Friday lunch time. You know what that means. Time to clean out the news chum links:
- Technology End of Life. An article on the death of the DVD, combined with another article I read somewhere but can’t find today on the death of the CD, prompted some musing on disappearing technology—and the longevity of technology. Look at vinyl records. I’m still able to listen successfully to records manufactured in the 1930s and 1940s. Cassettes are known to be poor, although I’ve had some hold up for over 25 years. CDs? For all their superior technology, the only ones that might last are the manufactured ones. The CD-Rs supposedly have a very short shelf life (although I haven’t had any die on me yet). Same is true for DVD-Rs. The upshot of all of this is that those Super-8 movies and VHS tapes of your wedding will last longer than that CD or DVD. Further, our music collections are increasingly all digital—meaning you better have backups and backups of backups, as well storing them in non-proprietary convertable formats… as well as praying that the next revolution doesn’t mean that your converted MP3 sounds like crap. Oh, and as for your music device, I fear the day the iPod Classic goes away, but we all know that day is coming. Ten years is a lifetime for any modern technology.
- Knitting Your Brow. The LA Times has a nice piece on how yarn shops are trying to make a comback after the knitting craze crashed. Crafting comes in crazes. Back in my college years, I remember when needlepoint shops were everywhere (this was good, as I was into needlepoint at the time). They then got pushed out by the knitting shops. You could find skeins and skeins of knitting yarn, but canvases and DMC were harder to find. My sister-in-law, Sheri, is one of those folks that love knitting. The next craze to come in was quilting—in fact, my wife is at the Glendale Quilt Show today with a friend. We’ve run all around Southern California for the Quilters Run. What’s the next craze that will kill the Quilt shops? Who knows.
- Losing Your Cookies. As noted above, fancies come in waves. The NY Post is reporting on the next food fancy: macaroons. Evidently, cupcakes are so yesterday, and the almond paste cookie is now in. This makes me happy, as macaroons are gluten-free. Just as long as they are better than the yucky Manaschevitz Pesach macaroons.
- What’s Lost is Found. They may have found the lost city of Atlantis, in a marsh in Spain. Funny thing is, it is just where Plato thought he parked it. He had just misplaced the stub where he wrote the information.
