Financial & Travel Musings

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One of the downsides of looking in on some of the online courses around these days (of which Yales Open Yale is probably the most accessible) is that the hypochondriacs amongst us can have a real field day.

We probably all know that working around asbestos isn’t a good idea, bringing in its wake all kinds of diseases with weird names like mesothelioma and the like. However, did you know that if you’d a cat in the house when you were in the womb that you’ve a higher chance of becoming schizophrenic? Yales couple of sessions on mental illness are a real gold mine of such off the cuff remarks that you’d not ordinarily come across and yet which were presented in a very accessible form.

What’s probably not a good move is to leave through the mental illness diagnostic manual as the small sampling that I heard about courtesy of the Yale psychology course covered oodles of mental diseases, many of which had fairly “normal” symtoms.

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We all expect technology to be innovative in some ways. After all, innovation is what technological development is all about, isn’t it?

However, that innovation is most evident in surprising areas. For example, if you’ve been keeping an eye on MP3 players over the last few years you’d have seen their initial introduction with 128MB a few years back and size-wise they were fairly large with normal batteries to be fitted in. Gradually, the memory crept up but the size dropped dramatically as batteries became the internal ones charged from your computer. Then screens appeared first to display the menus and then to show photos and videos.

Probably the most innovative product this year are the various baby computers. They’re not so much innovative in terms of the techology but they significantly change how you use them. For instance, I find that I use my little Acer in ways that I’d just never consider with a normal sized laptop. Would I ever have watched that Open Yale course with the normal laptop? I think not.

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It’s sad in a way that we’re all starting to call the things “home entertainment systems” rather than TVs, videos, or whatever, isn’t it?

Anyway, we’re actually looking to upgrade the camcorder at the moment as it’s quite ancient in technology terms though it works just fine otherwise. However, the snag is that you can rarely upgrade just one item as doing so just shows up shortcomings in everything else.

Therefore, we are likely to find that our brand new HD camcorder will push us towards looking at home theater furniture to go along with the full theatre experience that, hopefully, the new camcorder will bring us. It’s strange to think that just 10 years or so back and it was just the fanatics that would have considered home theatre furniture but nowadays it’s well into the mainstream.

So, looks like we’ll be out some serious cash on technology and technology related items in the coming year….

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