Traffic Cone = Cinema

Heraclitus warned us that "the only constant is change." For many years, the American school system eluded this inevitability, but not this year. EVERYTHING has changed. No textbooks. A new tablet device. We're wireless. And Bluetooth. We've adopted a new learning management system. Canvas instead of Google classroom. OneDrive instead of Google drive. OneNote instead of something else. And there's the looming threat that the winds of change will soon to remove our desktop computers.

Also, I still have stuff on Evernote.

Yesterday, I couldn't even figure out how to play a DVD. Every year, in Honors Philosophy, we read Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and then we watch the first thirty minutes of The Matrix. Because it's the best visual representation of Plato's allegory.

But yesterday, I couldn't get the DVD to play. Apparently, Windows has removed this function from its Media Player. People stream now. Have you heard of Netflix? Amazon?

Coincidentally, both of these are blocked at our school. Even if you've purchased the movie on Amazon. So I freaked out a bit (in front of the children) and then I downloaded a bunch of weird free DVD players (and probably infected my desktop with some weird viruses . . . now whenever I use the search bar, it sends me through Yahoo! instead of Google).

Then the tech guy came and showed me that there WAS a player on my computer. The VLN player. The symbol is a traffic cone. It didn't open automatically when I put a disk in, so I didn't know it was there. And when the tech guy scrolled down through my apps and showed me the traffic cone, I wondered: why is orange traffic cone synonymous with playing a DVD? But then he started telling me about all the changes in my future-- they were taking my desktop, my DVD player, my big monitor, and my hardwired internet . . . and so I shouldn't even get used to the VLN player.

"They're not making your job any easier," he said, "and they're not making my job any easier either."

And why is the VLN Player logo a traffic cone? There's an enigmatic explanation on Wikipedia, but it adds more to the mystery than it resolves it: "The cone icon used in VLC is a reference to the traffic cones collected by École Centrale's Networking Students' Association."

If anyone can make sense of that, please leave the explanation in the comments.