it’ll be just like that book you read

maura @ 9:26 pm

I went to the CUNY IT Conference last Friday so this past week’s tweets are a little techy. I also presented at the conference, which was fun if a little nerve-wracking. When I got there on Friday morning and looked in the program, the room listing for our session read Theater. !!! Yes, the multi-hundred seat Theater. Thankfully, for some reason (tiredness? still getting over this dang cold? who knows?) I didn’t freak out, not even at the beginning of the session when the tech was buggy. It was quite the weird experience, with microphones and blinding lights and my co-presenter’s course blog on a seemingly million-foot tall screen behind us. Crazy.

So here’s last week’s twitterstream:

Learned lots of new stuff at tonight’s wine + cheese + Firefox workshop. I love my job! http://bit.ly/7UHHwl
less than 5 seconds ago from web

I love my RT days, but working from home makes it a little too easy to have a cookie for lunch dessert.
12:46 PM Dec 7th from web

@divanoir totally! Gus is getting the new super mario bros wii for xmas, let’s have a wii brunch sometime!
12:18 PM Dec 6th from Echofon in reply to divanoir

Wish I’d been able to make it to #acrlny09 last Friday. Thx to all the tweeters for the great summary, esp. @StJ_Libraries
10:11 AM Dec 6th from web

Watching a sensei @ Gus’s karate class teach 30 kids while clearly fighting a sore throat makes me feel like a whiner.
11:58 AM Dec 5th from Echofon

Still waiting for my kid to return from his field trip.
10:46 PM Dec 4th from Echofon

@ms_tinamarie Sorry to miss yours too! Too many great sessions today, wish I could have made it to them all.
4:18 PM Dec 4th from Echofon in reply to ms_tinamarie

# In the info lit presentation @ #cunyit, wish I could be at the WordCamp session, too. Where’s my clone?
2:42 PM Dec 4th from Echofon

At #cunyit? Want to sign up for the CUNY Academic Commons? Visit the computer lab in 436T all day to join #cunycommons
10:24 AM Dec 4th from web

@mikhailg yes, audio for http://bit.ly/6CP7t4 #cunycommons preso from #cunyit, tho quiet.
10:11 AM Dec 4th from web in reply to mikhailg

@zephoria Parents who are scared of video games do. As a parent, it always surprises me how many parents are still afraid of video games.
8:20 PM Dec 3rd from Echofon in reply to zephoria

RT CityTechLibrary Merlot+Firefox make for a great combo. Join us Dec. 8, 5:30-7:30 for Web2.0 Happy Hour http://bit.ly/7UHHwl
12:33 PM Dec 3rd from web

Twitter is the only thing I’m caught up on right now, bah.
11:04 PM Dec 2nd from Echofon

really hoping that this is my last superbusy week. i’m tired.
8:19 AM Dec 2nd from web

it’s all here in writing

maura @ 9:42 pm

I am ripping my very first LP to MP3 right this very minute: Thomas Dolby’s second record “The Flat Earth.” So far it’s been a pretty easy process, though you have to press a button to indicate the start of a new track, which is kind of a drag (Jonathan swears that there’s software that senses the silence between tracks automatically, so we will probably look into that). But really the simplicity is amazing — huzzah for USB!

I’ve been thinking a lot about music lately, spurred mostly by turntable acquisition and following the prolific Kristin Hersh on Twitter. Throwing Muses are playing here in mid-March. We’re not going. It’s on a weeknight and our babysitter’s in high school and my mom is busy and it’s expensive and late and loud and…

And in some ways I am sad about that. They’re one of my favorites and don’t tour together much anymore. But I’m not as sad as I thought I would be, which is kind of interesting. You’ve heard me moan & groan here about not being able to keep up with music, not being able to go to shows, blah blah blah. Where has the time gone, why don’t I feel the same drive to go find the new stuff, etc.

The other day I was reading a post on Easily Distracted, historian Timothy Burke’s blog, about mass consumption and the economic crisis. In the middle of the post (reason #5) he writes about “saturation of personal ownership,” and one of his examples is music. Maybe one of the reasons that music sales are slow is that the old folks (i.e., me) are buying less music than they used to. And one reason for that is that we already have so much music, all of the music that we’ve bought over our lives thus far.

I don’t know, it’s not news or anything that I have a lot of music (and only listen to a fraction of it). But for some reason just reading that paragraph made me feel a whole lot better about my relationship with music these days. It’s no big deal if I’m not as hungry for new music as I used to be. I’m having a big birthday this year and I’m too old to worry about whether I’m cool (and I never have been, anyway, so why would I start now?). And just like everything else that there’s not a ton of time for now (hello, video games), I’ll have more time for them again in the future, I’m sure.

And as I slowly digitize my records, all of this old stuff will be new to me, anyway.

still listening to wax, i’m not using the cd

maura @ 10:00 pm

Last week we got a new TV. I know what you’re thinking: hey, anti-consumption hippie girl, what’s with the big purchases?! Of course there’s no real excuse. Our old TV works just fine. We almost decided to keep it, actually, even despite the HDTV change next month. We tend to watch most of our TV on the computers, so the real idiot box is typically used for video games and DVD watching.

BUT, our old TV is REALLY old, like 16 yrs old or so. It could get a driver’s license if it didn’t live in New York City! And it’s kind of broken — many of the buttons have been pushed in (though the remote still works). And a huge energy user. And of course it’s not HDTV-ready, either.

Once we agreed to get a new TV, the family technical specialist suggested that maybe this was a good time to jettison some of our other old, semi-functional audio/visual equipment. My ol’ reliable receiver, a college graduation gift from my dad, actually completely functional (if a giant power suck). The DVD player (a few broken buttons) and the 5-CD player (doesn’t play CD-R or MP3 files, sometimes acts wonky). My old turntable needs a new belt, and I got a USB turntable for Xmas anyway.

Okay, the speakers are perfectly fine. And I will miss them. But apparently we can run everything through the TV: new DVD player (plays CDs, CD-Rs and MP3s), old VCR, my USB turntable, and our 4 (ahem) video game consoles. Well, probably only the Wii and the PS2 will be hooked up full time; we don’t play the N64 and Dreamcast often. Lots of space (and power) saved, w00t!

It’s still kind of freaking me out to think of listening to music through the TV, but I suppose I’ll get over it. I haven’t even had the chance to hook the turntable up yet. One of my resolutions is to try and find more time for music, which I miss (subscription to the indiepop-list notwithstanding), and which seems to have slipped out of my life so gradually that I can’t even figure out exactly how it happened. Hopefully this new setup will be the kick in the pants I need.