November 22, 2003

Re-acquainted With The Antiquated

I bought a CD today. Yeah, that's Compact Disc. Ok, so that's not all I did. I also saw Cal kick Stanfurd's ass 28-16. In fact, today's been a great day - won at football, drank a new holiday peppermint frappuchino from Starbucks, ate at In & Out, watched Ocean's Eleven for the first time, and of course, randomly spent about $80 at Best Buy. Who could ask for anything more?

The day started out rather questionably, when our rental car to Big Game plans were thwarted by stupid rental car agency rules and expired licenses, but Garett soon came up with "plan b," while I was busy doing the whole yuppie thing at Starbucks with my holiday peppermint frappuchino. Shut up! It's good, dammit! Stop judging me! Anyway, we arrived at Palo Alto around noon-ish for the 12:30pm kick off, and after getting lost for a while and seeing horses, we made it to the game. It was kinda cold and we got kinda crappy seats in the back of the stadium and too the side. To make things worse, our bench was unstable, so it was like 1.8 times as hard to stand on it and not fall as it should have been. Tragic, I know. With my luck, we ended up next to a bunch of frat guys, with their homophobic rhetoric and idiotic propensity to jump on one another whenever Cal made a tackle, in a daft display of heterosexuality. It's so annoying sitting next to a bunch of rowdy, intoxicated, and downright stupid people who threaten everyone's safety and peace of mind by constantly knocking one another over and everyone around them in the process. I was sort of glad we didn't score in the first half - at least I didn't have to worry about getting knocked over. It made me want to join a fraternity. I think I'll look for the one that does the most jumping on other men during athletic events, so I can prove how straight I am. I'll keep you posted on this project.

After the game, we went out to Best Buy, which is what this post was actually about before I got sidetracked. I was going to pick up the first season of West Wing on DVD, as it came out earlier this week, which I did. But as I was walking past the CD section, my eye caught an album I've been wanting to check out for a few months now: DJ Tiesto's Nyana. I mentally debated buying the CD. I've been in a musical rut recently, and iTunes doesn't carry this Tiesto album, so finally, I decided to just go for it and buy a CD, for the first time in what seems like years.

Getting home, I wanted to pop in the disc and listen to this new album, but it had been so long since I did anything CD related that my desktop didn't even have a GUI installed to load the CD player function. "No worries - I'll just play it on my stereo," I thought to myself. I stuck it in my stereo and pressed play, but there was all these error messages. So I kind of looked into the CD player in my stereo, and noticed that some CDs that were in the tray had slipped out and fallen in when I moved the stereo, back in August, but since I hadn't played a CD since then, I hadn't noticed until now that there was a problem.

I had to dismantle my stereo, and extract the CDs before I could get the disc to actually play. Having given the whole album (both discs) a first listen, I'm finding myself anxious to rip the album to MP3, load it onto my iPod, and just not worry about discs anymore. It's amazing how a few years can completely change your perspective on technology. Back a few years ago, CDs were the only way to listen to music, and just a couple of years later (I think I first learned abou MP3s in 9th grade), I can't imagine using an actual physical medium for listening to music. It's crazy how fast technology changes, but I think it's even crazier how fast we tend to accept and accomodate these changes. Makes you wonder what crazy technology is in store for use in the next ten years, doesn't it?