Compu-power
The past week has brought summer weather back to Davis: it will be above 80 degrees F (27 C) for the next 6 months! It's wonderful to be wearing T-shirts again, but we have a protester in the house.
My dear computer keeps seizing and 'freezing' (actually, it's over-heating, but the effect on the screen looks like it's freezing) - so it is time to replace it. Last night (O magnificent internet!!!), in the comfort of our own home, we ordered a new computer.
It's amazing: to be able to shop and have complicated, custom-made things delivered to your front door - at a fraction of the cost it would be for me to go and get them.
This got me thinking: I am still amazed at the age we live in. I remember how excited we were as kids when my Mom got us our first volumes of encyclopaedias: so much information, in our own house! And yet our kids won't even know the word encyclopaedia. These days it's all wikipaedia. I can talk for free to my family overseas with VOIP, see my sister's pregnant belly expand via web-cam conversation, and also be journalling all these experiences for my friends and family across the globe to read just a second after I've written it. Wow.
My dear computer keeps seizing and 'freezing' (actually, it's over-heating, but the effect on the screen looks like it's freezing) - so it is time to replace it. Last night (O magnificent internet!!!), in the comfort of our own home, we ordered a new computer.
It's amazing: to be able to shop and have complicated, custom-made things delivered to your front door - at a fraction of the cost it would be for me to go and get them.
This got me thinking: I am still amazed at the age we live in. I remember how excited we were as kids when my Mom got us our first volumes of encyclopaedias: so much information, in our own house! And yet our kids won't even know the word encyclopaedia. These days it's all wikipaedia. I can talk for free to my family overseas with VOIP, see my sister's pregnant belly expand via web-cam conversation, and also be journalling all these experiences for my friends and family across the globe to read just a second after I've written it. Wow.
posted by Bronwyn at 9:21 am
1 Comments:
I LOVED our Encyclopedia Britannica (a suggestively imperialistic title, I now realize). It was a many-volumed leather-bound set, with embossed spines. The pages were gossamer and each volume smelled so bookly. Mom gave them away after I got married and I threw a bona fide toddleresque tantrum. I cried and cried, not so much for the loss of the (then dated) information contained in the books, but for the way they loked on my bookshelf! Oh the VANITY of it all! One has truly arrived when it is quality, not quantity that matters in one's library, n'est pas? (She says as if she has arrived...)
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