Our New Digital Lifestyle

I find myself maybe not dragged, but nudged, into the 21st century by our mobility this year. Being away from home while maintaining it for renters, needing to maintain easy contact with family and friends, paying bills while away, not having room to move favorite photos, books, and CDs - all this prompted a slew of beneficial changes in our life. Moving has a way of doing that - forcing evaluation of what's important, what doesn't need to be done, and what can be done more efficiently. I'm beginning to think I should at least pretend I'm moving every few years.

My first steps were to consolidate services and move the remainder of our paper statements to automatic payment and online management. This wouldn't have been possible even a few years ago for some of our services, but now even the City of Houghton (population 8,000) water bill comes as a PDF in my email. Cool!

We'd  picked up cell phones for last year when Ben went off to college (Ann already had one - the family early adopter's been cellular since 2008, online since 1987). But it was time to cut the cord. AT&T was not enthused, but in the end accepted the inevitable with sullen good grace (They seemed to have lost this battle many times before.) And now this Christmas, Ann asked to upgrade to an iPhone4, leaving me the iPhone3G. So now I've even got portable data (on an admittedly tiny screen) in my pocket. Travelling will be all the easier.

Loosing access to our 200+ CDs was an outcome not to be countenanced. Ben to the rescue! We hired him to rip all our CDs to the computer (And paint the front of the house over the summer - thanks Ben). I'm a bit of an audiophile, and have avoided lossy compressed audio for years. And A-B comparisons between the original recording and the MP3 with the reference speakers in the living room did show a loss of quality. I don't know, maybe my standards are slipping, but I still wasn't up to moving 300 lbs of speakers in 6 sections to a 1 bedroom apartment 1,000 miles away. Instead I eagerly dove into researching top quality powered mini-speakers. How often do you get an excuse to by new audio equipment? And we've been very happy with the result. The Audioengine 2's produce a surprising quality of sound for something less than 6" on a side and plenty of quantity for neighbor-friendly apartment listening. It's nice having 80% of what our floor system offers fit in a shoe box.

We didn't get our half-dozen photo albums scanned before we left, but we've been using a digital camera for several years, and mom and dad gave the entire family one of our most precious possessions a few years before: DVD after DVD of their entire slide collection beginning in the 1950's. All this pops up on our screen saver daily, providing a sense of connection and history that is most welcome as we settle in to a new town.

Movies don't scan so easily - or legally, so we left our small DVD collection behind. The apartment has a decades-old TV and VCR, but we opted to forgo cable and instead moved into the brave new world of downloaded video. This has been very satisfying, and content selection is rapidly growing. I can easily see never having a TV again. And what we can't find online, we often find in the excellent Schlow Library DVD collection 4 blocks away. That's been nice too - and free.

To keep in touch with friends and family, email has been our primary medium, but with so much new going on in our lives, I thought it might be more efficient to post our thoughts and happenings online. I originally considered Facebook, but it's short, conversational style and constant interruptions I find frustrating. As you can see, blogging was the chosen solution. I've been pleased with it. I can ramble on to my heart's content without fearing that I've interrupted or outstayed my welcome, and folks who are interested can come by and read what they want. Nice.

Our computer was a bit of a dilemma, being a large, power hungry, difficult to transport desktop unit, and I toyed with upgrading to a laptop, but the old unit still had a few years in it. So we bit the bullet, wrapped it in bedding, and threw it in the car. In the end, I've been travelling so much exploring the region that we bought a cheap netbook so I could research, navigate, email, and blog on my adventures, and that's been a good alternative. I'd have been loath to take a laptop that was our primary computer pootling about the countryside, but the netbook I don't have to worry about. It's relatively cheap, all its data is in the Cloud, and I can fit it in any old backpack. Someday when the desktop unit bites the dust we'll probably move to a desktop replacement laptop - transportable, low power, but basically meant to stay around the house. The netbook will remain the risk taking traveler.

It turns out the netbook is getting heavy rotation at home as an ebook reader, recipe downloader, and email companion. We brought only a few treasured cookbooks, and I've borrowed a few paper books from the so-convenient library, but with this Ann can see her online recipes right in the kitchen and I'm able to download free ebooks from the library. And any of the thousands of free out-of-copyright classic pre-1920 literature from the Project Guttenburg (highly recommended). I've revisited works I read in school, and some I should have but never did: Huck Finn, The Scarlet Letter (wow), Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath (again wow). Now it's War and Peace. Slow to start, but at around page 85 the intrigue is heating up. Only 1,200 pages to go....

I'm pleased and amazed with the compactness of digital living. So much becomes virtual that with a furnished apartment waiting for us, we were able fit most of our valued possessions in a car and leave home for 9 months with only minor inconvenience. Oh what a brave new world!