Jack’s Old & Busted Blog

. . . doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s in a spherical wooden treehouse.

Well, despite the best efforts of two surge protectors, lightning took out our cable modem and AV receiver last nite. I swapped the modem out this morning in a jiffy, but spent several hours shopping around for a replacement amp. The old one did great for 10-plus years, so I did the same thing I did back then: bought the cheapest Yamaha I could find. What a difference! It took almost a full hour to set up (you gotta tell it how far each of the six speakers are from your head, crossover freqs, decoder setup, etc., etc., etc.), but it was worth it. The sound quality is unbelievably better than old setup. No more muddy center channel! Also, I get AV component video switching as well as optical and Pulse Code Modulation audio input! Woo-hoo!

So, if you’re still sittin’ on that old Pro Logic system, get out there and make some rain.

I’m trying to think of something more inane than Twitter. So far, it’s between RSS feeds of how much sales tax I’ve paid each hour or my current body temperature. Or maybe this journal?

Little known fact: I was part of the earliest test group for the iPod.

Here I am c. 1972 with one of the prototypes. Note that this model has the exact dimensions of an 8-track tape. Hmm. (Aside: If radio didn’t start sucking so bad, would the Walkman/iPod have beaten out the venerable transistor radio?)

It continually occurs to me that most people’s photographic histories are in great peril because of the digital revolution. I love flickr, and I love my digital cameras for the simplicity and economy of taking snaps, but 99.9 percent of these images only live out there on the Interwebs, or, worse, on some flaky external hard drive waiting to fail (or maybe in that stack of scratched up CD-ROMs?). Barring a fire or flood, family photo albums like the ones I was perusing yesterday will easily outlast me, but what will happen to the digital stuff when noone can remember Grandpa Jack’s flickr password?

Also, and perhaps more problematic, is the fact that we are absolutely inundated with images that most people are too lazy to tag or sort for quality. I’ve seen people on airplanes share pics that they have stored on their cameras! Conversely, I can visually recall most of the images in the dozen or so albums I have stored away in the garage. The physical act of creating those albums forced someone to make a choice about what each photo means. For that matter, the economic limitations of film also force people to make choices about what they shoot.

Now, I’m No Luddite™, but I’m beginning to wonder if future generations will be puzzled as to why their family histories and hairstyles are frozen around the time most people switched to digital. I’ve ranted about this before, I think, but it deserves another turn.

(I was also viewing a couple of videos my parents had transferred from Standard-8 to VHS, when the whole issue kind of smacked me upside the noggin again.)

Been traveling so I hadn’t had time to post the big news. Ash was selected to the Adidas Junior Phenom Camp All-Star team for her age group again this year. I’ll post pictures later. There are a bunch.

Ash had 26 points in her first game and 20 in her second, including four 3-pointers. She had a ton of assists and blocks and a few rebounds. Both games she was going against a post several inches taller than her (and 40 pounds heavier in the second). Ash is not a post player, but frequently has to defend the post when she is the tallest player on a squad.