Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Little things are always failing in our home. This time it was the CD changer in our music system. The changer suddenly became spastic and would continually shuffle one disk in and out of the player. I couldn’t get it to eject the eight CD clip to retrieve my CD’s. This also locked up the radio so we couldn’t even use that part of the system. I fiddled with the radio, the changer and the clip for about two hours then suddenly it ejected into my hand. I immediately unplugged the changer from its umbilical cord and retrieved my CD’s.

I spent another couple hours trouble shooting the changer. I was able to confirm the changer was getting power and was grounded, but I couldn’t download any circuit diagrams without buying a subscription so I wasn’t making very good progress. I started calling around town to see how much it would cost to replace the changer. Your typical car stereo store informed me that they no longer carried cd changers all. Their solution was to sell me a new in dash stereo that I could hook up to my i-pod. My what? Is it something like an eight track? Oh! O.K. it is one of those things the teenagers have growing out of their ears.

With a little more research, I discovered that my Palm, PDA would work just fine. I had already done a little of this transfer of music about four years ago. At that time I had a collection of vinyl records. (Even older than eight track) With great labor I had recorded these onto the computer using an audio recording program. I manually de-popped each track and converted these into mp3 format. This was all part of our original plan to sell the house and condense everything into an RV.

Now I have found that I already have a program, Windows, Media Player, that will automatically record the audio tracks of a CD and save them in MP3 format and usually brings along all of the artist/album/track information with it. Indeed this has a name in the current jargon; it is called “ripping.” In 2003 I could “rip” a vinyl album in an evening of intense work. Now the computer does it automatically in less time than it takes to play one of the tracks of the CD. Wow!

Next I set out for Wal-Mart to buy a suitable card for my PDA to hold all of my CD’s. I had roughly calculated about four gigabytes would hold our entire collection. I checked the return policy and then selected a $65 chip about the size of my thumbnail. I very carefully slit the package and tried the chip – It didn’t work. Three more trips to try various sizes, brands and speeds of chips proved that my Tungsten E2 could only handle a one gigabyte SD card. My four gigabytes of storage cost $75. The link to the stereo is a $15, fake tape cassette with a cord and a stereo plug on the end. This is still cheaper than repairing or replacing my CD changer or buying a new radio. Even better than this is that I have cleared out a cupboard that was dedicated to cd’s. They can go into our storage unit. Some day in perhaps thirty or forty years our grandchildren will look at this collection of cd’s and marvel at how huge they are. They probably will exclaim “These don’t even include full scale, three-d holo-videos of the artist’s performance!”

I remember somewhere, someone once told me. “The only constant in life is change.”

We are still hanging out in Hillsboro. In another ten days Judy will be having some oral surgery to solve a bridge failure problem. We expect to be here until Thanksgiving.

Just sign us off with a chilly woof-woof.