Posts Tagged ‘ Life

13-year-old Trades iPod For a Walkman For a Week

Our kids growing up will never know the pain of waiting for a cassette tape to rewind, forward a song, or having to remember to rewind a VHS tape. I thought this story was a good look into what someone growing up in a purely digital world, thinks about our old analog equipment.

BBC Magazine convinced 13-year-old Scott Campbell to trade in his iPod for a Walkman for a week and see what he thought. Scott thinks the iPod wins when it comes to sound quality, color, weight, and shuffle feature. The Walkman however offers two headphone sockets making it much easier to listen to music with a friend. My favorite part of the review is, “It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


[From 13-year-old Trades iPod For a Walkman For a Week]

Pontoon Boat ready for cruising the lake..

We took a couple of trips on the “party barge” today. I let Abbey drive a couple of times, and she is really getting the hang of it. My goal is to give Abbey some driving experience — even if it is a boat — prior to her learning how to drive a car. I want her to have a lot of experience developing her hand eye coordination, so that when it comes time to learn how to drive a car, it will be simple. I had similar experiences when I was a kid, and it made ace-ing my drivers test simple.

Amelia really enjoyed the boat, as she was able to walk around the deck at will. A couple of times she climbed right up in my lap, and took over the wheel. Also, her “no fear” personality is starting to scare me a little. When it was time to get off, she just kept walking, and attempted to jump off, just like the “big kids” and her sister. Luckily, I was right there to catch her.

I pulled two quite large splinters out of Amelia’s foot today, and she screamed her lungs out. She is currently on a course of anti-biotics (prophalactically – to prevent Lyme disease), and I really think her foot was infected, so she would have been put on amoxicillin anyway. The whole area was red, and from going through a few foot infections in my life, it looked infected to me.

Today was a very strange day weather-wise. Sun, rain, thunder, hail, and sun. It started off in the low 70′s, then dropped to the low 60′s. The wind picked up, and knocked down a tree top in our yard, which almost came down on the porch, and would have likely took out our living room window. Right now there is a frost warning for tonight, so all the plants are going to spend the night inside. The cold night should be good to get rid of some biting bugs though, so that’s not too bad..

Pictures from Lake Adventure on Sunday – Memorial Day Weekend 2009

For some reason, zooming around in the rowboat (6 hp), is actually more fun than the pontoon boat. It’s certainly more rough when bouncing over other boats’ wake, and you get more wet, so maybe thats why? It’s also much less stable, which probably adds to the excitement a little. But, the pontoon boat can carry lots of supplies, and plenty of people, so its a great boat for entertaining. Still, the 13 foot rowboat was a lot of fun on Sunday.


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All the photos have been upload to flickr, picasa, and mobile me, so I have plenty of backups :-)


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Turtle basking in the sun

Abbey, Amelia, Holly and I came up on four turtles basking on a log today. TurtleOnLog