Like many churches, mine has a rather large collection of tapes. They went digital with the recording about the same time that I started to attend it, and I’ve taken an interest in some of the old sermons. The only problem is that I left my tape player behind during the last move so transferring them to computer has been at the church and has been slow. A couple weeks ago I managed to finagle for a pretty nice tape recorder and have been able to record the tapes at home much faster (I’ll probably return the tape deck after these tapes are converted). The computer can record while I’m working and editing only takes a couple of minutes. In the last two weeks I’ve converted about 30 tapes, so I found this article on the BBC website to be pretty amusing:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8117619.stm

It looks like the Sony Walkman has been out for 30 years. Impressive, isn’t it? A writer convinced his 13 year old son to trade in his iPod for a Walkman. It was only to be for a few days but here are some of the valuable lessons that the son learned:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape.

I'm relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born, as I can't imagine having to use such basic equipment every day.

To make the music play, you push the large play button. It engages with a satisfying clunk, unlike the finger tip tap for the iPod.

Oh how I wish that I could teach him that there is life without portable music players. In the last four years I’ve gone from always playing music while driving to hardly ever turning the radio on. It gives more time for thinking and learning how to stalk. Music dominates and controls our thoughts entirely too much (see my post on The Crowd for a quote). Incidentally, I have not listened to most of the tapes that I’ve recorded yet. In time I’ll pick out some of them and will plan to upload the rest to a server for others to download. The last two weeks have been pretty busy.