Farewell to VHS
So after this month, no more VCRs will be produced. Wait, they were still making VCRs? I guess there are probably some folks out there with shelves full of movies – purchased or taped from TV, professional and personal – who were never interested in buying them all again in a digital format, or didn’t want to invest the time and…
Of Birth Dates And Birth Orders
It’s a weird day in our house. Today is M’s 12th birthday, but she’s not here to celebrate. We dropped her off for her first-ever week at a summer camp yesterday. So our phones, or rather her phone, will not ring with calls from relatives looking to talk to her and wish her a happy birthday. There’s no special dinner…
Musical Interlude
Some words about music. I’m wrapping up my first week of a rather grand experiment: avoiding iTunes/Apple Music and using Spotify in their place. I cancelled my subscription to the now defunct Rdio streaming service and went all-in with Apple Music as soon as it went live back in June. While Apple Music wasn’t perfect, I liked how it was…
A Periodic Site Housekeeping Update
Perhaps you’ve noticed, if you’ve dipped into the site’s archives in recent weeks, but I’ve been working on another clean-up project around here. I wrapped it all up this morning. A couple years back I stopped putting pictures of the girls on the site. Well, at least ones where you can clearly identify them. The idea being I wanted to…
When Good Plans Go Awry
For years I’ve been a Back Up Nazi. I let people know how important it is not just to back up the data that is valuable to you – photos, videos, music, important text documents – but to have more than one backup copy. One copy around the house. Then an extra hard drive at a neighbor’s home or bank…
Old Films
Like many parents, we bought a camcorder around the time our first child was born.[1] Like many parents, we recorded dozens of moments during our early years of parenting, sometimes letting the tape run long past the point when it should have been shut off because we were so utterly delighted with everything our child did. Like many parents the…
Can’t Get That Song Out Of My Radio
Sad news from the radio world. Faced with growing competition from digital alternatives, traditional broadcasters have managed to expand their listenership with an unlikely tactic: offering less variety than ever. The strategy is based on a growing amount of research that shows in increasingly granular detail what radio programmers have long believed—listeners tend to stay tuned when they hear a…
Farewell Winamp
Time, and technology, march forward. The first widely popular desktop application that played MP3 files, Winamp, is being shut down in December. AOL Shuts Down Winamp For Good I first downloaded Winamp in December 1997. Pearl Jam had a new single, “Given To Fly,” that was getting airplay in advance of its official release. I kept reading on Pearl Jam…
For The Love Of Baseball And Radio
OK, cramming three things together that aren’t each related to the others, but I can link them enough to justify the single post. And, I know, all of these would have been much more timely a week ago. You were busy, too. Let’s get caught up together. First, radio. Last week was the 75th anniversary of the War of the…
Blog Change Manifesto
As promised, the long, boring, navel gazery that is the “Why I Changed The Blog” post. Feel free to skip. First, the important things you need to know. The landing page will show the five most recent posts. If you want to read further back, just hit the Journal link over on the left and you can browse to your…