Life with Apple Products: Simply amazing!

Despite my exposure to computer technology for most of my career and studies, some 35 plus years, I still get incredibly amazed by what we are capable of achieving today with the use of modern equipment, in our simple household for instance, especially if we've been wise to acquire appliances from Apple . Lemme explain.

It's Friday pm, and I've been watching the market on Google Financials and CNBC. MSFT gets slaughtered as predicted earlier, very much like Amazon. I kinda feel rather down (thank God I don't hold any AMZNs, although that would be nice to have bought some six months ago and offloaded them yesterday), so I decide to play some of my music to cheer up. In moments like these, when I got the blues, the Boss is all I can think of. I've got quite a few of his albums. From his "Rising" album though, I only got two songs, that is "The Rising" and "The Fuse". I turn-on my AppleTV that holds, say four-five thousand songs. Sound comes out of an interconnected Bose sound processor. Images show thru a Sony Bravia flat screen. It's raining cats and dogs outside. July in Belgium. What else?

I'm sitting on our living room sofa, music coming out of those Bose speakers on the other corner of the room. I got my iPhone on my left, with the 'Remote' app running to control the AppleTV (via wifi), while on my right my fingers are tapping the keyboard of a MacBook Pro, keying-in the text of this blogpost. I sort of get tired listening to the Rising and the Fuse for the 100th time, when a candle-like thought shines into my skull: Wait a sec... this album sounds real cool! Why the heck do I only own just those two songs? In a heartbeat I'm on the iTunes Store and listening samples of the remaining album tracks, 13 in all. Sound pretty cool too. Especially that one called "Into the fire"! Sheer beauty! Raises the dead! Listen to its lyrics:

The sky was falling and streaked with blood,
I heard you calling me, then you disappeared into the dust.
Up the stairs, into the fire...
I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher...
Somewhere up the stairs, into the fire...

May your strength give us strength,
May your faith give us faith,
May your hope give us hope,
May your love give us love...

Wow, what a wonderful piece! Wait a min, it gets even better. The album originally shows a price of 6.99 euros. But... price is now dropping. What's goin' on? iTunes just found out I had bought two album tracks in the past, so it's like "you can have the rest of the album for just 5.01 euros!" Jeez, how cool is that?! I got a discount because I had already paid for those two album songs. Long story short, in about 90 secs I bought and had the remaining 13 tracks downloaded and ready to go (remember, I have a 25Mbit/s bandwidth on my ISP cable connection).

During all this time, the AppleTV has continued playing the 'Rising' and 'Fuse' for the n-th time. As I have previously configured the AppleTV to sync with the laptop, next thing's going on, all 13 downloaded tracks get synced on ATV's hard disk via Wifi. I tap on the the phone's touchscreen and the Bravia now shows the entire album list of "The Rising" tracks, my past two buys ranked among their peers. I click 'play' by tapping the iPhone again and the music starts playing from the first album track on.

All this completed within minutes. The room is dressed now in a heavenly 'Rising' rock sound... Composed by the Boss, a baby-boomer, for us, the rest of the baby-boomers. With songs I never heard before. They all sound as good as those two I had purchased earlier. Outside it's still raining. Oh, no, there's some silver linings growing around the darkest of clouds, and patches of blue skies appear out of nowhere. The rain seems to have stopped. Springstein's sound still playing on the Bose and I feel I'm getting in the mood again. Welcome Weekend! I'm feeling the sound on this July Friday deep in my guts and soul, as I carry on to complete this posting. And I'm like "what did you learn from this experience, dude?". Well, I'll tell yeah... My fat ass is gonna get much fatter. All these events happened while I'm still sitting on my sofa and my over-shaped body didn't move an inch. Try to do what I just described ten years ago, then. Or twenty? See?

Morale of the story. Apple is changing our lives... and it adds extra fat to our butts! How about that?