barns, iPods, and convenience

Today was one of the great days where I get to relax on a Sunday. Don't get me wrong, I love playing at WEC. However, the days where I get to wake up on my own, eat when I feel hungry, not stress about playing well and memorizing music, and go to the 6:00 service at the Yoder Barn (no plug intended) are super cool to say the least.

I'm really enjoying having an iPod. I received an iPod Classic from my parents for Christmas, and it's been a long time coming. Not that I have been waiting on them, I've just had much better things to spend my scarce cash on - all the junk like food, textbooks, you know, all the not really that important stuff. I have an inordinate amount of music (also a drain on the petty cash), most of which I do listen to. You could probably call me an iTunes junkie, as I've been using it to organize my music for years now. So naturally, I should have bought myself an iPod years ago.

I am loving that I have all my music with me all the time now. I can say, "Hey, I have this song I really want you to hear!", then pull it up and listen to it, whereas before I mostly had to wait until I could get to my laptop and pull up the song there, or burn it to a CD so the person in question could hear it. So much more convenient now!

Convenience is a wonderful thing. As an engineering major, I've discovered a lot of things in the engineering discipline are about convenience. I mean, one could argue that all technology ever developed is for someone or another's convenience, but even in the process of engineering, you do things for convenience. You assume certain parameters are negligible to simplify calculations, you reuse pre-derived formulas once they've been learned, and you even ignore some effects altogether. It's kind of scary to me, actually, to think about the number of shortcuts we take in class, but almost scarier to think about what would happen when one of those "negligible parameters" actually had an effect - things are super complicated! For the sake of convenience, no, of sanity, we have to streamline the effects to things that show the global behavior of things, and then verify through experiment whether our shortcut worked.

If you sit and think about the number of people that you come into contact with in your lifetime and the choices they make, all the weather patterns and universal orbits and changes, the world is such an infinitely complex thing. It's literally mind-boggling for me to even to try to conceive it. To know someone is in control is where my ultimate convenience lies.

I misspelled the word "convenience" the first time I typed it ever time it is used in this post. No lie. Curse you "I before E", you've failed me for the last time.