John's Music Blog

While I am constantly immersed in some aspect of technology, on a personal level, I’m a bit of a technology laggard.  If something is working, I don’t have a driving need to replace it with the latest technology. I still own one black-and-white television and two of my televisions have rabbit ears, though I won’t keep them past February 17, 2009, when a  digital converter will be necessary to allow them to continue to work.

However, having just returned from the U.K., where I spent $0.99 per minute to make calls back to the U.S. on my AT&T Blackberry (that’s with the International Calling Plan discount), I decided I need to join the more-technically-current crowd.  Turns out that for many situations, a Logitech camera and microphone together with a Skype account provided the perfect remedy to the pain of expensive international calls.

I was in New York in 1964, to see the 1964 New York World’s Fair.  I don’t think that Skype and Logitech are what AT&T had in mind, when they showed their Picturephone at the Fair.  It’s rather impressive what 44 years of additional innovation can bring.

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