I saw a guy walking around the mall the other day with a walkman on his hip. Not a CD man, or an ipod, but a freakin walkman. I couldn’t understand what the heck century we were in. I am by no means an electronic snob, nor a snob in general, although this entry may beg to differ, but I really had to stop and think that a walkman is just no longer practical. Every piece of music is available as an mp3 or on CD that was ever available on cassette tape, so why burden yourself with carrying around some huge artifact of history on your hip when you can do yourself and the world a favor by joining the rest of the twenty first century and coughing up the ten bucks for an off brand mp3 player. My uncle who is in his sixties and can hardly turn on a television has an mp3 player. He has always been my benchmark of where technology hits last so if he has some new toy then it must either be a must have, or it is because everything else that had been previously manufactured that did whatever that new things does is not being made anymore. It was not as if the walkman guy was poor either, he had a nice watch, new shoes and a cell phone on the other hip. Don’t even get me started on having a cell phone on your hip either because that is a whole different can of worms…

Courtesy of XViD Codec

Cell phones are becoming more and more advanced to the point that they are beginning to replace standard items that we have used for decades. The need for a home phone as pretty much been eradicated by wireless internet and cell phones. The wallet looks like it’s going to be the next thing to go. In test regions people were given the ability to scan their phones to make payments and access public transit. The phones were loaded with the users bank account information and equipped with magnetic strips that allowed the phone to essentially be scanned like a credit card. The user’s identification information was also loaded onto the phone. This made the need for a wallet more or less obsolete. Cash, credit cards and Id’s no longer had to be carried. In some regions this new technology was warmly welcomed, but in other people just don’t seem ready to leave the wallet at home yet. Engineers are also playing with the idea of using a cell phone to remote start a car and even allow you to adjust the thermostat in your house before you even get home. Sony is working on kitchen appliances that can be turned on to preheat an oven or microwave a dish via cell phone. If we don’t already rely on cell phones too much, we most definitely will when they act as the remote controllers of out lives one day. Imagine how many more driving accidents there will be when we are busy not only texting and talking while we drive, but also starting the oven and buying Christmas presents too.

Courtesy of SEO Company

In 2008, Cyberdyne, a Japanese robot company, came up Robo Suit HAL (HAL stands for Hybrid Assistive Limb). Robo Suit HAL is basically a full body suit that one would strap on to each appendage with Velcro. The suit has a battery pack that fits onto the wearer’s back and sensors that can detect very weak biosignals coming from the skin. These biosignals are the signals from the brain that tell the muscles when to move. HAL does not move the wearer, but when it receive these biosignals, it assists the wearer in whichever movement he or she was going to make. This means that there is less pressure on the joints and less tension on the muscles. This suit is designed to help people with physical disabilities, give support when doing heavy labor, and provide rescue support at disaster sites. Something like the Robo Suit HAL seems like it will become a very useful invention when it is applied to real life situations. As of right now the suit looks bulky and cumbersome, but then again, so did cell phones at one point. There is no doubt that a device that would assist the elderly in maintaining mobility, help the disabled to function normally, and provide extra support for rescue crews would be beneficial. I gotta wonder though, how long before real robots are created? If this suit is able to sense brain signals and move accordingly, how long is it going to be fore we are able to control an entire human sized robot through remote brain signals? My imagination is running away with me isn’t it? Well, I bet cavemen never thought it would be possible to harness light in a glass ball screwed to the ceiling either.

Courtesy of SEO Company

Kodak Picture Machines are pretty neat. I remember back in the good ‘ol days when there were no such things as digital cameras. You actually had to use regular film or a disposable camera. That was terrible. I mean at the time, I didn’t think twice about it but wow! digital cameras are pretty damn cool. The quality of the photos are amazing and now there are so many things you can do with them. You can download them onto your computer, a friend’s computer, download pictures from your phone to your computer, or my favorite, print them out on a Kodak Picture Machine. These things are the best! They’re all over the place. Target, Wal-Mart, any local drugstore… You can make print photos in seconds, edit, enlarge, and even add text to your pics. I love to play with the color option. I really enjoy photos in sepia tone. I just think they look so pretty and antique looking. I have to be careful though because I sometimes end up with too many pics in this color! My favorite thing about this contraption is that it gets the job done so quickly. As soon as you put your memory card in, with the press of a button your pictures are printing right before your eyes. Even if you have a large amount to print, it doesn’t take that long. Another convenient thing about the Kodak Picture Machine is you can make multiple prints and sizes of the photos you want. Wallets, 5X7s, 8X10s… I like having that option just in case I’m wanting to make extra copies for friends and family. The only bad aspect to this amazing machine is there’s usually always a line to use it. Guess it must work then!

Ares Download

My boyfriend’s new lap top has a DVD burner and a CD burner like most do, but then it has this new thing on it called LightScribe. All you have to do is put the CD into the drive, and then go into the program and create some cd shaped image. You can put what ever you want on it, graphics, pictures, text, just anything you want. So, you go in there, create it, and then, as most would guess, print it out on a sticker and then put it on the disk as straight as you can get it on, right? NO SIR. This thing has some kind of awesome laser in it that actually burns the image straight onto the disk. You just have to put it into the CD drive upside down, and the laser just goes on and does it work right on the CD. You can burn an image of your face into a disk and give it to your friends. You can burn the list of songs that are on the CD right ONTO the CD. You can write your name on everything you burn so no one can steal it and claim it as theirs. WAY cooler than those stupid CD stickers that used to be really popular. Those things would always bubble up and quit playing, and if you put it on wrong the first time your CD was ruined. And the printed out pretty bad, and if you got them wet they looked like shit. He burned me a movie the other day, and put the cover of it on the actual CD. Technology, you still surprise me. Sure, this doesn’t cure cancer or fix global warming, but it’s real cool to have while were still here, right?

Courtesy of Ares

Earlier this year I was still a college student, living right by campus and working my ass off to finish my final semester. I was sitting at home, getting ready to write a paper, when the screen on my lap top started blacking out, then coming back on and only letting me do stuff for 10 seconds. I loved this lap top, it was the first big purchase I had made on my own. I had gotten some random awful virus that I couldn’t figure out on my own. I took it into Best Buy, where they told me it was going to cost $260 to get it fixed. It was a lap top I had bought four years ago and I hadn’t had an issue with until then. So knowing that it was going to cost that much I decided the best thing to do would be to spend the extra money and get a new lap top, so I could be free of troubles all together with it. I was so pissed at that time, that I went back into the computer section and ended up just buying a Mac. Not just any mac, but the brand new one that has an LCD screen, made out of aluminum, totally recyclable and an 8 hour battery life. Went just a little over my budget. And, since then, I don’t think I could be happier. I wish that this whole time I was giving those computers so much shit that I had an idea how awesome they were. It’s hard to explain it, I really think you just have to go into a store and play around with one. For the first week or so I thought I had made a bad mistake in buying it because of how different it is from a PC, but during that time I learned more about it and really got used to it, and it’s the coolest lap top I have ever seen. In the end I fixed my other lap top on my own, making the purchase completely unnecessary, but I’m still glad I got to buy a totally sweet lap top.

Courtesy of Ares

Communicating with friends and family these days is so much easier than it use to be. Everyone has cell phones now, it’s rare that you even call a house anymore. Last time I called someone’s house and someone else answered the phone, it was like I had forgotten what to do. No one even says hello anymore, they just answer it and know it’s you. I can shoot an email over to a friend right now, and know that she will get it on her phone immediately and I’ll get a response back. Even faster is the infamous text message. I can get on facebook or myspace or twitter and find people that I haven’t talked to since I was in high school and look at pictures of them and see what they look like now and have been doing. With all this tech communication available, you think that we’d feel closer to our friends than ever. But, I think the opposite is true. It’s rare that I even call my friends anymore, because I can just send them a text and get a faster answer that way. I post on their “walls”, but I don’t meet up with them for a drink. It’s nice, but to have that easy communication, but it’s just lost that personal touch. I guess it’s easier for me to have more friends now that I can keep in touch with, with the sucky hand off being that I’m not as close to them.

Courtesy of Ares

I remember back in the day when no matter what we were buying my mom would write a check. All the information was necessary: full written out price, number price, pay to the order of, drivers license number, all that bull shit you had to fill out. The people in our small town that knew where we lived NEEDED to have all of my mother’s personal information just in case her check came up hot, because they couldn’t just drive down the street and come to the house and find her. I still have a check book, yeah, and I use one check a month to write my rent check. Other than that, I don’t even know where the stupid book is. Soon enough, the check was becoming less and less popular and the debit card was taking over the world. Which is AWESOME, unless your debit card was one of those weird ones that isn’t backed by a credit card company and most places wont even take it. That sucks. My mom had one of those for years. Now a days, if for some reason you are still into checks, you can go into Wal-Mart and hand them a blank check and it will print everything out on it and then all you have to do is sign. A lot of places now even have the deal where they just take the check, scan it, and then give it right back to you. Now, can someone explain to me what the hell this is about? If you’re going to just give it back, you wasted that paper, and all your time filling it out. Get with the times, check book keepers. Time to make them obsolete.

Courtesy of Ares

The best way to find out what is going on in the world is to get on the internet and go to any old website, like yahoo or MSN, and getting an update on what is going on from a professional standpoint. But something else that gives it a personal touch is getting on twitter and look at the trending topics to find out what’s going on in the world. You can search for any keyword in the tool bar and instantly see any tweet that someone else has posted with that word in it. It’s hilarious to see actual opinions of people on the topic at hand. Sometimes, you can learn new info or get better links to find out more on what you want to know, or you can just see how stupid people are when they take about things they have no idea about and get a good laugh out of it. I love getting those personal opinions people have right from their own fingertips. People on the news websites usually just have to write the story, fact based, and that’s good and all, but getting that little touch of personality is funny. I love to read other people’s blogs as well and find out what people think about things, but twitter is just a quick little way to get some interesting one liners on the events going on. It’s so informal and sometimes noticeably unintelligent, but it’s real opinions written from real people. It’s probably the fastest way to get what you want out into the internet for other people to see. So go out there and check out some of the trending topics, maybe even try to start your own.

Courtesy of Ares

I’ve got family all over the country, some even outside of it for the time being. It’s hard to keep in touch, we have all the social networking sites like myspace and facebook, but it’s just difficult to keep up with everyone with those. So, I recently bought a new computer and saw that it had a web cam on it. My computer from when I was younger didn’t have one of these, but we had bought one to connect to it and see what it would do. We never used it, no one did then. But, with this new one, I found out about the free program skype. You can make video chat phone calls to anyone else that has an account with them. I downloaded it and, surprise, soon forgot about it. Then, I was talking with my aunt in California and she mentioned that she also had it. We added each other and had out first video chat. It’s amazing how clear the video and voice can be with a good internet connection. I walked around my apartment and took my aunt on a tour that would probably have never happened. Since then most of my family has added the program and we often have video chat conversations. A few of my cousins and their kids are stationed in Germany right now, and with out the program we would only get to see them once a year or less, but now I can get online any time (keeping the time difference in mind, haha) and give them a call and see what’s going on. I love this program, recommend it to anyone at all, even if all of your family is in the same city it’s still a fun and free way to make phone calls.

Courtesy of Ares