Weblog shortened is Blog

Digital life, Star Tribune May 20, 2009. Headline: "Re-rip music so songs will play on the chopper." Not long ago that headline would have made even less sense than it does now. "When you ripped songs from CDs, the default Windows Media Player setting probably was to copy them as WMA files. You can fix that by re-ripping your CDs as MP3 files." What surprises me most is that, nonsensical as it sounds or would have sounded to me a few years ago, I in fact get the essence of its meaning and envision clicking things on the computer to make music "download" onto some gizmo or other in a different format.

A friend, who claims she will not read blogs and wants nothing to do with them, does not even want to hear the word. She claims the world is divided into mammals and dinosaurs, and she is a dinosaur, minus the large teeth and weird body shape, of course.

A few years ago - or maybe it was just a few months ago - I wanted nothing to do with blogs either, but here I am. I used to dismiss them, although I read a few and was entertained. I feared I could not be clever like the others and scoffed at the idea of being a blogger. Yet, I like to write, so now a "blogger is I". Still up to taking risks, I guess.

Now there's Twitter, which I understand is a short form of messaging that many do from their telephones. I have insisted that I will not do texting and will not get into this twitter thing, but you never know.

I've learned that I can't upgrade my phone to a Blackberry device until September. Okay, so I did ask about it. Do you suppose in September I'll tiptoe another step into the 21st century? At my age perhaps I should do as much of this stuff as I can understand for as long as I can understand it. One of these days I may find that I too am a dinosaur, and when someone talks of re-ripping music, I'll envision a choir anthem being torn into bits of paper. I may then suggest anthems to rip based on the dullness of their alto line. That ripping effort could take years to complete.