Me stalking the bunny… — photo by Mom
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“House Of The Rising Sun”; The Animals
Let me know if the YouTube isn’t available.
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The thing about No Post Days I love most is also it’s greatest curse… it’s the versatility, the total lack of constraints on topics I can chose from.
Just this morning I ran through at least three topics before deciding on this one… I’ve got 2,357 songs stuffed into my computer which gives me 154 hours of non-stop and non-repeat listening pleasure. Compared to people like my little brother, who has over 11,000 songs, it’s not much. But even that’s little league compared to Brian Murphy.
Brian was the dude who built the record library for at least two radio stations in Ottawa. His pre-download era record collection was over 14,000 LP’s… then there were the 9,000 CD’s, 10,000 reel to reel’s, and an ungodly amount of cassette’s and eight-tracks all stored in his basement. How many songs is that?
There, see? I totally just changed the topic again…
The thing about technology is the effect it has on a population can only be really understood ten years or so from when it was introduced. Right now we’re starting to get an idea what the effects of the two trillion dollar investment in tech infrastructure between 1998-2000 will be… just before The Burst fibre optic cable was laid across continents and country’s and right up to your doorstep. Then everything went Wireless so what was only available on a desktop suddenly fit in your hand.
So thanks to lightspeed communications, fantastically cheap digital storage and hand-held devices like the iCollection, the PSP, Berries and cellphones — which have become mobile pocket computers — we can now be walking Libraries. Literally.
Here’s the thing… Yahoo!, GMail, Hotmail and even WordPress now offer, for free, Gigabytes of storage per free account. The mobile pocket computer most of us walk around with each have Gigabytes of storage, but also allow us to access all of those free storage accounts. So… just as important as what and where we can Access becomes what’s the limit on what we can store?
In essence, and soon thanks to Google’s decision to digitize every book ever published it’ll be a reality, we can all have our very own Library of Congress stored in a pocket sized device. Think of the power… every song ever recorded tucked away in your account beside every book ever written and you can scroll down to find every work of art by every Master…
Ah, No Post Day, truly You are awesome. For this gift to the World we should all thank Anita.
So if you’re willing to participate the question for today is: how much information do you currently have digitized on your tech devices?
Bonus Points: Does it frustrate you when people write “I don’t know…” in an email or in a post and you kind of feel like you have to reach out and slap them while screaming “GOOGLE IT MOFO!!”?
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...salted lithium. 
Proudly-little to none. I have about 3 years of posts on wordpress, and 25 records on my laptop.
We’re not counting all the mp3’s on cd are we?
My husband on the other hand, had his 80gb iPod filled within a few days or receiving it. Sigh….
200 mp3’s. 40hours dvr. keep most things taking up space in lp, tape, cd. and dvd.
I have currently 4464 songs digitized which is almost a fortnight. I have a fortnight worth of old podcasts too.
I have a 320gig external and I am just waiting to have external drive and 1000 cd library in the same place.
I like to be able to carry music with me and a variety too. This isn’t true of other media.
I like paper books, I love hardback books and a kindle won’t replace that. I like watching movies, in fact it is one of my favourite things to do, I couldn’t substitute a 2inch ipod screen for my laptop’s 15.4 and I feel bad about that.
I can however watch comedy on a small screen. I like listening to routines but find even a slight visual cue helpful so have digitized some DVD comedy performances and sketch shows.
And first thing I do when someone says I don’t know is send them a link to the first three google results
I don’t know… the Kindle is a pretty amazing little device. I love the tactile book experience as well but the Kindle seems like a whole other Thing. It allows you to store mega-amounts of literature, and right now there are almost 100,000 titles available for download… from what I’ve read it’s a much better reading experience than what we get through the current handheld systems. The biggest problem I have with it is the cost ($400)…
Oh man. The Kindle is an awesome device. Andy Ihnatko who writes for the Chicago Sun Times has been singing its praises.
I could totally find a use for a device like the kindle. My textbooks take up three feet on my bookshelves. Then there is digitised articles as well. I would be will to say that I could fit all of them on a Kindle. I could totally sacrifice the tactility there because I tend to flick through to the page and leave the textbook laying on my desk.
The tactile thing though is part of the joy for me in reading for pleasure. The tactile thing is why I still buy a newspaper despite getting alot of news (BBC World, Guardian – I also buy and yes I am a bleeding heart liberal, London Times, N.Y. Times and L.A. Times) via RSS.
There is something to having physical formats I spent a night at R’s flicking through LP records and him then sifting through another box finding similar stuff to what I said I liked. This I have repeated many times with my own CD collection and other friends. I get a huge amount of please from a friend getting turned onto a band or director or author based off my rec. That wis lost with digitised media
I’ve been dreaming of the Kindle. PERFECT for my commute. No more torn covers or mystery stains from my packsack.
Haha….I can beat you all. I have tons and tons of songs on my radio!
I’m such a loser…….
Music has never really been a downfall for me. I have been able to satisfy most of my listening via 200-300 songs that I rotate out from time to time. I just consider it a personal “best of” list.
I have a great weakness for movies though. Divx is the shit and with sites like Quicksilverscreen, it makes trying to find new stuff almost trivial. If I find something I like I can save it if I want. My dvd player plays divx movies so I can get 5 or so movies on a disc. Though not as good as dvd by any means it’s something I can watch when I feel like it that can satisfy my needs for the time being.
I don’t own a MP3 player or any portable device, even a cell phone. I am way to much in my sorry home theater to settle for lesser size like what is on IPOD’s and such. I have just purchased a 32″ LCD that works great as a monitor, got a new amp for my 3 LFE subs and purchased a new upconvert dvd player. I would love to have an HD player or BR but the out of work budget just doesn’t allow for that.
As far as tech like the kindle goes I’m not a big fan of reading digital media. Don’t know if it has something to do with my eyes not getting along with the screens that well or the fact that when I have access to those kinds of things I tend to lose focus and won’t finish what I have started to read before switching to another title. Hardbacks tend to keep me in line. I do see one area that e-book readers could excel in and that would be in college markets where the cost of higher education is through the roof any how. Think about how much that could be saved if a student would rather have and e-copy of a text than the hard copy. It could save student cost in the millions, but how would such a program be implemented and what school would really want to be the first one to benchmark such a thing?
I guess it doesn’t mean anything really and it feels that I am just babbling, throwing some fodder in the works and trying to clear my head this morning.
Good morning Bryan… HD-DVD is about to get a lot cheaper… Sony took over 90% of the next generation market the day Warner Brothers announced they were going with BluRay. Prices for HD-DVD players are being slashed Huge as they try to regain some of the market… but really, they’re Beta-like toast. I think the price on a BluRay will drop (from $350 – $500) once Sony starts licensing the technology, so maybe next Christmas it’ll be around $250.
Kindle, to me, has a perfect early-adaptor market in students. Get them hooked and prove the technology is worth paying money for and they’ll use it for life… but, unfortunately, the Kindle costs pretty much the same as a PS3. If I were a student today I’d drop the coin on the gaming console.
I’m not exactly sure what’s wrong but whatever driver which is supposed to allow my computer to play movies is tout fookied… I really have to call Dell and get it fixed. Whenever I try to play a movie I get a blue screen of total weirdness, and when I download a DivX file my computer shuts down Windows Explorer “For my own safety”.
You can a photo of the bluescreen here…
My brother still downloads a lot of stuff, but he gets warning letters from his ISP about doing it… he lives just North of Toronto where there’s an upscale Chinatown. There’s a store in a huge mall near his house which sells first run movies, a lot of times they’re pre-release and cost about $5 for ten movies.