It's been three years since I posted to this blog. My uncle and his wife created a beautiful blog covering their boat cruising adventure in South America and Mexico. This inspired me to to share my thoughts once again in this blog. To start, I thought it would be worth a few lines to update the subjects I wrote about three years ago:
iPod's and MP3 players in general are much more main stream. It is quite unusual to see anyone carting around a portable CD player. New cars come with input jacks so you can plug your iPod into your car stereo system. It's only a matter of time before the connection will be wireless. One positive change is Apple allowing other sources for MP3 songs other than iTunes. Amazon even has a downloader that automatically updates the iTunes library to recognize the music downloaded from Amazon.
Since I wrote the post on immigration and Social Security, I've heard only a couple of people mention the possibility of using immigration as a means to fix Social Security. One person stated that it wouldn't work but didn't offer any justification for that position. It's been three years and there has been no movement at all to fix Social Security. We're now in a severe recession, which will likely put Social Security into an even worse condition. I predict that it's only a matter of time before immigration restrictions are lifted allowing more young professionals to enter the US to work and pay into the Social Security system.
Congress has allowed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to Expire. My son is now in Middle School, and is home school is not a NCLB. My wife still wanted him to go to a different school, one with slightly better test scores. We entered the lottery and won two years in a row without the NCLB advantage. What's interesting is that there is an NCLB middle school in our town, and you would think that a large number of parents would take advantage of NCLB to get their children into a better school. Apparently this didn't happen in large numbers; otherwise, there would not have been a spot for my son. My daughter has three more years of elementary school. We originally took advantage of NCLB to get her into a better school. Her school has indicated that we no longer need to enter the lottery to get her a spot, so hopefully we won't be hampered by the expiration of NCLB. In three years, we'll have to address the middle school preference. Whether or not Congress renews NCLB, NCLB won't help us get her into our preferred middle school.
HDTV is also main stream. All the TV stations but one have shut down their old analog transmitters. What's interesting is that most of the cable channels are still transmitted in low resolution. What's also interesting is that the raw cable signal appears to have all the local HDTV transmission, but they don't make many of them available if you use a cable box. To take advantage of all the stations available on Time Warner Cable in our town you need to use a splitter to provide one signal to your cable box and one signal to your TV's antenna input. Here, I'm assuming you use HDMI or other video source from your cable box to your TV so that you don't need to hook up the cable box's RF output to your TV. In any event, I won't be happy until all the cable channels are high definition, just as all the free stations are now.
Look for future articles on GPS, Wikipedia, HD Camcorders and backing up all those old 8 mm camcorder tapes (because your 8 mm camcorder will fail soon and you might not be able to get a replacement).
Magobrillo
