Technology

I figured out the slide show gadget. Now we will be able to post picture taken along the way in one or more slide show on the side of this blog. Right now there is one playing form a trip that we did last year to Las Vegas, Nevada. What's amazing to me is that all of the stuff that I've been doing with this blog is part of Google Apps. The blog itself is on Blogger. The profile picture and the pictures that were included in areas of the blog are part of Picasa Web Albums. And the slide show is uploaded to Picasa as an album and the blog is pointed to the album to play the slide show. The blog can also be updated through an FTP server if you don't have access to Google for any reason. If find this all truly amazing.

We live in a world where all of the technology is taken for granted. Everything is expected to be instanteous at the touch of a button. I look at these things and think about my grandmother using a crank telephone (two longs and a short) on a line with 6 other people and marvel at the computers we use to make phone calls today.

In a week we will be taking a round trip journey of some 15,000 miles in less than three weeks. There was a time when only the rich could make a trip like this. The trip would take considerably longer than 3 weeks as well. I will be taking a computer with me that has more computing power, more RAM, and more storage capacity than the first mainframe computer I worked on. The digital camera I'm taking will shot nearly 4 frames a second of still shots and do it without changing a battery, winding, changing film and hold nearly 500 pictures before anything must be done to help it along. We too soon take our conveniences foregranted and think of them as necessities and get angry when they don't instantly do as we would like. I am truly amazed every day.