Category: Techno Bob

TV-B-Gone

This is a very cool gadget that lets you turn of TVs anywhere you stumble across them. Think about it. You’re in a restaurant trying to eat, and a TV is blaring over in the bar.

Click.

It’s off. Life is better.

Techno Bob Travel Bob

During another travel binge last week (NYC,
Cincinnati, Corpus Christi), I was staying at the Athletic Club in New York. They supposedly have wireless. But the signal was scant, and I wasn’t able to get much done.

So I started walking around the hotel with my laptop, fishing for a stronger signal.

I found one. On top of the armoire. So I’m standing there, with my laptop at shoulder height, answering e-mail and surfing the web in spurts, until all the blood would run out of my hands and I’d have to take a break.

The next morning, my back and shoulders were sore from my high-wireless act. But the pain was nothing compared to the grief I would have suffered using a dial-up connection …

Now Playing: Broken Hearts Are For Assholes from the album Sheik Yerbouti by Frank Zappa

Music Bob Techno Bob

Wireless tunes …

I finally broke down and bought an AirPort Express, Apple’s cool little wireless base station. I put it off for a while because I bought an AirPort Extreme that I was never able to get to work properly.

This was a completely different story. I purchased it so I can stream music from my computer to our stereo. The setup went flawlessly, and now I’m listening to the new CDs I purchased and loaded onto the computer. It’s much cooler and easier to access music through iTunes and stream it to the stereo than it is to sift through hundreds of CDs and load them into a CD player. My iTunes music collection is now more than 4,600 songs (about 14.5 days worth of music), and I have quick and easy access to all of it.

During a recent flight, I listened to CSN&Y’s Deja Vu through my iPod and was floored by what an incredible CD it is. It had been a while since I’d listened to it. That’s put me on a CSN&Y binge, during which I purchased:

— “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” a solo album by David Crosby that includes most of the members of the Grateful Dead, several folks from Jefferson Airplane, Neil Young and Graham Nash. It’s awesome. I’d never heard of it until I caught a tune from it on WDVX. It’s now on regular rotation.

— Manassas by Stephen Stills. I’ve only listened to it once, but I like it already. I really wanted a copy of Super Session with Mike Bloomfield but CD Universe didn’t have one (is it even out on CD? If not, it should be. Their version of Donovan’s Season of the Witch is incredible.)

— Four Way Street by CSN&Y. Another great purchase.

And one departure from my binge:

— “Shuffletown,” by Eric Taylor. He’s right up there with Townes Van Zandt in my book. Incredible songwriter.

Now Playing: Cowgirl In The Sand from the album Four Way Street (Disc 1) [Live] by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young