Currently Out of Service – Hardware Problems

Sunday afternoon I went to a nearby mall to buy my wife a new pair of tennis shoes.  The poor shoes were in a pretty bad shape.  When I got back, I found all our electric digital clocks blinking.  Oh, Oh!  That was a bad sign.  It meant their was a power outage during my absence and my computer was left turned on.

The UPS was shut down, which should not have happened and my computer was also shut down.  When I turned the computer  on, nothing happened.  I’m afraid the power supply was fried up during the power interruption.  This means I will be out of the computer environment for the next three days.  I’m writing this post at a Chinese Internet computer center.  It feels so strange working from another computer.

I apologize for this inconvenience.  Promise to get back to you as soon as I get my computer back.  Technology is great, but it can get back and bite you now and then.  Good Day.

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Photograph of the Day: Early Autumn Pond

(Credit: Pixdaus.com)

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The Acceleration of Change

I’m 62 going into 63 next December.  During these past six decades, I’ve seen an acceleration of change extremely difficult to cope with.  I think it was Alvin Toffler who brought this subject up in one of his classical books.  He called it “future shock.” Toffler’s shortest definition of future shock is a personal perception of  “too much change in too short a period of time“.

Together with is wife Heidi—who is also a writer and a futurist—Toffler has discussed in length, the digital revolution, the communication revolution, the corporate revolution and technological singularity.

In his book “The Third Wave”, Toffler describes three types of societies, based on the concept of “waves”—each wave pushes the older societies and cultures aside.

• The First Wave is the society after agrarian revolution which replaced the first hunter-collector cultures.
• The Second Wave is the society during the Industrial Revolution ( late 1600s through the mid-1900s). The main components of the Second Wave society are nuclear family, factory-type education system and the corporation.
• The Third Wave is the post-industrial society.  Toffler and his wife coined several words to describe this wave such as: Super-industrial Age, Information Age, Space Age, Electronic Era, Global Village,  Technetronic Age,  and the Scientific-Technological Revolution.  He anticipated that this last wave will bring demassification, diversity, knowledge-based production, and the acceleration of change (one of Toffler’s key maxims is “change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways”).

Toffler argues that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a “super-industrial society”. This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving them disconnected and suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation”—future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of the future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock, he also coined the term information overload.

I have experienced this acceleration of change in my lifetime.  Let’s take a brief look:  Vinyl records were replaced by the CD, the CD was replaced by the DVD, and the DVD is being replaced, even as we speak, by Sony’s Blue Ray technology.  Do you remember the ferocious fight between Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s VHS format?  Now both technologies are non-existent.  Technological obsolescence blew them out of the water.

The latest change is about the struggling industry of broadcast television.  Eight decades after pioneering the concept of broadcasting, NBC is on the verge of a startling move that illustrates broadcast television’s decline.

Cable TV operator Comcast Corp. is expected to buy a controlling stake in NBC Universal, perhaps as early as this week, bringing the network of Johnny Carson, Jerry Seinfeld, Bob Hope, Milton Berle and Tom Brokaw under the corporate control of a TV cable company.

Starting last Sunday, Vivendi SA had an option to sell its 20 percent stake in NBC Universal.  Majority owner General Electric Co. is expected to buy it and then sell a 51 percent stake of the entire NBC Universal unit to Comcast, which serves about a quarter of the nation’s subscription TV households.

By owning more content, Comcast further hedges its bets as mainly a distributor of shows in case viewers ditch their cable TV subscriptions and migrate to the Internet, mobile devices or a platform that has yet to emerge. The company could charge for the shows or sell ads wherever the viewers are.

As the calendar pages turn, I wouldn’t be surprised if Cable TV is replaced by Internet TV, which has a long tradition of being free.  Google could be the pusher of this technological change and Chrome OS–paired up with Android  OS—could be the vehicles to do it.    Not to far away, I foresee millions of people of my generation, viewing “I Love Lucy” with their 5G iPhone.  The globe is spinning so fast, I have a hard time breathing.  Good Day.

Source:  Broadcast pioneer NBC prepares for cable takeover – Yahoo! Tech

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Photograph of the Day: Pillars of Time

(Credit: Karnak Temple in Egypt @Pixdaus.com)

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Letter From a Turkey

(Credit: Miss Cellania.com)

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The Act of Giving Thanks

The First Thanksgiving

Today is a traditional day in the United States and Canada.  It is called Thanksgiving Day. This special day is a harvest festival celebrated primarily in Canada and the United States. Traditionally, it is a time to give thanks for the harvest and express  gratitude in general.   While perhaps religious in origin, Thanksgiving is now primarily identified as a secular holiday.

The traditional “first Thanksgiving” is the celebration that occurred at the site of Plymouth Plantation, in 1621.  Elementary school teacher Robyn Gioia has argued that the earliest attested “thanksgiving” celebration in what is now the United States was celebrated by the Spanish on September 8, 1565 in what is now Saint Augustine, Florida.

Today, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday of October in Canada and on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States.  Thanksgiving dinner is held on this day, usually as a gathering of family members and friends.

Expressing gratitude is a core social value.  We have to be thankful for the many things we receive each day.  The  bright sunshine, clean fresh air, political liberties, the gift of life, food on the table and a trillion of other things we take for granted.

We  don’t celebrate Thanksgiving Day in Panama.  However, I know many families who express appreciation to other people, and of course our Good Lord, for favors and blessings received.  For example, my wife and I pray at the table before eating.  For us having food on the table every day, is a blessing from our Lord.  I know of people who go to sleep with an empty stomach.  That is sad.  At night, we also pray together, and thank our Lord for having lived another day.  Just being alive and breathing is a blessing so big, I have no idea how to express it in words.

To each and every one of you, my dear readers of Lingua Franca, Happy Thanksgiving! It feels great to be alive and well!  Good Day.

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Photograph of the Day: Lake Fall Leaves

(Credit: Leszek Paradowski @Pixdaus.com)

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Joke: A Fainted Reporter

A car was involved in an accident in a street. As expected, a large crowd gathered.

A newspaper reporter anxious to get his story could not get near the car. Being a clever sort, he started shouting loudly, “Let me through! Let me through! I am the son of the victim.”

The crowd made way for him with a roaring laughter. Lying in front of the car was a donkey.

The reporter fainted! 

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Photograph of the Day: Old Bridge

(Credit: Igor Ensei @Pixdaus.com)

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Joke: Baseball and Classical Music

The Cleveland Symphony Orchestra was rehearsing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. There is an extensive section where the bass players don’t play for twenty minutes of so. One of them decided that, rather than stand around on stage looking bored and stupid, they’d all just file offstage during their tacit-time and hang out backstage, then return when they were about to play. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

On the night of the performance, the bass players filed off as planned. The last one had barely left the stage when the leader suggested, “Hey we’ve got twenty minutes, let’s fun across the street to the bar for a few!”

This idea was met with great approval, so off they went, tuxedos and all, to loosen up. Fifteen minutes and a few rounds later, one of the bass players said, “Shouldn’t we be heading back? It’s almost time.”

But the leader announced, “Oh don’t worry, we’ll have some extra time – I played a little joke on the conductor. Before the performance started, I tied string around each page of his score so that he’d have to untie each page to turn it. The piece will drag on a bit. We’ve got time for another round!”

So another round they did, and finally—sloshed and staggering—they made their way back across the street to finish Ludwig’s 9th.

Upon entering the stage, they immediately noticed the conductor’s haggard, drawn and livid expression.

—”Gee,” one player queried, “Why do you suppose he looks so tense?”

—“You’d be tense, too,” laughed the leader. “It’s the bottom of the ninth, the score is tied and the basses are loaded.”

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