This and that...

Jose, can you see...

Younger son Benjamin got to have another musical experience I've never had -- singing the National Anthem at a professional sporting event! He and the 100+ other kids in our church's children's choir were invited to sing before the Frisco Roughriders game last Friday (Frisco is a AA minor league team of the Texas Rangers). The performance capped off a week of The Heights' music camp. They performed the musical "Pirates of the I-Don't-Care-ibbean" on Thursday night -- Benjamin actually did play a character named "Jose"! -- and then sang at the game on Friday.
They did an awesome job, and this dad was pretty proud!

iPod, uPod, we all Pod

As much as I love new technology, I'm usually a slow adapter -- mainly because of my budget, not a lack of desire. My boys both bought their own iPods before I got my hands on a decent MP3 player -- and even then, mine is a refurbished Creative Zen, not an iPod. (Maybe I need to rethink how much allowance I'm paying them...)

In any case, it's dawned on me recently how I don't listen to CD's any more. I'm old enough to remember when they were the new audio technology in the mid-80's, and now they seem to be going the way of LP's.

Oh, my new Honda Civic has a CD player, but it also plays CD-R's filled with MP3's, and with that feature I can fit 9 or 10 albums onto one CD-R. But since getting my Zen, I've even stopped doing that. Now I just listen to my Zen in the car. The Civic didn't come with an MP3 input, but its radio is wired for it. (It's available as a dealer add-on for $100 plus labor, but I just found plans for the modification online and used about $10 worth of wires from Radio Shack.) Even 10 albums on one CD-R is no match for even my 4GB Zen, which currently has 671 tracks from 51 albums, along with over 2000 photographs, 20 videos, and a 1GB SD memory card inserted with even more.

This hardware shift doesn't seem to ruffle my kids at all -- after all, CDs are old technology to them, having been adopted a decade before they were born -- but it's pretty mindblowing to me. I find myself more and more starting sentences with, "Boy, I remember back when I was young..." Sigh.

I am consoled by the fact that they will have to face new technology themselves in coming decades, and they'll have to hear their kids saying things like, "Wow, Dad, you used to have to carry something with you to hear your music???"