Notes on the Road to Nerdville - 5/3/2006

Notes on the Road to Nerdville - 5/3/2006
"Old School meets High Tech" or, "Old Dogs can learn new tricks"

I just noticed that this is my first Nerdville note on this new blog. In my previous blog, I had posted the occassional note about my journey to learn some new high tech gadgetry. Now I shall continue that Nerdville journey note-taking here. :-)

My newest high tech toy is an MP3 player. It took me a bit to figure it out, but once I figured out about "ripping" and "syncing", the rest sorta fell into place. As they say, with new tech comes new terminology --or something. Anyway, I've been trying to step up (no pun intended) my walking exercise, which is rather boring without at least a radio to listen to. But on the FM side, I'm tired of hearing music from the 60's and 70's, and newer music does not interest me. On the AM side, though, there's only so much conservative talk radio that I can listen to.

Along comes my MP3 player. First, it's NOT an iPod, but a brand called Sansa. I didn't want the real deal, because I didn't want to spend that kinda money on an iPod only to mess it up. But since I chose an MP3 player that my student workers weren't familiar with, they couldn't readily provide the assistance that they could have otherwise provided had I gotten an iPod like they have. Well, excuse me for not being like everyone else! ;-)

But I generally learn about stuff by messing around with it, and if it doesn't break first, then I start to learn about it by trial and error. Well, now I got enough of a hang of my MP3 player to be able to upload podcasts of news stories and debates. When I went walking around today, it was so cool to listen to something that was actually helpful and informative--instead of listening to something by the Beatles for the umpteenth time. Don't get me wrong; I like to listen to music from time to time as well, but if I'm going to have a site and a blog that are going to emphasize opining, then I need to listen to more stuff like that. While I am "old school" in some ways, it's times like these that I appreciate living in the Internet Age.

This has been a note from the road to Nerdville.