As I stood there looking like a Roy Orbison impersonator in my specially polarized glasses, I made a mental note to call my wife and apologize for the money we’ll be dropping on 3-D televisions in the next few years. Because, no matter how attached you are to your current HD flatscreen, you’re going to want to throw it in the trash once you see sports in 3-D.
This is not meant to serve as an advertisement for ESPN or for any of the consumer electronics companies whose products I may mention below. I’m not receiving any promotional equipment or reward of any kind; in fact, I’d be fired if I were. This is just a warning for all of you out there who, like me, can’t resist the lure of the Next Big Gadget.
Sometime between five and 10 years from now, most of us will watch our sports in 3-D, and we’ll wonder why anyone bothers to actually attend the games.
With this blog, a web design business that I operate as a sideline and a desire to put some photos online, I decided to create a personal website.
I showed it to someone yesterday and their response was, “Why do you need a website? You aren’t a musician or a politician.” My reply was that when the Internet first became popular in the ’90s, it was hip to have a personal website. And everyone knows that Scott County is always at least 10 years behind the times when it comes to popular culture, so I’m just now catching on. I may be unimportant, but someone will still sell me my name with a dot com or dot net on the end of it for $8.95 a year.
So check out my website, including the season-by-season photo sequence, which includes some of my favorites from my collection of photos taken throughout the Cumberlands region. Most of them are from the Big South Fork, but some are also from other locations, such as Dale Hollow and the North Cumberland WMA.
There is a huge privacy flaw in Google’s new Twitter/Facebook competitor, Google Buzz.
Who woulda thunk it?
Everyone complains about Windows Vista. But from what I can tell, Windows has come a long way with Vista. It’s definitely much more user friendly than XP or previous versions. The story from the Mac camp before Vista was released was that Windows was ripping off a lot of the features of Apple’s OS X operating system and incorporating them into Windows. The similarities are subtle, but they’re there, and Windows is better for it, IMO. Sure, Vista uses a lot of memory. But memory is pretty cheap these days. And the laptop I’m using only has 4 GB of memory, and I can’t see it slowing down the machine any (I haven’t run any major memory-hogging applications like Photoshop or audio-video editing software, though).
That’s my observation after a couple of days back on a PC. I’m sitting here with a PowerMac desktop and my HP laptop running side by side and, to be honest, I almost like Vista as good as OS X. Almost. But, admittedly, I haven’t really rolled up my sleeves and got my hands dirty with Vista yet. So far I’ve just been transferring files back and forth. Within a week I’ll probably be cursing Bill Gates again.
I have to give props to my brother-in-law for this. If you listen to music and you drive, you need one of these.
It is called an FM modulator. And it just might be the coolest gadget I’ve seen in a while. The best thing about it? You can pick one up for less than $15, shipping and handling included. I have no idea how long these have been available, but I had never seen one until last Saturday, and I had to have one for myself.
I don’t have a CD player in my truck, so I always listen to my iPod. A couple of years ago, I bought one of those little deals at Walgreens that you plug into your iPod from your vehicle’s power adapter and it transmits your mp3s to a radio frequency.
There are some drawbacks with that, however. For one, my iPod is one of the lower-end, first generation iPods. It’s capacity is only 1GB. Which seems like a lot, until you actually start filling it up with music, and you can run out of room in a hurry. And the sound isn’t very good quality when transmitted over the radio with the device I have (which cost about $20 at Walgreens). And my iPod is always going dead at an inconvenient time (like when I have just departed on a long roadtrip).
Enter, the FM modulator. It plugs into your power adapter, just like the other device I have. And you can plug in your iPod or other mp3 player into it, just like the other device I have. The difference? It isn’t limited to just a select few frequencies, like most other such converters. It can play on any frequency. And I’ve heard it has good range, like when you’re driving down the road, you can actually pick up the mp3s in another vehicle. I can’t imagine that the FCC actually approves of that, but who knows.
There is a big benefit to the FM modulator over the other device I have: Quality. The sound is very good. It may not be CD quality, but it’s close enough that you won’t care, and close enough that you might not be able to tell.
It gets better. The FM modulator is an mp3 player in and of itself. So if you don’t have an iPod or other mp3 player to hook into it, no sweat. It eliminates the need. You simply store your mp3s on a memory device and insert it. The modulator has a USB input, meaning you can plug your SD card (or compact flash, or any other memory card) into a card reader and use it that way, or you can use a flash drive. Dave uses an SD card in a small card reader. I was going to do the same, until I discovered that I could buy an 8 GB flash drive for less than I would spend on a 4 GB SD card and reader.
So instead of being limited to 200 or so songs, I can carry my entire mp3 collection (about 5 GB and over 1,000 songs) with me on the road and play it, and never worry about the iPod going dead. And if you’re one of those people who have never taken the time to convert your CD collection to mp3s, this is a perfect excuse to do so. CDs are so yesterday (especially when iTunes offers songs for 99 cents each, and complete album downloads for less than you would pay at Wal-Mart).
And the best thing about it? The total cost on eBay (search for “FM modulator”) for the player and a remote control is about $13, shipping included.
Cool. Very cool.
I never got into the MySpace craze. I had a profile that I set up to use to network with other journalists, but it was never my thing. It always seemed to me like a thing for teens. I can’t remember the last time I logged in to my profile.
Along the way, I set up a Facebook account, but never used it. Way back then, Facebook was a poor second to MySpace, and nobody really used Facebook. Facebook has, of course, exploded in popularity over the last couple of years, but I had never used it. Until the last couple of days, when I finally started looking for friends to add.
I was missing out. I should’ve started using Facebook long ago. It blows MySpace out of the water. Seriously. There are many cool features on Facebook that MySpace doesn’t have. The only drawback is that there are still far more people using MySpace than Facebook, so you can’t really find that many people on Facebook. For example, of the 170 people or so who I graduated with in 1997, only about 30 of us have a Facebook account (or, at least, only 30 of us are telling when and where we graduated).
I can see that Facebook will be an excellent tool not only for keeping up with folks but for networking, which is what I wanted to use it for in the first place. I know a lot of you square folks (don’t take offense; I’m one of the most square people around) like to knock the social networking sites, but it really is handy. Over the years, there are people who I lost touch with and had searched the Internet for and couldn’t find them. Within 5 minutes, I had found a couple of them on Facebook. Let’s face it: Unless you keep in touch with someone on a regular basis, you’ll eventually lose touch. Physical addresses change, email addresses change . . .
I still think it’s silly that some people will post everything about themselves on an Internet website. But it is cool to keep up with people and see how many kids they have or where they’re living or what line of work they’re in now, if you haven’t seen them in 10 or 15 years. The drawback is that if you’re older, you aren’t going to find too many people you know. But there are quite a few “older” people on there. In fact, I found several people (not to name names) who I would have never in a million years thought I would find on a social networking site. I found quite a few people who use Facebook as a way to keep up with family members who are spread all across the country. All the family members are on each other’s friends list and they can all communicate with one another at the same time, which is really cool.
Speaking of posting everything about yourself, one of the knocks against MySpace is a lack of privacy. Facebook is different. No one can see your profile unless you accept them as a friend and allow them to see your profile. Once your logged in, Facebook serves not only as a networking tool, but a way to share pictures, videos and an instant messaging tool all in one. I can see how easy it would be to get addicted. Now I just have to find more people I know.
If you are like me and you’ve never tried social networking because you were turned off by the cheesy, childish feel of MySpace, give Facebook a try. You might be pleasantly surprised. I was.
It’s amazing to me how cheap USB memory is getting.
I picked up a 4 GB Sandisk flash drive (or USB drive or thumb drive . . . whatever your preference) just last year for $20. I was amazed because not so long ago, when I bought my first laptop, I ordered a Dell-brand flash drive. It cost $20 and was only 256 MB. I was so amazed at the 4 GB retractable flash drive from Sandisk for $20 that I made a post about it.
Tonight, I went to Wal-Mart to pick up a SD memory card and card reader for storage. And for less than I could get the two of those for, I picked up an 8 GB Sandisk flash drive for $20.
I guess it’s a sign that I’m getting old (I turn 30 in a week, you know) that I can remember when an entire computer hard drive wasn’t 8 GB. But this is just amazing to me: 8 GB of USB memory for $20. Wow.