Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Day 183 the one with a better title about the end of compact discs

2018: Day 183 the one with a better title about the end of compact discs

Dear Reader,

Oh eBay. I’m searching for Nirvana DVDs right now. Reading articles about the end of compact disc (CD) sales earlier today really made me think. Part of that thinking was about maybe buying some Nirvana DVDs and CDs. some time ago I bought a deluxe edition of the Nirvana album Bleach on vinyl. Before my purchase of a record player getting compact discs was really a major part of my technology driven journey. Both buying music on CD and burning discs was exciting. Digital music was so much better than the tapes I had been putting in my Sony Walkman. I had one of those yellow ones that was water resistent or something to that effect. Being able to store data on a disc was super exciting. It changed the game. It democratized data storage in a way that until the cloud was inconceivable.

I cannot really overstate how exciting that technology was at the time. It was a sea change in storage technology. Even backing up music discs was exciting. It fundamentally changed the entire music industry in some unexpected ways. Corporate executives from Best Buy elected to stop selling compact discs this week. I did not expect to have any emotional reaction to that news. Strangely enough it did make me think back about CD of the month clubs and the joy of going to Best Buy to purchase new albums when they came out. Some album releases were a really big deal. They were talked about on the radio for weeks before the day when a new album could be purchased.

Right now I should be finishing up a class on Coursera. It turns out that a few labs for the, “Leveraging Unstructured Data with Cloud Dataproc on Google Cloud Platform,” course are taking me a little bit longer than usual. That was bound to happen at some point. Some labs are more interesting than other and the ones that hold my attention tend to go by much quicker. Maybe in a few minutes I’ll jump back into the course on this Chromebook and knock out a lab or two tonight before going to bed. Part of what it takes to knock out courses is the will to complete an hour or two of learning every night.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado


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