I love technology and gadgets. In fact, it is most likely the reason that God hasn’t seen fit to make me filthy rich. I would no doubt be an ‘early adopter’ of EVERYTHING.
Mobility
It’s a marvel of modern science and technology that many of us carry around phones that are more powerful and useful than full blown computers were just ten years ago. Of course, we also now have all of these amazing tablet computers that can do so much that many people are foregoing a computer altogether.
Last night I was browsing the app store on my iPad amazed by all the music production apps available. So I downloaded the $4.99 Garageband for iPad app. It’s incredibly fun and actually reasonably useful. Couple that with some of the synth apps by companies like Korg and you can start creating fun music.
The Cloud for Music
Dan’s fire brings up another technology that I wish he had participated in. Cloud services. I remember getting all schoolgirl giddy about iTunes Match. I was going to be able to put my entire music library into the cloud and share it with all my apple devices. So I dove in. It took a few days to match/upload everything but it finally made it. The service was great… at first. But latency, timeouts and the dreaded 25,000 song limit began to plague my experience.
Along comes Amazon with their MP3 Cloud Player service. It is the same price as iTunes Match ($24.99 per year) but their limit is 250,000 songs! So I am making the move to Amazon now. There is more reasoning than just the song limit. Amazon has an app for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and their own Android/Kindle. You are not limited to an iTunes enabled device. The only device that I cannot use my Amazon Cloud player on is my Apple TV. Bummer.
I mentioned Dan earlier in this segment because he had thousands of his albums digitized onto an external hard drive. This was salvaged from the fire, but it was hosed down by firemen. For $24.99 per year, all your music can have a nice, safe backup place that would allow you to re-download the songs if you needed to. So if you love your music, think about iTunes Match or Amazon Cloud Services.
Food Tech
Another technology that I have discovered very lately is the Keurig machine. Yeah, yeah you are laughing at me right now. But you must understand that I am not a coffee fan. I do love tea though. Especially Chai or Earl Grey or anything Teavana! My employer just got one of these dandy machines and even I can make a decent cup of tea with it! I am going to obtain one of these for my house at some point soon!
Blabber Tech
Blogging is so five years ago! So is podcasting! But with the continual rise in social media, ordinary people can promote their independant blogs or podcasts much more easily. For example, my church records the Sunday Morning messages and podcasts them. In the old days I would record them, rip them to Real Audio files and create streaming links. But you had to remember to go visit later on Sunday to see the message.
Now I post the new podcast and it automatically downloads on your iTunes app (if you are subscribed). It also Tweets and posts a link on Facebook to all the people who follow or ‘like’ the church. Yes the technology has been around for years, but the backend simplicity and interconnectivity of social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter continues to grow and really make the average joe’s job of promoting their work SO much easier.
While I’m on the subject of Podcasts, I’d like to promote a few that I enjoy right here:
1) Church of God at Baden Podcast – Pastor Don’s weekly sermons
2) Koinonia House.org 66/40 Podcast – A ministry dedicated to the development and distribution of materials for encouraging and facilitating serious study of the Bible as the inerrant Word of God.
3) Monty Colvin’s Rockcast – Monty is best known as the bass player in the band, Galactic Cowboys. His ‘rockcast’ is a show about hard rock music, humanity and whatever else is on his mind. It is drenched in self depricating humor and is very pro. Check it out and tell him I sent you!
Christmas Music
Finally, I leave you with two tracks written and recorded by my band Sombrance for a Christmas compilation a while ago. I hope you enjoy them!