Legacy Media-Channel Fixtures in Your Car

I was sitting in my auto yesterday waiting for my oldest boy to finish play rehersal.

A few high schoolers were out on the open campus smoking their cigarettes.

My stream of conciousness from that point forward went something like this:

Shame, these guys are starting a habit dozens of my associates are trying to quit, after years of trying. Smoking has been such a legacy habit, I mean look at the smoke lighter built into my car. Smoking is hard-wired into this car. There is an ash tray, and lighters in each armrest. Why did they build three lighters into the basic design of this car (toyota), can’t the back seat passengers ask for a light from the front seat?  Why not one lighter in front and just three ash trays? I haven’t used that lighter for anything but a cell phone charger. Funny how technology changes. Using cigarette lighters as chargers for various and sundry electronics is probably why they are still built into cars. Fewer of us smoke, and smoking is discouraged on airplanes, restaurants, and theaters, but here in the car it not only serves a private toke,  but all these gizmos need charging too, so leave the design as it was. I guess I charge my iPod too. Above the cigarette lighter is a cassette player and above it is the CD. I have used them less that the cigarette lighter. Why? Because I listen to podcasts and music on the iPod when I drive. When I don’t listen to the iPod, I have the radio on. Radio is the oldest technology in this car! Save maybe the tires.

So there I sat, finding myself amongst three hard-wired-into-my-car legacy media systems; tape, CD, and Radio.

I wonder what other uses the cassette player and the CD might have beyond their legacy uses? I haven’t used either one in two years, at least.

Just use the cigarette lighter to keep my iTunes on tap. Funny…

How the World Wide Web was Invented.

When you are deciding about whether to buy the 1080p or the 720p flat screen TV for your home theater, pause a moment to remember Philo T. Farnsworth.

As a young electrician, he imagined lines, or rows, of electrons forming an image while plowing potato fields in Idaho in the 1920’s. Driving back and forth amongst the potatoes, the young inventor imagined  the rows being tightly presented, so Seurat-like images could be transmitted to screens.

This led to the invention of the first purely electronic television and the issues of screen resolution. We are just now fullfilling Philo prophecy that one day, scanlines can be so tightly assembled they’d look like, “pictures hanging on the wall”.

Them is some “High Def” taters.

This talk by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of HTML, URL’s and by default, the internet as we know it, is a must see. Here is the Philo T. of our day. He didn’t invent the internet, but he increased it’s resolution beyond anything the ARPANET offered.

It will take sometime, precisely 16:51, but will bring you up to speed on what may be in store for our Billion Channeled world.

(Notice how little Berners-Lee looks like Al Gore…)

How to Grasp the Hugeness of One Trillion Dollars

What do you get when you mix financial and visual literacy?

See Here: