Wednesday, August 6, 2008

VACATION!!!

Finally my vacation is here! This is the weekend I had originally planned to ride my scooter up to Massachusetts. Unfortunately (as previously mentioned) that can't happen due to NY state's scooter regulations. A 50cc scooter that can achieve between 30 and 40 mph needs a motorcycle license to operate. I didn't really feel like getting pulled over in the Catskills by some overzealous local cop who might impound my scoot. Not exactly my idea of a fun time.

On a cool factor note, I found a neat little software package that allows me to convert DVD's to MP4 format for my blackberry. I've fiddled with it a little, and I'm ripping a copy of transformers so I can watch it on my phone. O.K. kinda silly I suppose, but should provide a nice diversion at times.

I'm really impressed with my Blackberry Pearl. It may be tiny, but it has all the tools I need in that little package. Really quite nifty. I remember when my mom and dad got our first VCR when I was a kid. It was 1985 and we received it as a gift. My parents were excited to receive such an expensive gift as we could not have afforded such a luxury at the time. They didn't even get cable until after I left for college, and that only happened when my brother moved back in and got it installed. But anyway, even though I'm a bit of a tech geek, I'm still amazed at all the stuff our current gadgets can do. 25 years ago, if I had told someone that I would be able to watch movies on my phone sometime in the future, they would have laughed at me and went back to playing their Coleco-Vision.

It's really quite amazing when you think how far we've come in such a short time. My first computer was a 286 with 1 meg of RAM and a 20 meg hard drive running on DOS 5. I bought it used so I'd have a computer for college. three years later, I bought a K5 (pentium Clone) 100 mhz with 16 megs of RAM and an 850 meg drive. That was something. Now the computers we have run circles around those systems and even my phone has more processing power.

Kinda makes yer head spin.

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