I read an interesting article online this past Friday. It was about today’s “Apple iPhone” shindig, and about the convergence of digital devices. I had been thinking about the convergence of digital devices ever since I saw a photo of the new MacBook Air notebook computer put on the market by Apple a couple of months ago. In case you missed it, the MacBook Air is the one you can carry around in a manila envelope. It’s that tiny.

Seeing that computer reminded me of the Apple iPhone, and the Apple iPod. When I look at each one of those, and read about the available functions on each one of those, I realize that the laptop or notebook computer is shrinking down in size to something closer to an iPhone. The iPod plays movies and songs. The iPhone connects to the Internet, can be used to send e-mail and search the web, and plays movies. From what I read, the next big step in making laptops smaller will be to make them the size of one of those DVD players with a 7-inch screen.

I am no techno-geek. I do NOT have to have the newest digital toys. But heck, even I own one of those 7-inch DVD players (from Radio Shack; I got a discount because that model was being discontinued (I like buying gadgets that announce themselves as obsolete while still on the shelf), plus an additional discount because it was the last one -- the “display model”).

In reading the news today, the big buzz at the Apple hootenanny was that the new iPhone will have GPS (so I can know how lost I am), and will have 3G (third generation) radio. I’m not exactly for sure what 3G radio is, but it seems to be something like Sirius Satellite Radio, only you listen to it on your cell phone. That cell phone, by the way, comes with a battery that is good for 300 hours when the phone is in standby mode, and you can get either the phone with 8 gigabytes of memory, or 16 gigabytes of memory. Crap! My first computer had ONE MEGABYTE of memory, a 40 megabyte hard-drive, and it was A SCREAMER!!! Oh, and even though a geek friend built it out of spare parts and pirated software, it cost a lot more than an iPhone.

Here (if I did it right) is a link to last Friday’s article:
view link

Near the end of the article is a link to a great song / playlist site: view link

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is some footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge experiencing harmonic resonance shortly before its collapse:




This second vid has nothing to do with nothing, but I saw it on YouTube when I was searching for vids about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and I thought it was amusing:




Here’s a vid of a song I like: