Sunday, January 26, 2020

The Inexorability of Progress



In my lofty position as liaison between my condo building and our management company, I needed to contact everyone in the building. Tricky to do with no one’s phone or email. I downloaded the questionnaire form used by the other reps, adapted it to suit my needs, and prepared to print it. No luck.

          My new laptop refuses to acknowledge the existence of our printer and the handy CD provided by the printer company would have solved everything, but apparently in our relentlessly changing tech world, they don’t make laptops with CD drives anymore. We finally figured out a work-around by loading the document onto a flash drive, plugging it into My Guy’s computer, and printing from that.

          A tad ironic that before I can email anyone I needed to first scotch tape that piece of paper to everyone’s door.



          We were at an art display last weekend with live music in the background, a softly played sax, whose player also had a terrific singing voice. My first impulse was to see if he was selling a CD. But then I realized – the only place I could listen to it would be in my 11-year-old car, or at home on the player tucked away in a bedroom.

          How do performers make a little extra money nowadays? Everything seems to be on-line.

7 comments:

  1. This is so true. We have a 5 CD player which I use for music and which I use for any CDs that I rarely buy. I recently bought one on China from PBS. I used to be able to cast to my TV with a Google device, but the cable company changed their box and that no longer works...I also wonder how the local musician makes money!

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  2. no laptop, no CD player. my 10 yr old desktop has a CD player. I was thinking about getting a laptop when I replace my desktop but now maybe not.

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  3. You can probably download the printer drivers online from the website of the printer manufacturer -- assuming, of course, that it's still a supported model.

    I hear you on the technology problem, though. Our security cameras stopped working when we got a new Internet router. We had to buy new cameras. Argh!

    I still have a laptop that plays CDs and DVDs, but when that goes, I don't know what I'll do. Give them all away, I suppose.

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  4. I am so very grateful that my desk top 'puter does have a CD drive. And that we have a CD player in the living room.
    Progress is indeed inexorable and often travels way too fast for me. Which both shames and frustrates me.

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  5. My newest laptop doesn't have a CD drive, that's why I'm hanging on to the old laptop which does have one.
    I bought the CD from a busker once because I really liked the music and discovered that it just didn't sound the same at home, without the atmosphere of the mall where I'd bought it.

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  6. Good question. I have a player in my desktop computer, and we can use our DVD player. But basically, we don't.

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  7. Everything seems to be going the way of streaming. I no longer have a CD player.

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