Techno-Change

Roku: It's not a salad dressing, nor is it some sort of Polynesian sun god. No, it's not a dance either. In reality, it's an great little device that lets you stream internet-based content through your TV.

In our case, a Roku was a catalyst. A catalyst for change. A force that pushed us in a direction we, until this point, refused to go.

I'm just being dramatic. Allow me explain.

A Roku is a great thing. Sue's parents have a Roku at their house, and we got to experience it when we were there last. You can get a lot of content from Internet sources, and a Roku puts that all through your TV. All you need is good Internet. Yesterday, Sue decided she was going to "bite the bullet" and plunk down the money for a Roku. We stopped by Best Buy and she selected the one she wanted (it worked on both wired and wireless) and we went to the check stand. The lady says we can knock $20 off the $99 if we open a Best Buy account on the spot. Sure, why not? Twenty bucks is twenty bucks. We would just pay it and cancel it anyway. We were feeling pretty good about it.

Until we got home.

We found that our aged 36" RCA analog (aka: behemoth) had no jack to which we could connect our new Roku. It needed an HDMI jack and the TV was just too old to have one. After sitting there and stewing about it for a while I did a little digging online and suggested we go to Costco and buy a new TV. It didn't take long for us to decide that it was time. After doing a little measuring to see what size we wanted, we blew the dust off the ol' truck and went into town.

We ended up buying a 47" Visio "smart" TV. That means essentially, that everything we wanted the Roku for in the first place is already built into the TV.

Funny, even though it didn't work out, the Roku gave us the reason we needed to join the 21st century. Now we can take it back.

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