Opportunity

You know those commercials by Honda where Mr. Opportunity knocks on your TV screen to tell you about a great new sale they are having at your local Honda dealer?  I realized today he knocks on the back of a CRT based on the glass sound it makes when he comes up and tells you, “I’m Mr. Opportunity and I’m knocking.”  I was trying to think of how they could update that to become more relevant as people start buying either LCD or Plasma TVs.  The problem is, these new technologies don’t make a distinctive sound when you knock on the screen.  A dull thunk would not be nearly as understandable.  That’s just one more thing technological innovation has made more difficult.

Some of you may know about the new OS X that came out; Snow Leopard was released just last week.  I had pre-ordered it from Amazon a while ago so I’m not just waiting for it to arrive in the mail.  Apple did something that I hope is going to become more of a trend.  They decided that the next version of their OS would be only $29 to purchase and install.  For those of you keeping track, that’s approximately 1/10 the cost of an upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate.  That and the fact there are 7 version of Windows 7 makes life a little more difficult.  I will admit I really like Windows 7 though, Microsoft did a good job updating their OS to make it a giant leap up from Windows Vista (which was a huge flop in its own right).

I have a friend’s laptop to look at over the weekend because it’s starting to get borderline unusable for them.  I realized just what I was getting into when it took about nineteen minutes and fifty seven seconds for this thing to boot up and get all the startup programs running.  I can’t even imagine living in a house where this was the main method for connecting to the Internet let alone trying to do anything on there that involved more than clicking a single icon.  After a lot of virus scans, a lot of program deletions and a lot of applying update, the system is running with some semblance of speed.  It’s not the newest laptop you’ve ever seen, but it’s in good condition and it doesn’t seem to be ready to die.

One of the guys at work and I are watching the show “The Colony” on The Discovery Channel.  Basically, they take ten volunteers and put them in a representation of a pandemic torn world.  They have to use their knowledge and each other to do everything from creating a fresh water source to finding a place where they are safe at night.  It’s very intriguing and it’s given me a lot of ideas about how I’ll have to survive when the zombie attacks come.