility study from 1959, apparently printed on ditto master or mimeograph. If you're under 40 years old, you probably don't know what those reproduction technologies were like, but I used to struggle with them in my high school days. Even in 1981, when the church printed a little black and white newsletter thingy titled "God Gave Me a Parish With Guts!", the pictures in it were dark and dot matrix-y. The newest thing I saw was a printout of an email from 1999, in which the original rector, Father John Clinton Fowler, wrote about acquiring a used pipe organ for the church, late in his tenure. It only cost $200 plus installation, but appears to have lasted only a few years before it fell apart. The replacement organ, dating from 1959 and originally built for a Cincinnati church, cost many orders of magnitude more than that to buy and install, but it's one of the best organs in this part of the country, so there.

But there you go. Even in 1999, for an important historical document, the way to preserve the data was to print it out. I started retyping the thing as I was scanning the photos, because it's not long enough to fuss with OCR for, even if I had a decent OCR program.

Still, much as I want to laugh at the old snapshots and dittos and other outdated technology found in the church archive, limited as they are in quality and shareability, I'm grateful that people took the trouble to make those physical records and preserve them. Many things from the past aren't around any more at all - or, if they are, they aren't online where I personally can get at them! I've looked at old photos and even silent black and white footage of Stalag Luft 1 where my dad was a prisoner, and at old photos of World War II squadrons and bomb groups; but I've yet to find one (outside of my Dad's small personal collection) that has my Dad in it. Large numbers of Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s and 1970s were wiped by the BBC, along with Apollo 11 footage and other important stuff. The technology of the items in the church archive is outdated, and nobody gets to see it because it consists of fragile bits of paper, locked up in a cabinet so it won't disappear or get destroyed. But the point is that it hasn't been lost or destroyed. It is therefore now available to me, to digitize and share with the world, or at least the parish.

St. Michael and All Angels Church as of December 26, 1953. 

This innocent photo killed my index page tonight.

And it's not as though current technology is so much more reliable than what they had in 1953 or 1959 or 1981. I already told you about my recent malware problems, and I can't get my new Family Tree Maker program to run for than a few seconds before crashing. More to the point, I tried to add a few of the images I found today to the church website, which is hosted on Godaddy. No matter how carefully I typed or copy-pasted the image's URL, no matter how many times I edited files to make them shorter, uploaded them again and gave them less problematic file names, my edited web page refused to display them. I had to let the church blog host the photos. At one point I added one measly photo to the church's main web page and saved it, only for the whole page to have been randomly ruined by my SeaMonkey Composer program. It's not the first time this has happened, either. Tonight, all the < and > marks were replaced with the HTML markup that makes them not be HTML tags any more. Last time, which was only a week or so ago, all the image URLs suddenly pointed to my hard drive instead of the web site, even though they were all previously in there with the full web addresses. Both times, I had to grab a Google cache version of the page, clean it up and repost it. I should know better, and always keep a backup before I edit a page.

 The back of the church, December 1953.

It's going to be worth it, though, right? If I can just get all the best of this old stuff scanned, uploaded and displayed, on web pages and pdfs that are consistently readable and glitch-free, then, THEN, we'll have the best of old and new.

 Karen

Round Robin: Remembrance of Things Past (Part 1 of 2)

This week's Round Robin Photo Challenge topic is The Times They Are a-Changin', and I swear I had nothing in mind in proposing it beyond the general notion of clocks and New Year's Eve. But over the past week I've been rather obsessed with my new toy, the iPad, which has nearly replaced my computer already. It occurred to me today that nothing tells the story of time speeding along for us as a society than the acquisition and discarding of computers and other technology. For example:

Our Commodore 64, purchased circa 1985. Now it's a monitor for an outdated VCR.

My iMac and my first laptop, circa 2004, photographed using our first
digital camera, a Mavica. The camera stored the images on floppy disks.

 

My brand new laptop, March 2005.

John's first two iMacs (c. 1999-2005) await recycling, 2011.

The latest and greatest going into 2012, and it's not even a computer. 

My iPad 2 will soon be obsolete; the iPad 3 has been announced. And I don't care.

Two other pieces of outdated equipment left our home this week, leaving behind memories of times long gone. To avoid overloading aging computers with a picture-heavy entry, I'll tell you about that in a second post.

Meanwhile, let's see how other Robins mark the changing times!

Linking List
as of Midnight MST
Saturday, December 31, 2011

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com


Jama
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com


Sherrie
Food for Thought
http://100sweets.blogspot.com/


Terri
Ways I See the World
http://teelgeephotos.blogspot.com/

Karen

Testing...1...2...3...5?

I got an iPad2 for Christmas. Hooray! Now I need to figure out which apps are actually worth using, and (this is the tricky part) actually learn to use them effectively.

Take this Blogger app I'm currently typing in an example. When I signed in, it took me to the archived Blogger version of the private AOL blog on which Carly and I used to keep notes related to the Round Robin Photo Challenges. It hasn't been used since 2008, but because it was first alphabetically on my list of blogs, this app assumed that was the blog on which I wanted to post. In fact it was rather insistent about this; it took me a not-so-good five minutes to escape to a list of my blogs! And what do I have to hit to accept the completed words the app occasionally suggests? Ah. That worked, sort of.

And I just took my first photo on this thing. Will it show up in this entry? Where? What size will it be? I suspect the iPad will never give me the control over the look of a blog entry that my computer does.

Still, I don't mean to gripe about this marvelous and expensive new toy. I've wanted something like this since the Newton and the first PDAs. Over time I'm sure it will only get more useful until it fools me into thinking it's indispensable. In the meantime I'll read books and Twitter on it (I gave John the choice of getting me an iPad or a Kindle Fire) and play with the Doctor Who Encyclopedia app.

And I firmly believe the learning curve on mastering the iPad operating system is a good and important thing to tackle. Years ago (I've probably mentioned this before) I saw a Scientific American Frontiers show about the aging brain. At least one study showed that learning something new later in life - not just more of the same but something markedly different from existing knowledge - helps to build new synapses and stave off the creation of the lesions that cause Alzheimer's. At least, that's my memory of what they said. I'm going to be 55 years old in March, and I'm already painfully aware that my memory is not what it was when I was younger. Learning to thumb my way around the quirky little QWERTY keypads and navigate the bare bones or nonexistent menus in iPad applications is proving enough of a challenge that it probably qualifies as a new skill. Got to keep my brain working in case anyone has need of it...!

Karen

Weekend Assignment #364: Partly Cloudy

Weekend Assignment #364: Ahead in the Clouds?
Suddenly the marketing departments of Microsoft and other tech giants are all about "the cloud" or "clouds," the practice of storing large files online and streaming them rather than everyone storing them locally on their hard drives. Do you think this is a good idea, a bad idea or both?

Extra Credit: Do you still buy CDs and DVDs?

At this moment, John is watching YouTube videos in the bedroom on his iPad. Walking by there a few minutes ago, I heard the distinctive voice of the Eleventh Doctor, and immediately joined John on the bed to watch the two brief Doctor Who videos from this year's British comedy/charity event Red Nose Day. We compared notes about BabelColour, a particularly good maker of Doctor Who-related videos on YouTube, and then I moved on. We actually do have downloads of the mini-episodes "Space" and "Time," but we watched the streaming versions anyway on John's silly little tablet. He also uses it to stream Netflix.

All in all, though, I'm not that much into using cloud-based streaming and storage in preference to having the file locally, or even a physical object. I don't buy many CDs, but I do buy every Doctor Who CD from composer Murray Gold more or less as soon as it's available in the U.S. A few of them I've bought twice, because I've been known to wear them out.Then I rip them to iTunes at work and at home. If the CD player in my car worked, I'd play the actual CDs on it. And I often raid the CD shelves for Beatles CDs to add to a computer or my outdated iPod Mini.

Videos? Okay, yes, I'll settle for YouTube streaming if the video is short and amusing and I don't really care about it, or if I know I'll eventually have a good commercial copy, or I can't get it any other way and I need to see it right now. Otherwise, I'd rather have a download for stuff I'm going to watch once or twice, or watch about a dozen times in the next few months until the DVD comes out. Mostly, I have the same attitude toward video that I have toward books: if it's something I know I like, I want to own it, and have it instantly available to me at any time, day or night. I suppose I could stream something at 3 AM just as easily, but will that same show be available to watch online at 5 AM on a Wednesday morning three years from now? Maybe, maybe not. I'd rather not take that chance.

Then again, there's a certain Luddite undercurrent to my protestations. I don't know how to stream something from Netflix or iTunes, and I don't especially want to learn. If I really had a good reason to do it, I'd do it, and it probably wouldn't even be hard to figure out. But I'm not there yet.

I do host photos remotely on Picasa and Photobucket and Flickr, but with very few exceptions I have the same exact edit of every image on my hard drive, and probably on my G drive as well. The few files I have on Google Documents instead of my hard drive in Word or Excel format are either things I got from other people or needed to share with Carly for a meme. Really, the only files of mine that exist in a cloud and not on my computer or my emails.

Still, if I had an iPad or even an iPhone, I'd probably start to embrace cloud technology. I saw at the Gallifrey One convention that an iPad not being used to the fullest extent of its capability is hardly worth having, especially for the price. Even so, the more time John spends in the bedroom, streaming Dr. Horrible on his iPad for the fifth time this week, the more I want to get into the act - clouds and all.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #325: Tech-Savvy? Sort Of

Ack! As busy as I've been the past week, I've only got an hour left to answer my own question for
Weekend Assignment #325: Tech-Savvy!

Weekend Assignment #323: Tech Savvy

When you bring home some new piece of technology, do you usually get it up and running with pleasant anticipation and calm confidence, or is there more likely to be much swearing, wailing and gnashing of teeth? What's the most trouble you've had with a new computer, tv, phone or related tech gadget?

Extra Credit: Who do you call in to help, if you get stuck?

I never got the hang of using this phone in my First Magnus days.

I'm generally pretty good with tech stuff, particularly computers. I always get my new computers up and running myself, and am often asked by friends for computer advice. I also figure out my new phone or new digital camera - well, enough to use it, anyway. I've never, ever used a phone for web stuff, and still fumble to change settings on my camera.

Where I really fall apart is on office phone systems, and to a lesser extent with modem and router problems when they crop up.  I worked for Worldwide Travel for twelve years, and when I left I was still physically walking into the other room to tell people something was holding for them on line 3. I struggled with Cisco phones at First Magnus and Beaudry, and at St Michael's I don't even know how to answer the phone until someone else has answered it and put it on hold for me. No, really. the extension in my office is a little weird, and sometimes there's call forwarding on, and, well, it's all too much for me, with no real incentive to learn this.

And oh, boy, that business with S. last week!  Late on Tuesday afternoon, I picked up her cable box and swapped it for a new one at the Cox Communications store, because there was a price break (less than current charges) for doing so. When I came out, my car was spurting coolant all over the parking lot. Oh, yeah, I'm lousy at automotive technology, too. So I drove straight to my mechanic, who was about to close up. He very nicely drove me and S.'s Cox equipment home. To me home, that is. S., who has pretty much nothing in her life except tv, had to do without it overnight.

Wednesday it took all day to get my car back, so I didn't get to S.'s place with the cable box until about 4:30 PM. I spent the next five hours trying to get the following components to talk to each other (as applicable):

• S's old, non-HD Samsung television, with no remote and broken control buttons on the front
• the new Cox box with HD and DVR capabilities
• the cable feed coming in through the wall
• a cable splitter
• a new cable modem
• a new laptop

The big problem, aside from the Cox self-installation kit being missing the equipment diagram sheet, was S's tv, which was stuck on some less-than-ideal setting, and consequently didn't want to listen to any remote that might otherwise be programmed to control it. After a Cox tech support person and I tried every code on the Cox remote without success, I had to go out and buy a different universal remote. I tried every Samsung code on that, too. None of them operated the channel buttons, but one did manager to get it off its "I'm not listening, la-la-la" setting. On the third call to Cox, after half an hour of arguing with the automated computerized troubleshooter, I got a different tech support guy who had me try a slightly different procedure for programming the Cox remote. Success! He then cleared up the issue with the cable modem, and we were up and running at last. Hooray!

When I get stuck, I try to call the appropriate tech support person, or solve it online. But some tech setup at home falls in John's ball court. He always manages it eventually, including tricky stuff like setting up routers with passcodes and stuff. But it's always stressful for him. At such times, I try to stay out of his way!

Oh, and tonight? This entry was delayed when Blogger decided, wrongly, that Firefox didn't have Java or cookies enabled. I had to reboot twice to get Firefox to load properly.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #321: Unplanned Obsolescence

Weekend Assignment #321: Where's Your Buggy Whip?

We sometimes hear the expression, "XXX has gone the way of the buggy whip." In other words, technology and society have moved on, and something that was once commonplace barely exists anymore because it's no longer needed. Do you still have something in your home that has become essentially useless? If so, why do you still have it? If not, when did you get rid of it?

Extra Credit: Have you ever worked in an industry that has gone the way of the buggy whip, or is in danger of doing so?

Heh. Yes, and yes!



As I was running around this evening photographing outdated tech for this Assignment, I accidentally came across this issue of National Geographic Magazine from November, 1970, proclaiming, "Behold the Computer Revolution." I'm pretty sure it's something one of the more computer-minded guys in our Doctor Who club found amusing a mere 25 years later, and brought to a meeting. I have no idea how I ended up with it.

I fully expected tonight to laugh at the hopelessly outdated computers shown in the article, those big teletype-style terminals attached to a mainframe, and endless reels of magnetic tape storing the data. Actually, though, my quick perusal of the article left me rather impressed. True, the actual computers pictured in it look unbelievably primitive and clunky; but the functions they predicted for computers in the future - in education, Wall Street, air traffic control, mapping demographics, medicine, law enforcement databases, etc. seem pretty dead-on. The one thing everyone seems to have missed back then was the idea of everyone having desktop, laptop and/or handheld computers, all wirelessly connected up so anybody can communicate with anybody in a variety of ways.



About 15 years after that article was written, John and I joined the computer revolution and bought our first computer, a Commodore 64. I wrote part of a book on that thing, but never finished it, and now there's no easy way to get at that data. As you can see above, the monitor is in our bedroom closet, where it serves as a tiny tv screen with the wrong aspect ratio, hooked up to our sole remaining VCR. (It plays DVDs too.) The computer itself is in a box somewhere.

What else do we have that's gone the way of the buggy whip? John tells me that we no longer own a typewriter. But we do have thousands of records: many crates full of LPs and EPs, a few boxes of 45 RPM singles and even a handful of 78s. After all, we owned a used record store back in the early 1980s, and a lot of that stuff is rare, such as promos, colored vinyl and Beatles picture sleeves. We also have a few dozen laserdiscs, and lots of cassette tapes. No 8-tracks, I'm happy to say!

And outmoded industries? Oh, yes! Certainly there aren't too many "record stores" any more, even when the records are CDs. After my record store career ended, we moved to Arizona, where I worked in video rental stores, two different local Mom and Pop chains. Those were pushed out by Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. Now the Blockbuster and Hollywood chains are themselves closing down, store by store.



After the video rental business, I went to school to become a travel agent. You can see the curriculum binder in the photo above. I was a travel consultant for about four years and then became a bookkeeper, and from there an accountant. That should have protected me when the travel agencies were made virtually obsolete by the Internet and the end of airline commissions, but no, I had to go and work for a mortgage company that specialized in packaging bundles of mortgages and selling them to investors. You know what happened there: the housing bubble burst, First Magnus crashed and burned, and I was out of a job.

My next "permanent" job was in the RV industry. This was right about the time when gas was flirting with the $4.00 a gallon level, and diesel fuel cost even more. And then the recession hit. Nobody could afford to buy RVs, or even fill their tanks and hit the road. So I was out of work again.

Now I'm working part time at my church. The religion "business," like most charities, is hurting a bit due to the recession and unemployment and stuff, but I'm pretty sure it will be around for years to come!

Karen

Weekend Assignment #295: Keep Me Warm!

This week's Weekend Assignment is short and sweet:

Weekend Assignment: #295: Even in Tucson, things can get a bit chilly on December nights. What is your favorite way to keep warm?

Extra Credit: What is the temperature setting on your thermostat?

It's no secret that John and I moved to Tucson in 1986 for the specific purpose of getting away from winter. I grew up outside Syracuse, NY, where the thermometer dips below 0 degrees F most winters, accompanied by blowing snow. Lovely. To make things worse, my elementary school made us stand outside in our skirts and tights in similar weather.  So if I become a little insufferable each year as Tucson barely dips below freezing, and that only about three or four times a year, you know where I'm coming from, literally.

So I enjoy the fact that entire years go by here without our turning the heat on once. On rare occasions we'll let it run for a few hours at night. If John feels the need for heat, he'll probably set it probably for 60 degrees at most. If I'm especially cold and the blankets are in short supply (as they always are), I might sneak it up as high as 65. But most of the time it's at 56 degrees - and turned off!

But that's not the fun way to stay warm. I was thinking about that tonight as I climbed into bed after being up for 35 hours straight. (I'd pulled an all-nighter Friday, compiling a list of Round Robin participants for 2009.) Cayenne jumped up on the bed immediately, right onto the comforter, right where my legs are supposed to go. As usual. But where was Pepper?

A moment of listening provided the answer.  She was outside the bedroom window, barking. I called her name and she was on the bed in seconds, streaking around and through the house to reach me. Then it was just a matter of getting Cayenne a foot or two to the south.

You see, when it comes to Tucson weather, it's never more than a Two Dog Night.


How about you? Do you face cold winter nights with a warm friend or a hot drink, perhaps even a Snugee? Tell us about it in your blog, or in the comments below. Easy instructions to participate are at the end of this entry, right after last week's wrap-up.

For Weekend Assignment #294: A Decade of Thanks, I asked what you're most grateful for of this decade's innovations. Click on the names below to read their full responses:


Florinda said...

E-Readers: I never would have said this until a few months ago, but my Kindle has truly made me a believer. I don't think e-books will replace the traditional kind for me, but the Kindle made carrying books with me a lot more convenient. Since e-books tend to become available at the same time as hardcover editions, and they cost less than most trade paperbacks, I don't have to wait so long for some of the books I really want to read, either!

Julie said...

I'm pretty darned thankful for the technology that allows me to work at home. Now if the economy would just cooperate...


Well, this is amusing. As I was working on this blog post the doorbell rang. UPS delivered us a new router! It's a good thing I wasn't working today, which is precisely one reason Paul took the time to outline to Verizon all of the problems we had been having with the old router. I'll spare you the techy details, but when Paul called yesterday they agreed that we needed a new router and promised to drop ship one immediately, though they told us it would be Friday before it arrived, since tomorrow is a holiday. Imagine our surprise when the equipment arrived at our door this afternoon.

Thanks, folks!

Here are the guidelines if you'd like to participate in the Weekend Assignment:

1. Please post your entry no later than Friday, December 5th at 6 PM. (You can also post your response in the comments thread, but a blog entry is better. )
2. Please mention the Weekend Assignment in your blog post, and include a link back to this entry.
3. Please come back here after you've posted, and leave a link to your entry in the comments below.
4. Visiting other participants' entries is strongly encouraged!
5. I'm always looking for topic ideas. Please email me at mavarin2 on gmail.com if there's a Weekend Assignment theme you'd like to see. If I use your idea, you will be credited as that week's "guest professor."


Stay warm, everyone!

Karen

Weekend Assignment #294: A Decade of Thanks

This week's Weekend Assignment finishes up one holiday-themed assignment and proposes another:

Weekend Assignment: #294: Thanksgiving is upon us, and it's traditional to ask what you're thankful for this year. But let's tweak that a bit. As we prepare to finish off the first decade of a new century, let's take a moment to appreciate the good things that have come about since 12/31/1999. What aspect of living in the 21st century are you most thankful about? I'm talking technology, medical breakthroughs, favorite tv shows, even people and pets born since the ball drop of nine years ago.


Extra Credit: What are you most looking forward to as the century continues?


For me, the choice comes down to social media or my two dogs. Which am I more thankful about, the big, world-changing, life-changing developments in online culture, or the fact that I personally have two dogs who bring me joy every day? Hmm. Let me explore that question for a moment.

Back in 1999, I was on AOL, hanging out on the SF and Fantasy writer's discussion boards. A few people were already writing what would come to be known as blogs, but I'd never heard of them. There was no Facebook, no Blogger, no Twitter, no Wikipedia. I'd never heard of John Scalzi, future blogger Carly of Berkeley, or dozens of other people who have since enriched my life with their words and pictures. But then came AOL Journals, and LiveJournal, and BlogSpot (remember when it was called that?), and other blogging platforms. Suddenly we all had new friends, around the country and around the world. Maybe we hadn't even actually met most of them, but they were friends nonetheless. Blogs in turn gave rise to microblogging, short bursts of self-expression on Twitter and elsewhere.

The next wave came in the form of social networking sites, when again redefined the word "friend." They were organized around virtual pins on virtual maps, around professional connections, around where you went to high school, around a common interest in films or gaming. Eventually the concept coalesced as the juggernaut Facebook, on which I spend far too much time these days.

Then there are the Wikis. Wikipedia was another obsession of mine for a while, and I still think I did some good work over there while the mania lasted. Today there are individual Wikis devoted to hundreds of subjects, from specific tv shows to legal or medical information.

Now, the question for me is, how grateful am I for all of that? I'm certainly grateful for the friends I've made, and the platform to publish my own words and pictures with nearly instant gratification. The downside, of course, is the way it can suck up my time, and the way the different social media compete for my time and interest. Is Facebook a step too far for me, considering its detrimental effect on my blogging output? Does it really matter? I'm not sure. Perhaps I would always been seduced by the next cool thing, whether it's a Zynga game or Gallifrey Base or YouTube.

From the Picasa album Trouble Dogs

The impact of Cayenne and Pepper on my life is much more straightforward. Yes, I'm sometimes a little annoyed when Cayenne demands more petting, pressing her head into my hand or pawing me with her sharp claws. Yes, I get a little frustrated at Pepper's tendency to walk the other way when I call her, although she's not nearly as contrary as she was the first year we had her. But I spend a lot of time happily petting them, taking them on jaunts, trying to take pictures without flashing out their eyes.

Yeah. Overall, considering the drawbacks of the social media stuff, I think I'm most grateful for my dogs!

Oh, and on the hopes for the future thing? Well, first of all, I'm looking forward to being thankful for a permanent, full-time job that I enjoy, and where I'm appreciated. In the long term, I'm looking forward to medical breakthroughs in brain function. I still remember how devastated my dad was many years ago, when he tried to talk to his mother on the phone and she didn't know who he was. My dad's memory is actually pretty good these days for a man in his high 80s, but my mom at age 75 was falling apart rapidly. Even I, at a mere 52 years old, am starting to feel that my memory isn't as sharp as it was. The other day, Father Smith asked what a particular bill was for, and I told him that it was incense. Since the check paying the bill was for hundreds of dollars, we quickly concluded I'd made a mistake in issuing it. I told him to void the check and I'd redo it. But it was actually a payment for office supplies, and the dollar amount was right! I'd confused two vendors with short, nonsensical names. My mistake was hardly earth-shattering, but it worries me. I've relied on my memory all these years. Can I keep it functioning adequately while research continues on how to prevent and treat Alzheimer's and dementia? Oh, I hope so!

How about you? What great new person or thing of the 2000s are you especially thankful for? Tell us about it in your blog, or in the comments below. Easy instructions to participate are at the end of this entry, right after last week's wrap-up.

For Weekend Assignment #293: When Do the Holidays Begin?, I asked when you personally start celebrating the holidays. Click on the names below to read their full responses:

Sherrie said...

After the Thanksgiving holiday, I start thinking of Christmas. Anything before that is way to early to my way of thinking. Our city has already started putting up the holiday lights. They started putting them up right after Halloween.

Carly said...

 Holidays begin for us all the way back in May. You see, there is a small rodeo parade here in the East Bay, which is held every Mother's Day weekend, and it is kinda the unofficial kick-off of summer, or at least it is for us. Two weeks later comes Memorial Day, and then my birthday and well, you get the idea. We don't really stop celebrating until January 1st. But if we are talking about the holidays... holidays... then I would have to say, they begin with Halloween.

Julie said...

It's hard to avoid thinking about the December shopping season, as much as I try. Of course, thinking about it isn't the same as actually getting into the whole holiday brouhaha. Some family members have to plan vacations and time off early, so in that respect we're thinking about family celebrations. I also try to think about gifts, but only because I'm always on the lookout for bargains.

Florinda said...

When my sister and I were little, we used to start playing the Christmas records in August. My mother was far more patient with that nonsense than I would be. Now, if I start hearing holiday music before the end of November, it's "rushing the season." There's a lot of Christmas music that I actually like - I just don't want to listen to it, or sing it, until the calendar is edging into December. And I really don't want to walk into Target on Halloween - in the morning, before anyone's been out trick-or-treating yet - and see the Christmas-decoration department already set up in the "seasonal" corner of the store.

Mike said...

I'm not a huge fan of Christmas decorations going up in the stores right after Christmas. It has nothing to do with the fact that Thanksgiving isn't here yet, or that it contributes to the commercialization of Christmas. I don't care about that. I just hate that it makes me stressed out thinking I have less time to get presents. True, Jenn does most of the shopping now, but I'm a last minute shopper, so I don't want to think that last minute is here already. Does that make any sense?

Thanks, folks!

Here are the guidelines if you'd like to participate in the Weekend Assignment:

1. Please post your entry no later than Friday, November 27th at 6 PM. (You can also post your response in the comments thread, but a blog entry is better. )
   
2. Please mention the Weekend Assignment in your blog post, and include a link back to this entry.
3. Please come back here after you've posted, and leave a link to your entry in the comments below.
4. Visiting other participants' entries is strongly encouraged!
5. I'm always looking for topic ideas. Please email me at mavarin2 on gmail.com if there's a Weekend Assignment theme you'd like to see. If I use your idea, you will be credited as that week's "guest professor."

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Karen

Not Exactly a Sonic Screwdriver

Weekend Assignment #171: Talk about the most unusual piece of technology or machinery that you've ever used. It could be some specialized machine or tech you use for work, or perhaps some off-brand curiosity you found at an electronics store, or even (if you're technologically inclined) something you've created yourself. The key is that it's got to be something that makes people go "Huh. That's weird."

Extra Credit: Mp3/music player or cell phone: Which would you give up first?

My first thought om this was that I haven't used anything unusual. I was therefore tempted to give a fictional answer. I could claim that I really did invent the M-box 3000 Personal Empathy Device, or put myself in the place of my characters, living in a time bubble or taking part in weird physics experiments.

Then I remembered some real life bits of odd technology from my Worldwide Travel days. When I started there in 1993, I occasionally used a check printer that dated back to the 1950s or earlier. I would set the dollar amount, load the check and pull the lever - ca-chung! Result: nice, large, old fashioned raised numbers on what would otherwise be a handwritten check. Later on, after a change in banks, Mal just handwrote them instead, the ones I didn't generate on the computer.

The other unusual item was what I liked to call the ca-chung machine. It looked like a old style credit card imprinter, which you load with the card and a charge slip with several carbons and then slide the bar across - ca-chung! - to get the card number onto the charge slip. Only the machine I'm talking about wasn't for charge slips. It was for validating accountable ARC documents, which is an industry jargon way of saying it was for preparing handwritten airline tickets, PTAs (prepaid ticket advices) and MCOs (miscellaneous charge orders). Sliding the bar across - ca chung! - put the date and the agency's name and IATA number on the ticket, along with the name and number of the desired airline, transferred from a metal plate the size and shape of a credit card. Worldwide Travel used to have two columns of old metal plates displayed on the wall of the conference room, each representing a defunct airline: Eastern, Western, Braniff, PanAm, and on and on. The head of a regional airline once told Mal he decided not to issue metal plates, so that his airline's plate would never hang on our wall. And yes, the airline did go under a couple years later.

I thought of calling Mal and Dave today and asking if I could come photograph the check imprinter, but I decided that was beyond the pale. Instead I'll show you this:

This is the Igia Ultra Advanced Hair Removal System. Yeah, right. You know what it really is? A pair of electric tweezers. Seriously, that's what it is. You plug it in and it supposedly delivers heat or vibration or a low-level electrical current to the hair follicle, so that it comes out easily and doesn't grow back as soon as it would otherwise.

Here it is, the business end of the electric tweezers. You push the little button on the side and the tweezers close on the hair, and do whatever it is that they're designed to do. But it doesn't really work. The short tweezery bits are harder to maneuver than regular tweezers, the hair is no easier to pull out, and it grows back just as fast.

And really, I'm not surprised. What are the chances this thing actually delivers heat or a vibration or electrical current to the follicle? As soon as I got the electric tweezers, I was strongly reminded of quack electrical health devices from the early 20th century. I wouldn't be surprised if the power does nothing except light an LED to show the device is turned on. I certainly never felt any definite heat or current or vibration, though it's possible it was there to some tiny degree.

It occurs to me that it's almost the opposite of the Doctor's sonic screwdriver. His "sonic" is cordless, compact, and can do almost anything with sound. The electric tweezers are surprisingly bulky because of the cord, and do almost nothing, silently.

As for giving up the cell phone or the iPod, the truth is that I hardly ever use my iPod unless I'm going to the gym, which I haven't done in a shamefully long time. The phone doesn't get even daily use, except to tell me the time; but I use it more than the iPod. I guess I'd give up the iPod - and then buy an iPhone instead. Ha!

I'm plugging away on my Heirs edit. I'm up to Chapter Three, page 100. (Yes, it's a long book.) I've revised away bits of awkward or wordy writing that had persisted for years, draft after draft: nothing major, just individual phrases and the occasional sentence. Never again will an editor consider the odd comparison between clothing and the price of corn, or read about a "soldierly male" selmûn guard. And I found a disappearing cornfield by the Ot Lôven, and changed later visits to that spot so that the descriptions don't actively preclude its existence.

Oh, and there was a missing word in Chapter Three. Is that why I never heard back from Tor? Probably not, but it's still embarrassing! And the twins were simultaneously seven months and a year old at the time of the kidnapping. Oops! Fixed.

Karen