Sunday, September 03, 2006

Why Am I Still Amazed?

Hi All!

It finally happened. Office Depot's ad features a pretty well-configured PC with monitor and three-in-one printer for less than $100. I knew it would happen, but that is still quite amazing to me. One could come up with endless comparisons, but in my experience I have made $1500/month simply by selling a service contract for a 1980's $100K Wang system that was not NEARLY as powerful as this $99.99 consumable PC.

If only we could solve our energy problems so effectively! I doubt that it's for lack of trying and some day we will weave gold from straw, but in the meantime I can't believe that we are ignoring existing improved technology to get at our own oil and develop more nuclear power. Surely power plant technology has improved since that last nuke was built 33 years ago. Perhaps not as far as with electronics, but why we tilt at windmills we have existing sources that are there for us to use.

Ironically, in another ad is touted a little toy of a Sandisk Sansa music box marked down from $129 to $79. I am starting to take Karma for granted, as just yesterday I found one of these little suckers in my kid's room. He had loaded it with tunes and lost the cable so it was ready for the trash.

Curious, I googled the cheap little device and printed the owner manual, put a AAA in it, found that the cable for my digital camera fit and soon had reformatted the thing and put on Neil Diamond's "Hell Yeah" tune. With the little Sansa and a pair of noise-isolating in-the-ear Sennheiser head phones I had old Neil sitting in the room with me, strumming his tune with perfect acoustics.

The song got to the Sansa thus. Kid downloads to Apple for 99 cents. Emails the song to my GoogleMail account. I open the attachment on my PC and save to disk. Then I burn it to a CD. Then I drag and drop it to the Sansa, which appears as a normal disk drive when plugged into the USB port.

And to think I still have 500 or so LPs mouldering away in the basement, many if not all of which could fit into that little device that I can close my hand around.

What a world!

Incidentally, the Sennheiser ear buds were $80 (well worth it, as you don't have to crank the sound to drown out ambient noise -- can even use them mowing the lawn at a less-than-deafening volume), the Sansa was $70 on E-bay for a total of $50 more than a complete PC system. Ah well, Alex spent $300 for an Ipod to plug into my $800 Apple laptop. Everything is relative, I guess.

Cheers!

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