More 'This & That' with 'Oldest Living Blogger'

Looking at the Google Doodle today, the playable keyboard, which incidentally can be 'tuned' using those adjustments in the top section above the keyboard,
I decided to read Wikipedia's article on Robert Moog, and that in turn opened up a whole 'Down Memory Lane' thing for me. It mentions Wendy Carlos of 'Switched-on Bach' fame, and us old-timers will remember Wendy as Walter Carlos, whose first big commercial hit enabled him to get that operation which resulted in Walter becoming Wendy. And Walter/Wendy worked closely with Robert Moog for a while, engineering and perfecting the synthesizer and proving it could take its place as a legitimate musical instrument. I still have the old original vinyl 12-inch LPs of Wendy's exceptional arrangements of Bach and other music, and these still sound just as good as ever on my old direct-drive Quartz turntable from Technics, with a good Grado pickup on it. Anyway, going back over all that in Wikipedia made me very conscious of the fact that most of the important people of the world as I've known it in the last half of the 20th century and the beginning of this one are now either already gone or fading fast, including myself, of course.

Memory Lane is a real man-trap, isn't it? We can waste our lives away there. So let's switch back to the here and now. Is your keyboard full of crumbs? Maybe a few spills of coffee drops, or the remains of snacks, and you're wondering what could be done about it, other than tossing it and getting a new one? These are assembled much like the remote for your TV or Stereo, in a sandwich system, and can be disassembled (carefully) and cleaned out with a vacuum or duster and then reassembled again, and the proof that this works is that you're now reading this being typed on one that was just taken apart and put together again as above.

Lately, while using this test version of Windows 8 and trying to decide if I really want to continue using it, I thought in all fairness to Mighty Microsoft, maybe I ought to check the Windows 8 Blog for the latest news, and I'm glad I did. You should too, and you can find it right here. And as you'll see if you scroll down through it a bit, there's a very interesting short history of the various incarnations of Windows as it has evolved, along with its more important changes from one to the next. I was surprised to read that laptops have been outselling desktops recently, for example. Or that the good old mouse may be fading fast in favor of something called the Track Pad. Presumably an idea from aforementioned laptops. So maybe I'd better not be too hasty about arguing against progress. There's a reason for everything, if we look for it, and the only constant in life is Change. Go with the flow, or become a relic, it's up to you!