Exit. Hmm.

radio speakers

I was listening to my phone.

For wonderment, I set it up to play one of the hundreds of songs on the drive, put it on my desk and turned it on.

This little gizmo, not a lot bigger than half a deck of cards, sounded quite good, surely good enough for my fuzzy ears.

So I went looking for the speaker.

The sound comes out of an 1/8" hole on the bottom of the gizmo.

My idea of speakers still goes back to the 60's, where anyone who had a good sound system had speakers that dominated the whole room (or car sometimes).

Then I remember Bose. I never owned one, and I don't think I have even heard one, but they claimed a new technology where they could make a small radio sound like a big one, and I concluded that that Bose add and my iPhone might well share the same technology.

Since I am not a scientist I may be all wrong on that last one, but I have pretty good hearing for an old guy and that little phone sounded really good.

I am still impressed.

my smart phone

I was aware of the iPhone before it was introduced.

There did not seem to be any reason to get too excited, the chance of me owning one was quite remote, but I read about them, much as I read about Porches and Buick Regals. Off budget, but intriguing!

Then suddenly I am the owner of a "state of last year's" technology.

I am not complaining. To go from a guy who never expected to own one, to a guy who has last year's version is not a bad deal. Mainly it means that when scouting the App store, I have to be a bit aware of models. Mine is the Model 3.

Talked to daughter last night, the one with the engineer/gadgeteer husband. She said when he buys a gadget she judges it's effectiveness by how long he is enamored with it! She said some gadgets keep him occupied for a whole month, and she is delighted!

She said the iPhone has kept him occupied for much longer and I can see why.

If your weakness is playing games on a computer, there are lots of them, and you can carry the game with you to church, or to the Senate. I have family living in 6 different towns. The iphone tracks the weather in each of these towns. It really doesn't matter too much to me what the weather is in Brisbane or Portland or New London, but it keeps me entertained!

My iPhone consultant (futre son in law) said to look carefully through the App store. Look for applications (small programs) that would do what you need. Download all of them. Try them all, and the ones that really won't work for you get rid of them. That is good advice for the thousands of free Apps, but there are lots of pay apps too.

A bit of care there.

But a couple weeks after I began working with this little wonder, I am finding it all sorts of useful, besides being entertaining.

And, life goes on (somewhat changed!)

Even the grass will be green again.
I am waiting.

techie grandpa

The other day one of my granddaughters called me a "techie grandpa."

Guess it is true, mostly. I bought my first computer 25 years ago. Got a masters degree with the help of that old relic!

Now I text to my grandkids, I use a digital camera, I keep a blog and now I have a smart phone.

My new phone (an apple product of course) is not the latest model. Daughter 4 needed the newest upgrade and her company helped pay for it, so I inherited the old one.

Other than screen size and lack of a two handed keyboard, this smart phone allows me to carry infinitely larger computing power in my pocket than was on that old 75 pound system.

RAM in those days came in Kilobytes. I have not heard that term in a long time. Now I hear about Terabyte. Don't have one yet, but I have a couple 1/4 terabyte devices.

My old college computer had a hard drive (all computers did not in those days), with a capacity of 20 Megabytes. My iPhone has 16 Gigabytes of memory.

If I was getting smarter as fast as my computing power is increasing all would be very well.

I am afraid it is not, however.

And it all goes on the back of a truck.

missionaries

I have friendships that are about to crash because of veganism.

For all of my life I have been a vegetarian (even though I had a piece of turkey for christmas dinner). I don’t know that it will lengthen my life and I doubt that the guy upstairs is all that impressed, but it is what I know and am comfortable with.

Remember me telling about an in law in law who is big into herb therapy who was convinced that he could cure my grandson of diabetes and my wife of Alzheimer’s by his genius and herbs.

Daughter will not let him do his thing with my diabetic grandson, nor would I even listen to his healing prowess. I think both are nonsense.

The guy is in his 90’s, as onery as an old rooster, and convinced that all of these herbs he injests is the secret, yet his grandmother was smoking a pipe at 105, so there is a bit of genetics there.

I suppose it comes back to “it will help if you think it will help.”

Which brings me back to veganism. I am not exactly sure (not being a shrink) what it is that makes people so missionary about the difference between being a garden variety vegetarian and an ultra vegan.

They are as convinced as my inlawinlaw that it will make them live longer and healthier. It might help if you have had a heart attack or a stroke, I don’t know, and it may just make them think they are living longer, I don’t know, but I asked that the word “vegan” not be used again in my presence.

Which means that I am on an outside roll. If they can’t talk about it, and they are like new christians in their zeal, I am muzzling them. If they do talk about it, I’ll be very uncomfortable, especially when the talk is in the “would you change if it would cure you of . . .?”

So I am an outsider, maybe going even more outside as time goes on. And, truth be told, should l accept the “gospel” of it all, I’d not tell anyone!

It would be my secret!