Sunday, August 06, 2006

A tiny encomium on gadgetry

My home computer is old. I bought it in Dec. 2000, at the end of my first semester at SIU. It was a reward to myself for my new job there.

So it has no USB ports on the keyboard or monitor. (In fact, I was so habituated to the idea that USB ports are *only* on the back of CPUs that I hadn't noticed my office computer, circa 2004, had ports in both alternate locations until, oh, last week. I had been plugging my jump drive into the back of the CPU, which is, truly, a drag.) I've got an extension cord for plugging in gadgets on my home computer.

And just now, as I was unplugging a jump drive and plugging in my camera (thinking I might blog about my cats because I was feeling bad about my contribution to the quietness of the internets and I had been considering a post about Clyde, who has recently turned 20), I felt the same surge of wonderment and pleasure that I always feel when plugging in some gadget or other to a USB port.

Because, you know, it's just cool. I feel it when I open the little port of my MP3 player (yeah, sorry: I opted for the lesser coolness of a Creative Zen Nano Plus because for the same price as an IPOD Shuffle I could get a player that will display what I'm playing) and transfer audio files. Really. It's like I'm Miranda in The Tempest: O brave new world, that has such gadgets in it.

And the length of the cord that connects my 2000 Dell to my gadgets seems like a nice synecdoche for the technological distance that fuels that wonderment.

So this small encomium is my contribution to a noisier blogosphere. The entry on Clyde will have to wait for another day (I know my readers will hardly be able to contain their anticipation). And since I turn in summer grades tomorrow and won't be teaching again until January, I plan for a more steady stream of noise.

Update: Isn't it strange how I typed iPod in all caps above? It's like a visual throwback to IZOD, the totalizing brand of the 80s.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hey donna,
i've been wanting to get back into blogging regularly..i wondered if you could suggest some blogs...you know, the smart people blogs about blogging and other smart people things....good examples are the ones i used to comment about on the class blog...thanks! _Marissa_