Since I came to America, I left all my books & personal belongings at home. The only thing significant I carried over the ocean was the memory in my brain. Since then I lost almost all my belongings at home due to the flood & family moving. In America I started a new life & gradually I collected physical things. Every time I move to a larger house, I collect more stuff, buy more furniture and so make each new move more difficult. One thing I notice well is my music collection. While I was in graduate schools, I was exposed to a lot of music over radio. Anyone living in Dallas, Texas knows WRR FM 101. It is a 24-hour classic music radio station. After a while of listening I started buying some music with my little saving. When time goes by I found that the media of the music keeps changing & so the hardware player changes too. I remember I bought some records and pretty soon a Wollensak reel tape player in 1967 & an Ampex reel tape recorder with many reels of Beethoven's music. Then came the age of cassette tape. I started to collect hundreds of cassette tapes from 1975 to 1985. And then came the age of CD & VHS (replace record & movie). Pretty soon I found that I collected hundreds of CD & VHS tapes and all the previous tapes (reel to reel & cassettes) were moved to garage. Since 1997, VHS was gradually replaced by DVD & I found that hundreds of VHS tapes were moved to garage as well. The only thing didn't change during all the time was the music contents & they are the only things I am really interested. With Apple's iPod, people suddenly can buy a single piece of music without committing to a CD with some other music that they are not really interested. With new technology, music is put in digital format & becomes a file that can be stored in electronic memory. I found that all my CD collections can be crammed into a 32G iPod & carried with me most of the time. With the late smart phone & cloud computing, it seems most of the information we need can be stored remotely in electronic forms. All we need is a smart mobile device to access the information. Nowadays when we buy books or music, we are given the options to download or save in some remote area called Cloud. Thus we no longer need to move books & physical media while we move to a new house. It also seems possible to make all furniture & cooking utensils some kind of utilities that is part of the standard house design. With this we can move around, stay or live anywhere in the world without moving anything physical except yourself. We thus almost achieve a complete personal freedom in our life, a Free New World indeed.
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One thing keeps changing is the clock & watch we use. We used to wear watch & have at least ten clocks in our house & car. Every year when day light saving time is coming, we carry the chore to set the time by one hour. When we start using Internet & mobile handheld devices, we suddenly find that we no longer need to wear watch or set time anymore. The time is sync with the Internet, the universal time, and it is much more accurate. When time goes by, most clocks sold will be tuned & sync with the Internet. This is another example the technology changes the way we live.
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