Technically Befuddled
I was looking at the ads in the Sunday paper for Best Buy, Office Max, etc. They sell stuff I don’t even know what it does. 2009 is the year people have to get an HD television. Our not HD tv is about 4 years old, works fine. I gather they sell a converter we can add on to the tv. So my next question is, do I have to buy a new DVD player because the new DVD’s are HD? We have a nice collection of CD’s we’ve built up over the past 15 years. Now and again I’ll read some article that soon CD’s will no longer be sold, because of direct downloads. We better take good care of our players! I suppose the next thing will be instead of buying a movie on the disc, we’ll just buy the download. I used to have a cell phone that took pictures, surfed Internet, text’ed people. As soon as I figured out that all those extras cost extra money, I realized I’d bought way too much phone. The only reason I got a cell phone in the first place was because I sometimes worked late at night and it made me feel safer.
I miss my AOL chat rooms: In the old days (yeah- like 10 yrs ago) AOL was a lot of fun. There were all kinds of chatrooms. You could pick your interest and there were people around to “talk” with 24/7. I have a couple of online friends today I met in the AOL Women’s Open Chat back then. Then unfortunately things got ugly. Kids (usually) would jump into the chat room- interrupting, typing obscenities, being a pain. Stories started appearing in the news about women abducted or murdered after going to meet somebody they met online. (continues to this day with other sites like MySpace)
AOL shot itself in the foot. They kept changing their software. I had a couple of web pages I’d made. Then one day AOL upgraded to a version that our computer couldn’t support, and then I couldn’t even get in to update my own pages! Kind of like having a shelf full of Beta tapes in a VHS world. About that time, our cable company started offering high speed Internet, so away we went! I’ve heard about Worlds of Warcraft and Second Life (and heard about people getting totally addicted to their virtual world) In some ways, it sounds neat;talking “live” on a headset and moving the virtual “you” around in the computer world. A far cry from playing wav. files and learning computer- speak like {{{{{hug}}}} or brb, or afk!
Cybermates Be careful searching on that term- it will shoot you right into Porn Land. I heard something that with the coming Artificial Intelligence superstorm, it will be possible to create a companion loaded with a person’s compatibility preferences. Digital friends. Robotic Girlfriends! ACK! Though it might be cool to have a friend like Johnny Five from the Short Circuit movies. We could go to Borders and shop! 
“Input!”
I used to enjoy visiting the house of my friend’s father. An older fellow in his 80s. (I think he’s still with us, last I heard.) He has a cabinet color TV, circa 1966. On the side table is an attractive beige rotary dial phone. He used to be a teacher, so I bet if you poke around in his den, there’s a really nice typewriter. I think I’ll end up having a house like Pappy. I’m going to enjoy my stuff that still works and pick and choose from these innovative new things. Not replace things just because there’s something else “newer”.
I really would enjoy a flying car though!
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November 25th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
I hear you on missing some of the older technology. I started in the Cyber world on Prodigy! It was one of the very first on-line communities, before even AOL I think. What I loved about Prodigy was it had “bulletin boards” where you could get on and discuss specific subjects. It was organized in such a way that there would be a bulletin board for a subject (for instance, Travel) and then there would be sub-topics for specific things. So you’d have a sub-topic on, say, Hawaii. And then people asked or answered questions and had discussions about that particular topic. It was very organized so it was easy to get information about things you were interested in, or find people who wanted to talk about a specific thing. I met a very nice woman on the Pets bulletin board who I am still cyber-friends with today! She lives in California and we always say we should meet someday but we haven’t yet!
I haven’t given in to the new MP3 technology yet. I suppose eventually I’ll need to get an i-Pod because I’m sure one day there will be no more CDs!
November 26th, 2007 at 9:34 am
I have two TV’s that are relatively new, but not HDTV. I really hope that they sell a converter of some kind or things are going to get ugly.
I used to enjoy chat rooms too. I think I went to Virtual Places. It was a lot of fun until all manners of malicious people (young and old) started showing up with all manners of things that could ruin your computer. Someone sent something that messed up my computer and I never went back again.
It’s a shame that fun things like that have to get ruined.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:43 am
I used to be on AOL chat about ten years ago too! I hung out at (AOL) Tips and Tricks chat room. There were about 20-30 of us in this room to help the newbies with thier AOL experience. Such as it was
AOL was perfectly aware of this room, and they approved of it. Until suddenly one day they informed us they were shutting down our room and starting a “help” room staffed only by AOL employees. I was so sorry to see that go, because I made so many friends there. They picked a few of our members to staff their room, but most of us just drifted apart after that. Later on a lot of them became “Rangers” that supervised chat rooms.
Those days were actually the wild west of chat. Talk about your hackers, and phishers….it was pretty crazy most of the time.
November 26th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
I asked my techie-husband, and he said that you don’t need a new DVD player, HdTVs are downwardly compatible.