Number Crunch

Dad's leaving today.  In our discussion of how we would share all the photos we took...all 1,352 of them...we brainstormed.  Perhaps Picasa Web Albums?  But that doesn't provide high enough resolution for prints.  How about a flash drive?  Dad would have to buy one.  Eureka!  Let's use dad's shiny new iPod.  I was worried that maybe it wouldn't have enough space, until I flipped it over to see its capacity printed on the back: 64 GB.  GIGABYTES!  The measly 3.2 gigs that the photos take up are a drop in the pond of the iPod's storage potential.  Gone are the days of the floppy disk...

And almost as if the devices were communicating amongst themselves and commenting on our tech-talk, dad's BlackBerry flashed its red notification light, as he received an article by Marc Wollin: "This One Goes Past A Trillion," from his weekly column Glancing Askance.  Wollin's a New Yorker with a clever take on how we humans are "measuring up" these days.  Here's an excerpt from the short piece, which is well worth a read:

Think of your music, video and pictures. We used to talk about data in terms of kilobytes, or 1000 bytes. Then megabytes, or 1000 kilobytes became the norm. Now we routinely transfer and walk around with memory sticks than hold gigabytes, or 1000 megabytes. And it's not uncommon to find home computers these days with drives that handle terabytes, or 1000 gigabytes, which, coincidentally, is the same as a trillion. In taxes, huge number: in footage of your vacation, not so much.

[FULL ARTICLE HERE]

All this to say: stay tuned for photos.  A helluva lot of them.