The long drive, connectivity and tech

In my post where I mentioned I will be busy this summer with things that take me away from posting here quite so frequently, I alluded to a lack of connectivity for a spell as being one of those reasons. Well, those plans are starting to firm up and I will be incommunicado near the end of July for about 5-10 days.

My friend and publisher, Tara Caribou, provided me with an opportunity to tick off two items from my bucket list: visiting Alaska and driving the Alaskan Highway from Alaska, through Canada (via Yukon, a partial bucket list item — already covered with the Highway part), and then returning to the lower 48 States. She needed a driving partner to make the trip from the peninsula to Iowa, which is just a hop-skip-jump from my home near Minneapolis, Minnesota and I was looking for an opportunity to break up my routine (I only rarely vacation, the last trip being to Seattle and Portland a few years ago).

While I suspect it might not be quite as sparse as mobile maps would have you believe any connectivity I have while in Canada might be severely limited, which is fine as far as I am concerned. I often wonder at just how reliant we’ve gotten on being always plugged in and I recall back in the 90s just how much of a leash a pager felt after the initial coolness factor wore off. Then came cell phones, and I was a late adopter as a result of not wanting to be leashed again (my workplace almost makes it essential to have a smartphone anymore and I gave up my rebellion against having one around 2009).

Sad, isn’t it, when I pine for the days of payphones where you had to drop in a quarter to make a call… Only people with illicit intent use them anymore, and most have been yanked out of commission as a result.

In unrelated news, my desktop PC was starting to show that it was a decade old. For someone who does indulge in video games, that is almost a sin by some gamers’ standards. To be fair, I’ve been playing fewer games in the past few years, so my incentives for upgrading have been minimal. I don’t revel in all of the pretties that new games add for those who can afford such things, but I use my personal desktop for more than gaming. I also write, research, blog and have a home studio that I like to do digital music recording with. That last part also showed off the age of my desktop, as my RAM (quick memory, for the less technical) and the CPU (the PC brain, for the same folks) were okay for writing and typing, but was becoming bogged down for much more than that. Music production was limited by the RAM and CPU and, while I don’t need pretties for my games, I don’t much care for listening to lag and distortion when I start to record and mix-down music.

There had not been any good opportunities to piecewise upgrade my desktop over the past few years and building from scratch is no longer less expensive than having someone build for you (buying power, donchaknow). I’ll have to keep up with the upgrades this time so that it doesn’t become quite so much on the edge of being “over the hill”. By that point, I will be well over the hill myself and this one might meet my needs until I am done with all my fancy tech stuff with a little TLC.

I’m still planning on recording vocals on the song I solicited lyrics for, if anyone wants to try their hand at writing lyrics for me. Details are found on the earlier posts about the matter, if you want to make a last-minute submission. I plan to record early next week while everyone but the critters are out of the office (to spare them the anguish and mental trauma of hearing dear old dad try to sing).

Until the next post…