Wednesday, December 28, 2011

A Technological Dinosaur Moves Into The 21st Century

In the Words of My TV Idol...Jim Nabors..."ShaZammmmm"....


You know, thinking back a few thousand years a couple of two or three decades, there was a time sometime beginning in the late 1970's and ending in the early to mid 1990's when I seriously considered myself to be on top of all things relating to personal computers and home technology goodies.

For cost reasons I couldn't actually OWN all of the stuff I was reading about and salivating over, but I did manage to get my hands on a couple of pretty good early computers in their day, but still...

Not so much any more these days.

I don't know what happened in the past 20 or so years, but I just sort of lost interest in keeping up with everything and decided to let all of the younger people out there worry about the hectic process.

I let my prescription subscription to Byte Magazine and PC World expire, and between WebCams and Facebook and Twitter and God knows what else that's come along other than Blogging....

and I've had a cell phone since 1990...waaaaYYYYYY before most people had them....

Today I just don't seem to have the time and energy to worry about the stuff I used to worry about any more.

That said, Pat wanted a Amazon Kindle for Christmas this year. 

At the last minute I wandered out and found one of the new Kindle "Fire" boxes at the local Staples office supply store and I brought it home and until tonight/this morning I've basically just let her charge the battery and figure out how to use it.

Then after she went to bed tonight I was fiddling around in the living room doing some paper work and decided to pick the thing up and read the owners manual.

After a couple of hours downloading some free Apps and getting used to the Android interface I have to emphatically state that...

THE KINDLE FIRE IS PRETTY DANG COOL FOR THE PRICE OF ONLY $199.

I spent 15 minutes fumbling around and managed to download the Netflix App and now I can watch Video on the darn thing in COLOR...using our wireless internet connection.

ShazammmmmMMM...

My Father would absolutely go nuts these days looking at the stuff we all take for granted in our modern culture/society.  He was a TV/VCR movie junkie in his day and grew up living beside the guy that did all of the TV repair in his home town of Prenter, WV back in the 1940's

Our house was always full of portable TV's and oddball Tube based Radios and even early Transistor Radios (and Crystal sets) way before the average household had even Two TV's in the building.

Now my Mom has two flat screen TV's down in Alabama at the Farm and I'm buying another 55" set for the living room this weekend if I can find a good deal and Dad never saw a LED/LCD/Plasma TV since he passed away in 1996 and missed the revolution in video technology.

The hardest thing about getting older and living beyond a half century on the calendar is keeping things in perspective I think.

We tend to see everything in one or two year slices of time and I belive it is nice to stop and reflect at the end of each year and consider the details which are often overlooked in the rush to move from late December into January 1st and the new year of 2012.

I guess I'll go now and fiddle around with the Kindle some more now...

Regards Y'all...

1 comment:

Ed Drew said...

who woulda thought, my wife gave me a Kindle Fire for Christmas and I think about the same as you do. It's a lot in a little box. My wife is watching a netflix movie on it as we speak (type)