You stream, we stream, we all stream...

I finally cut the cable and rely completely on streaming content for my television consumption. I got sick of paying for cable that kept increasing in cost without increasing the number of channels I had access to. I was down to basic cable that was basically useless. Other than allowing me to access a few local channels (which I rarely watched anyway) it offered me nothing.

So now my cable bill only includes high-speed Internet and phone land lines. I would get rid of the phone, but my wife insists we need it for emergencies and to receive countless robo calls offering me extended warranties on my car and alerting me that someone is buying expensive things with my Amazon account.

The only down side to streaming versus cable is the number of apps I end up paying for to get premium content. I have Amazon Prime, Netflix, Apple TV, Disney +, HBO Max, Peacock, Paramount, Showtime and PBS.  It still is cheaper than basic cable and I only have to watch commercials on Peacock.

Unlike cable, which was a cultural desert of crap channels, I find myself with almost unlimited choices of things to watch. I have binge watch tons of great original content. The downside in discovering some new series and watching all of the available episodes is waiting for a new season. And sometimes they never come because Netflix or Amazon decides not to continue with the series. But even when they do come, it is sometimes after so long that I forget the plot line of the previous seasons.

What I really like is that, unlike watching premium channels on cable, I can watch a movie or series from the beginning anytime I want. I'm not at the mercy of tuning in at a specific time. And who needs a DVR? DVD's have also become obsolete. Everything is in the cloud waiting to waft down to your on demand.

I remember writing posts in the past about the marvels of DVRs and being able to pause live television. And I remember bitching about having too many cable channels and not enough good content. Who would have dreamed we would eventually be able to stream just about anything we want and any time we want. 

I can't even imagine what and how we will be watching content five or ten years from now. Maybe all we will have to do is close our eyes and content is streamed into our brains.

If that happens I know what I'll be doing at staff meetings in the future.

Does not compute

I was one of the first people to work on a personal computer at our office back in the early 80s. It was pretty basic. You ran software from a big floppy disk that sometimes required you to turn it over to access more commands. It seemed pretty amazing at the time. We mainly used them for word processing and spreadsheets.

Now we have gigabytes of memory that allows us to store music, photos, journals and basically our lives in an electronic box. Computers have come a long way, but what hasn't changed is the frustration of losing tons of stuff when the piece of crap PCs crash.

My desktop computer automatically updated yesterday. This morning it automatically stopped working. I did the logic thing. I tried rebooting. Nothing. I turned it off and turned it back on. It sits there with the blue HP Invent screen and does nothing.

I have my laptop, and I've got backups of most of my photos and family tree information, but I discovered that you iPod can only be synced with one computer at a time. All of my music was on my iTunes on my desktop. And you can't export from you iPod to another computer. So I am screwed. If I want to continue to add songs to my iPod I have to resync it with my laptop but it will wipe off all of the songs currently on my iPod. This means I will have to recopy all of my CDs to my laptop and reload them on my iPod.

Besides a lesson in backing up everything several times, I've learned a valuable lesson. Nothing is permanent. You can create CDs, but they only last a few years. Portable hard drives are fragile and even your primary PC is only a temporary repository for your life's work.

Sigh, I'm going to start keeping everything in shoeboxes again.