A Starr Before Ringo

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Someday, history may note my lifetime as an era in which the world moved from analog to digital. My generation has walked that line and, quite frankly, those on either side of the divide are a little clueless. We have insights which folks of other ages simply cannot grasp.

Luckily from this side, it is now possible to get glimpses from then. Hell, it's even easy to go back before one's own existence.

I was catching up on 2018 pop on a music streaming service. There is some damn fine music being created nowadays.

Then, on just a lark, I decided to peek at some songs which accompanied World War II. So, it was today, in my online meandering, that I sort of fell in love with Kay Starr.

You Show Me Yours

I think in many ways Mark Zuckerberg is right. Who needs privacy in the Internet age? I've tried many times to state how hard it is to actually make anybody look at anything on the Internet. The idea of keeping one's image or activities off the Internet seems either like misplaced vanity or perhaps insanity. Like, honestly, who gives two craps about your life? Really. Unless you're a candidate for the current media paparazzi, who is going to seek you out? Save for a few friends, nobody in the world cares.

Perhaps, it's just that I've always longed for a stalker. It seems I've never been interesting enough to attract the attention of one. Damn!  Regardless, I love having stuff online. I love the possibility for having a conversation via email or Facebook where I can point to facts. I love being able to document lots of stuff I've done via a simple URL.

There's hardly a conversation I could have where I couldn't point to a blog entry or an image for clarification. I have a great deal online. For example, as I get older I realize how temporary things in life are. I wish I had many more examples to draw from, but things weren't always so digital for someone born in 1959. Yet, if we are having a conversation, I want to be able to draw from my experiences. I want to be able to demonstrate anything about me. I know, it sounds a little egotistical. Okay, I'll acknowledge that my favourite subject is most always, myself!



Talk about my grandmother and wherever we are, I can pull up a photo (as long as there is WiFi). I love this self-portrait I took with my paternal grandmother as an adolescent. It was a timer shot. Her name was Ina Hurd and here we were in Stoddard, New Hampshire at the summer cottage of my other grandmother, Emily Osgood. I cannot say for sure which year this was taken, but it was mostly likely in the early 1970's. I love the light and colour of this image which was originally on a 35mm slide.

Expanding Media Options

I need more hours in the day and, no, that doesn't have anything to do with a busy work schedule. I am finding the plethora of audio and video available to me a little daunting. Okay, maybe it's a lot daunting.

I grew up when most of the world was analog, especially its video content. If I wanted to watch something on TV, we had three snowy commercial networks and PBS terrestrially from Boston. There was no cable in Wendell NH in the 1960's. Everything on the tube was synchronous and required being in a chair at the time the networks decided to air a program. Oh, my! Now I've got the satellite receiver / PVR to catch anything from my 50 channels on its hard drive. It makes little sense to have a premium package with more channels than I could ever watch. As well, of course, there are between 13,000 and 14,000 titles on Netflix at the moment that only require a click to view. I can even stream television content from stations across the world. I try to keep up on the Sinhalese-language pop videos. Also, did I mention YouTube? There are just so many options and such vast choices; however, there's so little time.

Furthermore, of course there is audio, both portable and home based. First, I have a list of about a dozen podcasts to which I subscribe. They come from sources such as the BBC, CBC, NPR, PRI as well as bits from the likes of Scientific American. Moreover, I do normal, traditional radio over tunein.com from anywhere in the world, or create my own mixes in Pandora. Lastly, I have also uploaded over 11,000 titles to Google Music Beta. And wouldn't you know it, now Spotify comes along!



I have opted for the free version only but simply don't have the time to devote to finding and collecting all the music I like. The social functions might be fun. Having such a vast collection of music at my fingertips does make me feel like a kid in a candy store. I would definitely like discovering new music by sharing playlists with friends. Yet depending on one's view, either fortunately or unfortunately, I don't have any Spotify friends. The whole situation is all rather moot anyway. Unless we can add a few extra weeks into every year, I haven't the physical time to listen to it all!

An Analog Guy in a Digital World

I'm going to be 52 years old in July of this year but I consider myself a digital native. I don't like hearing that phrase thrown around as if it's an age-dependent term. I didn't grow up with the Internet yet I've adopted it as if I had. In fact, if anything, my maturity gives me an added perspective. I do note, with exasperation, how poorly some of my generation have adapted to these technologies. I don't seem to quite understand how they don't get it. I obviously believe that digital rules!

For example, I am the middle of watching, Where Angles Fear to Tread (1991) on Netflix while typing this. I was not raised with the nearly infinite selection of options available today. In fact, if a movie wasn't in the theatre, the only way to see it would have been on one of the three US broadcast networks. Until I was in college there was no such thing as video tape. Now, I no longer need to schedule my time to match a showing. In the mid-1990s I never thought video via the Internet could surpass the tiny 160 x 120 pixel, RealAudio files.



See, I may not fit the definition of a digital native, but I don't have to be in order to enjoy an on-demand selection of what's available to me at the moment. I think there are over 11,000 shows available on Netflix right now. If I add hulu.com and the networks, my digitial television has never had such a selection of possibilities.

Storing Youth

I'm a little too practical to be poetic; however, one doesn't need to write artsy verses in order to be creative. There are many other avenues. I think I may have been born too early though. I'd have made a great digital kid.

Nothing was digital nor easy forrty or fifty years ago. In grade school, I used to mix caustic chemicals in my room. They allowed me to expose grainy negatives on rolls of B&W Kodak stock. Now children can easily take hundreds of digital pictures. Additionally, one of my favourite toys as a small child was a reel-to-reel tape recorder. I'd run around capturing sounds. In 1969, I sat on the floor in front of the TV around my tenth birthday recording the audio from lunar landing. Now kids can save sound clips in numerous ways. In my very early teens, I would often try to piece together Super8 movie reels and sync them up with cassette audio tapes. Now, there are kiddie camcorders for sale.

How much easier these things would be today! The difference with digital is that files are not only easy to make and share, but easy to save as well. Storage space is cheap enough to keep a lasting record of all the sound, pictures, and video of one's early years. I hope kids today commit to backing up their digital junk, so when they're my age they'll still have some of the artifacts.

Cult Means 'Not for Everyone'

In 1979, I was a sophomore in college. Although only a few hundred miles from Manhattan, little Keene New Hampshire was a world or two away. I didn't see the movie then but The Warriors is now a guilty pleasure.

The film has such a ... well ... indie feel. It also is so analog. I'm coining that term here to mean, 'non-networked'. I mean there were no cell phones for God's sake. If you introduce Verizon thirty years hence, the whole premise of the movie falls apart. It really was a simpler time. And the NY subway was rough, scary, and had graffiti. It kinda makes one nostalgic for the good old days!

Carbon Paper?

There are times when I'm reminded I've another birthday rapidly approaching. I've talked about growing up analog here. Today I was reminded of that when I ran across the term carbon paper. It was in some ancient BCIT materials I discovered which talked about acceptable classroom materials. Carbon copies were not permitted. When was the last time I saw a sheet of that? For a while 3M or somebody invented those multicoloured forms but I haven't seen those for a while either as most of my paperwork has gone digital. Now the form is likely on my monitor with the instructions to tick the box to show acceptance with this or that policy.

If carbon paper is from a time long past, then yesterday, I found more proof that I have vast experience to draw upon. The movie, Car Wash, arrived on DVD. It has Richard Pryor and music which won both a Grammy and a Golden Globe Award. It was released the summer which I turned 17, which incidentally was thirty years ago. What a fun film, what a strange time, and what a lot of hair!

The Epitome of Analog

The world was analog when I was a baby. Probably the largest change that has occurred in the last four and a half decades is the development of digital.

Here, I'm not thinking only in terms of photography for that's a shift in paradigm that's obvious but didn't begin in earnest until after the new millennium. I am talking about a whole mind-set. The plots of some movies from the eighties and before would fall apart in a remake. Imagine not being able to get in contact with someone! Now, we'd have explain how the cell phone batteries were dead. In another example, the phrase, a mixed tape, sounds like an anachronism.

What made me think of this topic was I am readying this week's final exam. It was easy to find the exam copies I've used back through the late 90's. They are all in C:>My Documents\MS Word\BCIT\COMM Exams\. I remember how in 1985 the English Department at the Taif Ordinance Corps Center and School didn't have a PC. We used typewriters and that's the epitome of analog.

Formats Come and Go

I grew up analog. My first wrist watch was a Timex with hands.

The first video tape I ever saw was 1/2" reel-to-reel B&W in high school.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon converting an hour and a half of 8mm analog camcorder tape to DVD. (There are hours and hours left.) This particular trip was a summer spent touring India.

During retirement, I'll probably be able to dump all archived video, text, and images to IP-accessible, personal data storage. Will a copy of the blog reside there too?

Not Letting Go of Old Junk

I plugged a firewire connection from my digital camcorder to the computer. Inside, it had a tape which I'd just copied from my old analog camera. I captured one hour's worth of events from the summer of 2000 to the hard drive. The resulting file was about 13 gigabyte.

In order to find these old tapes, I had to hunt through the closet shelf and open a bulky and unwieldy box. It contained all sorts of old, computer paraphernalia. I took a breath and threw away an old Quantum disk drive. You see, the one-hour video file was larger than the entire 12 gig drive! I really should've chucked it out long ago.

There was also a zip drive (pictured above). It had a parallel port connection because it was used before the days of USB. The cartridges held only 100 meg. I wondered if it would run under XP and I did manage to find an iOMEGA driver. It worked fine but the device is fairly useless. Why couldn't I gather the courage to throw it out too?

Done

When one copies sound or video in analog format, the process takes exactly as long as the event did. As you may know however, when throwing around digital files, the copying process can take a small fraction of the actual, linear time.

'Trying to cope in analog' is similar to how I've felt when entering my missing eJournal entries. The actual events took place during September and October, but I've spent near an equal amount of time getting it blogged. Never again, shall I leave on a 2-month vacation without a notebook computer! From the next trip forth, I will keep the journal entries and edit the journal photos while the events are occurring!

Regardless, I'm finally pleased to announce that true to my blogline, every day of 2004 is now contained here. Each week of our trip is complete:

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09

If you're a frequent visitor to my eJournal and images, you may have seen some of the entries and photos from our trip to Sri Lanka. It is now completely online and available, so the numbers above link to the weeks away. In order to read sequentially, you must start reading from the bottom of the pages.

Capturing is to Video as Scanning is to Photos

I have started using my capture card to convert years of analog camcorder tapes to mpg files. This is the first step in eventually creating DVD's.

Tape forces one into 'linear thinking'. Trying to find a specific event on tape is a mess as one generally has to fast-forward through lots of tape in order to get to the desired part. DVD menuing will make that a thing of the past as one captures into 'clips'. Each clip can appear on the DVD menu. It will take just moments to locate and play the correct scene.

Remember trying to carefully drop the 'needle' into the 'empty space' on a vinyl LP?

Sound of a Kiss / Picture of a Tree Toad

Undoubtedly, the current news of the Mars Rover Mission has prompted a rekindling of my interest in space.

When I was growing up, there was a concerted effort to involve kids in the study of science and, more specifically, the space program. When I was in elementary school, I remember NASA came to the gym where my most vivid memory involved the guest scientist playing with liquid oxygen. If I can write about it today, it was surely a high-impact demonstration. At home, I can recall assembling a plastic model of the Apollo LEM. The first moon landing occurred during the summer before I entered Grade 5. Because cassettes hadn't been perfected yet, I captured TV audio on my small reel-to-reel tape recorder. Educational interest in space seemed nearly universal during my youth.

The very year I graduated from high school, Voyager escaped the bounds of earth. Now, twenty-six years after the fact, it's the most distant human-made object in the universe. Those words look simple enough; but imagine, nothing touched by a human has ever gone as far! Although we're still in contact, it left our solar system a few months ago and is speeding into the blackness in excess of 40,000 miles per hour. I fear trying to fathom its 8.5-billion mile progress is next to impossible.

What I also find fascinating is the Golden Record of humanity that Voyager contains. (Voyager 2, hot on its twin's far-flung heels, contains a duplicate.)

NASA's Flash Animation and Site

Some of the Recording's Content

Physical Aspects of the Recording

Because we are so used to CD's and DVD's nowadays, we have to remember that Voyager's 12-inch, metal disk is more akin to an old LP. It is analog and contains a stylus and set of intergalactic, 'pictograph' instructions on how to play it. Voyager has been journeying for about 60% of my life and this seems long to me. However, it will be 40 to 60 thousand years before it approaches another planetary system!