Trucker R wanted people on a radio forum on SF Radio. He asked me if I had Skype.
I HAD Skype. SysOps probably remembers it. But I checked THIS computer which I have had [for] several years and found no Skype, whatever the hell that is.
You are going to encounter my problem any time you deal with someone who has any institutional memory.
Historically, an old timer had to appeal to other old timers to demonstrate my problem. Today, any person can undersand it if he’s 25 years old.
An obvious example to anyone who is on here: The Bundys’ 1987 computer.
On “Married with Children,” it was the latest thing. Ther telephone receiver was put into a cushion on the modem, and it had a fan. Twenty years [ago], the thing looked more out-of-date ten years later than a windup telephone did in 1980.
Skype? I can’t tell you the number of programs just for broadcast I have been through in the last decade. But I have an advantage because my whole life has been like that. I try to remember Finnish, and I finally realize that what I said was in Modern Greek.
Language after language, place after place, my whole life has been a freight train out of control.
What makes this ironic, no, steelic[?], is that I have ADD. I can’t remember a damned thing, but I’ve learned to handle it.
So I stick to what is basically, always true.
It’s not like I had a choice.
p
#1 by mderpelding on 12/19/2007 - 8:56 pm
Note how constant technological evolution tends to divert available mental horsepower?
But yet, the subjects of our discourse are timeless.
Race, family, creed.
But we are constantly forced to divide our mental energies into learning new technologies to express those ideas.
It’s hard to build a better wagon when you must first reinvent the wheel.
#2 by Dave on 12/20/2007 - 6:29 pm
The changes that the WWII and Baby Boom generations experienced were nothing in comparison to the changes that the 19th and early 20th century populations experienced.
This is never acknowledged as it is perennially fashionable to say, “the pace change is accelerating”, the opposite of the truth.
The advent of the Maxim machine gun in 1870s, for example, allowed a band of 40 white men with just six of these guns to conquer a major piece of the African continent in months. But we can’t mention that because it is just too embarrassing to blacks.
But regardless of the slowing of the pace of change, (it’s taken 40 years to get to high definition TV for crying out loud), the Internet is truly the big “buster”.
It has completed what the telegraph started and Mommy Professor is a done deal as a result. The college campus of today is as atavistic as it comes. It is hilarious to watch all the buffoons on campus reenact the “golden oldies” and take themselves seriously doing it.
I haven’t seen anything so hilarious since I watched Curly Howard do his “chicken with its head cut off” routine.
But let us not compare Curly Howard with Mommy Professor. Curly Howard was a true genius. Mommy Professor is a true buffoon.