Love it or leave it, you have to accept that there is a very good chance you will be frustrated by some form of technology today. Scanner not working, printer jammed, pages not getting to my cell phone, memory card is full, batteries are empty, GPS is outdated, laptop has a virus, MP3 player still silent.
It was supposed to be so easy. Grab an MP3 player for my wife from the nearest electronics giant, and jam it full of songs so that I can take my iPod to the gym in full confidence, that the batteries have been drained in her player and not mine. After we finally purchased the player (from the 2nd store we went into, service wasn't all that great at the first store), we had to charge the battery from our laptop for about 3 hours. This was interrupted by a couple of hours of work, before I could finally settle down to start loading songs. This procurement process was my greatest source of frustration that day. Even more frustrating, than my wife asking me every 30 minutes if I 'got it to work, yet?'. iTunes only works with iPods, Napster doesn't work with Vista, some sites don't like Firefox, etc.
I was reminded of that Lewis Black comedy skit; of him taking home a new digital camera and printer, with the hope of printing a picture on the camera. Once you get all the cables sorted out and the camera software loaded on your computer, you might as well just take a Polaroid camera and snap a picture of the image on your screen, rather then try in vain to print it out on the photo specific paper that you realize too late, that you forgot to buy.
Take our experience from this weekend and learn from it. Technology is cool and useful only when everything else including the stars are aligned. Sure it's cool to be uncool today, but I still find some use for all the electronic junk lying around my house. Because in the famous words of Dave Berry, 'nothing is more attractive than a 30+ year old pecking away at the keyboard at 2am in the morning, illuminated by the soft glow of the monitor'.
Do you know of any great web-sites for .mp3 or .wma songs that are not subscription based? Shoot me an email at szabolcs.pall@century21.ca
Ready 2 Move?
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