I was cleaning up the orifice over Christmas and found an old MP3 player.  It’s a 4-year-old JNC “SSF-710″-model with a mind-blowing 256MB of RAM.  It was much-loved and much-used as my primary source of mobile audio entertainment before I got my Sony Ericsson W850i, and before I sold my soul to Sony’s Disc2Phone malware.

The battery was, of course, flat, having not been used for … well, when was it last used?  I charged it up, plugged-in some earphones and pressed ‘play’.

At that point I had the opportunity of looking back 18 months, and revisiting some podcasts which I had been listening to in June 2007.

Being the techno-IT boffin that I am, all the podcasts were contemporary science and technology programmes like the BBC’s Digital Planet, Australia’s own BRAN, Leo LaPorte’s TWiT and other home-spun favourites.

So what was making news in June 2007?

• Dr Karl was very excited about the commissioning of the new Hadron Collider, and people were worried that the Earth was going to be swallowed by a man-made black hole.

• The guys on BRAN were having a good laugh about Paris Hilton being slotted for 45 days, before she found God and was released.  Paris then went on to say that she had learned a lot from her ordeal and was going to take more interest in future decisions she made for herself that would affect her personally.  Or something.

• The Federal Government was excited about the upcoming Next-Generation Broadband Network and how a private-public partnership was going to revolutionize internet access for all Australians by facilitating equity in the…  blah blah, wot’eva,… blah.

• There was unrest amongst Apple zealots as no-one was sure when, or even if, the iPhone would ever arrive in Australia.  (And let’s not even begin to speculate about a possible 3G version at this point.)  People were hopping on planes and flying to the US, just to camp-out at Apple stores to get their hands on one of the gadgets.  Also, somewhere, a new iPhone fell into a Blendtec blender.  (Will it blend? That is the question.)

• And of course, early adopters of Windows Vista were warding people off with big, big sticks.

Ahhhh… reminiscing… it’s just not what it used to be.

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