May 31, 2009 5 min read

Well, it’s finally over — and now Mrs. Schulze and I don’t know what to do for entertainment on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. In fact, she remarked exactly this same thing last week. She was talking about “American Idol” (at http://www.americanidol.com/

) and it’s amazingly easy to get addicted to watching these kinds of TV shows — it really creeps up on you before you know it.

Now, Mrs. Schulze is saying that the finale of “American Idol” was so good that she probably won’t watch the show next year, as it will pale in comparison.

We’ve watched previous years together, but this year seemed as though they had an extra-large dollop of talent among many of the finalists. As we live in a high-tech age, it goes without saying that almost every move from every show is either on youtube.com or available via iTunes as a download.

Mrs. Schulze, I’m sure, was not alone in downloading many of the iTunes songs to listen to and it was she who brought to my attention Susan Boyle, the Scottish woman from English TV show “Britain’s Got Talent” (http://talent.itv.com/

).

Simon Cowell is also on the panel of this one, and Susan Boyle has an amazing voice. What truly shocked me about this show was that the Brits actually charge per phone call for you to vote.

Speaking of Tuesdays, my apologies to anyone who showed up in Oliver Square this week, expecting to see us play along with our with students. Thanks to the lack of follow-up on the part of our friend, Jimmy, the date was never actually confirmed at the Smokehouse. I’ll let you know in the future if and when a date is available.

It may have been just as well, since Tuesday was a busy day. We jetted (actually, drove) down to Ruby Hospital first thing for another blood test and check-up.

Thankfully, my white blood-cell count has only risen by about 3,000.

I then had to rush back to go teach and show the students my Variax guitar, which allows me to sound like I’m playing a 12- string acoustic guitar (or a sitar, or a banjo) at the flick of a switch.

I found out how long the six AA batteries last on Saturday when it quit during a lesson, but it had lasted through an entire week of teaching.

You can read more about these amazing instruments at http://line6.com/variax/

. I’m in seventh heaven changing sounds and tunings on it via the computer.

It’s finally sinking in that I’m going to be 60 this year — aagh!

Where have all the years gone?

Just because we’re getting older, though, doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy computers and cell phones and all the other gadgets that make our daily lives easier. They really do.

I know that teaching guitar while having a laptop connected to a laser printer has replaced dragging loads of sheets of paper with music on them to the store. I’ve got the equivalent of about 5,000 books on my laptop and probably over 100 videos, so I really do use all the things we talk about on a daily basis.

It’s also much more convenient to have somebody text me to tell me that they will be late or that they can’t make it, rather than having to answer a phone call.

I think that texting in moderation (not 12,000) is perfectly okay and almost every young person I teach has a cell phone, so it works out great.

Last week, I was trying to decide what to use for a media center so we can watch movies on our TV via a hard drive instead of having to search through all of these DVDs that we bought every time we want to watch something. A popular current idea is to take all the movies you own and convert them to either a format called .avi or another called .divx. These formats compress the movie into a smaller file-size that you can store on a hard drive. Then, using another piece of hardware called a media player that connects to your TV, you can play movies back directly from the hard drive. You can also play slide shows of your pictures or even just music (especially good if you have a surround-sound TV).

The one that I used is at http://www.neurostechnology.com/osd

and it worked really well.

If you look online, you can find other examples of these — many have either a 500-gig or 1-TB hard drive as part of the package. Just load your movies in a suitable format onto the hard drive, use the supplied remote to show what movies you have on your TV screen, press play and off you go.

It’s far better then having to keep delving through lots of DVDs. The 1-TB model that holds hundreds of movies goes for around $200. You will, of course, also need a modern TV with a suitable hookup.

If you’re still confused as to what I’m describing, this Web site has a picture of what it looks like: http://shop.inoi.com/product.sc?productId=90&gclid=CPu2qsDR3JoCFQIWFQodcirt3A

.

Until next time, happy surfing.