H.I.T.S.
Michael, one of my guitar students, came to his lesson last week sporting a fancy new phone with a small TV screen that swiveled out on the top of it. It looked like this one at http://www.ecrater.com/product.php?pid=808902.
The phone is offered by Verizon and, according to Michael, you can watch TV on your phone for just over $30 a month.
For more information, go to a href=”http://products.vzw.com/index.aspx?id=mobileTV http://products.vzw.com/index.aspx?id=mobileTV end
and learn more about it.
Being a gadget addict, I asked him to show me more, but, unfortunately, we couldn’t get a signal in the basement of the store where I teach guitar. I saw more students who arrived last week, sporting fancy new phones, and I always ask to check them out.
Another hot hobby that many of them have is either playing with paintball guns or air soft toy guns. A few of them have even invited me to some of their “battles.”
Curious, I looked online and found hundreds of Web sites like this one at a href=”http://www.airsplat.com http://www.airsplat.com end
. These air-powered replicas of various models of real weapons fire soft pellets, and bunches of kids (mostly boys) conduct battles on weekends.
It appears to be a really big craze, although I had no idea before my students told me about it.
It made me think about how far technology has come since I played as a kid in England with toy cap guns and, later, pellet guns.
As many of you may know, the UK has always had pretty strict laws regarding firearms. Out of interest I looked online at a href=”http://www.marplerifleandpistolclub.org.uk/general/gunlaw.htm http://www.marplerifleandpistolclub.org.uk/general/gunlaw.htm end
for more about UK gun laws. I know that it’s a delicate subject because of crimes committed with weapons here in the United States, but I’m only using it as an example of the wealth of information you can find online.
Also this week, I saw a online article about a 32-gig flash drive — just when I thought that the eight-gig drive I own was a huge amount of storage space.
On a recent H.I.T.S. show, Doren and I discussed how we remembered those first small drives that were about 256MB and cost a fortune.
Now, you can buy one that holds 32GB.
To give you some idea of what you could store on it, you could have 8,000 MP3 songs or more than 9,000 photos or 13 hours of video or more than six complete DVDs.
That’s amazing for something that’s small enough to hang around your neck.
We also discussed, however, that our experience has been that large amounts of data can take a long time to be loaded onto these.
Recently, when I tried to load over a gig of assorted data on my 8-GB drive, the progress bar quoted about 15 hours, so I quickly stopped it and trimmed it down.
Imagine how convenient it would be, though, to take lots of pics or home video in this way when you visited friends or relatives at the holidays.
You could plug into their Windows or Mac computer and show them everything.
Sales personnel could also take entire product lines and presentations this way.
Thinking of all that info reminded me of the old microdot technology that was in spy movies when I was a kid.
I looked online at a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdot, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdot, end
and it made me think how today’s consumer has access to gadgets that would make James Bond envious.
Speaking of Bond, there’s a new movie out later this year, so you can check out http://www.007.com/ for details, if you’re a fan.
Doren and I should be filming another show soon and, thanks to Carl Micarelli, we’ll be showing a very special guitar.
It’s one of the most easily recognized instruments in the rock world and the real thing has been valued at about $1 million, so make sure you tune in to see what I’m talking about.
Also, don’t forget to visit the archive for these columns at www.bloodylimey.com
, where you can click directly on the links we feature.
I recently did a Google net search for pics of my old hometown, Blackburn, Lancashire, a small town in the UK very much like Uniontown.
By accident, the search took me to a Blackburn realtor’s Web site, where I saw the familiar street name of somewhere I’d lived as a child.
To my delight, the house next to where I’d lived was for sale and it had about five really clear photos of the interior and exterior.
The house number was 64 and I could even see the front door of number 66, the house where I lived.
As the houses were terraced, they were all pretty much the same general design, so it was interesting to see the interior shots of number 64, as they were now much fancier inside.
I recalled how when we moved, in the early 1960s, my Mom had sold the house for about $3,500.
At today’s prices, they were asking about $167,000 for basically the same tiny, brick-built terraced house.
I wondered just how people survive there now, with high gas prices, taxation and lower wages.
It really made me appreciate just how well we do have it here.
Despite the recent big gas price increases, we’re very fortunate to have the standard of living that we have.
With that final thought in mind, happy surfing.