Viewpoint: Computing by candlelight

Computing by candlelight

For those of us who did our part to push the economy down the rocky road to recovery this holiday season by buying the best and newest toys that technology had to offer, I say, “Good job. Well done.” I really love the directions that consumer electronics is taking with IP telephony, wireless PDAs, and camera phones.

Despite our best efforts to buy the newest, brightest, fastest, and smallest every December season, we still have to mix old and new.

But I also must admit to a streak of nostalgia that won't quit. I finally threw out my scratched and dusty 45-rpm records, only because the equipment to play them has gone into the other end of the reverse-bathtub cost curve. Oh, plus they are too heavy to haul around and they sound horrible.

There goes 30 years of prints and slides into the trash�right after I finish digitizing them and correcting for the fading and color shifts. I'm going to be one of the first to replace my incandescent, fluorescent, and halogen room lamps with high-intensity (and cool ) LED bulbs when they come out, but for some reason it annoys me to be blinded by those blue auto headlights�I'd rather be blinded by incandescents.

We're always in “the interim” where we have all sorts of different technologies in use at the same time. Technology spreads at the speed of ROI, and in the meantime I'm still making prints from my digital camera�my dad will never own a computer or PDA to view digital photos. I'm still watching movies on my VCR even though I now have a DVD player�I just can't bear to throw it out while its still working. I have my eye on that plasma-screen TV, but I'm waiting for HDTV to gain general acceptance�by that I mean, of course, to become affordable.

Until then I work, sleep, and play in a world of patches, glue logic, dongles, upgrades, and adapters�trying to straddle a world full of recently antiquated and barely real technologies�feeling sometimes as though I'm computing by candlelight. I'm curious if any of you have any interesting kludges and work-arounds for making last week's technology work with next week's?

�Gary Evan Jensen, Editor