Let's Get Digital, Digital

I am here to report that I need never leave my home office again. That’s right, people, I did my homework and then some. I set up an account and subscribed to a dozen or so RSS feeds. (See below.) I listened to a podcast. I downloaded an audiobook from the library catalog. (More on those in my next post.) I even did 200 or so updates and countless system restarts so that I could install the latest version of Windows Media Player, which actually allows me to watch Netflix movies right here at my desk. Am I rockin’ or what?

Incidentally, several of these feats (particularly the Windows Media Player) were achieved with no small level of frustration and with really big bucketsful—we’re talking aircraft carriers of truckloads of buckets—of patience. At one point, my husband took over the installation just to relieve me of the sheer monotony of update, reboot, install—each iteration of which was followed by a message stating “before you can install XYZ, you must first yada yada yada.” (I regret to say strong language may have been used during this exercise.) Anyway, when all was said and done, my husband strongly encouraged me to actually WATCH a movie. So I did. At my desk. Alone. (Maybe my husband wanted to see our frustration and patience pay off, or maybe he wanted to spare himself being subjected to another obscure Zombie flick like the last one I picked out. Who can say? Either way, I am ready for the day—should it come—when the library has downloadable video.)

At this point, I must take a time out to say that E. M. Forster was surprisingly prescient. I’m not talking about Howard's End or A Passage to India here, but another of Forster's lesser-known works called “The Machine Stops,” which details a future where people live in isolation connected to other people only through technology. A strong opponant of H. G. Wells' style of speculative fiction, Forster intended “The Machine Stops” to serve as an "anti-Wellsian" piece. Ironically, it stands as a rather fascinating counterpoint to Wells' own dystopian visions in The Time Machine and other works. Read Forster's story along with Wells' A Story of the Days to Come for a fascinating and quick glimpse of two ironic and terrifying futures.

Here are my comments on RSS feeds: I set up a bloglines account, and added several accounts. The process was clunky, the bloglines page cluttered and hard to read (or so I felt), and I quickly realized I was never going to want to go there. I then added an RSS feed button on my tool bar. I click on the button when I am on a site I want to subscribe to, and, voila, with one additional click it adds the site to my RSS feeds. To access my feeds, I click on favorites and the RSS icon appears with a list of my subscriptions. Neat.