Monday, August 10, 2009

Technology -- It's All Relative

We started planning the Tahoe gathering in April and it seems impossible that after all this time it's over so quickly.

I took Lynn to the airport at 10 and she is now in So. California, visiting with her family. She is also looking at pieces of property to invest in, with the idea that she will, sooner or later, want to move back to California and that this is a good time to buy a house. I'm hoping that this comes to pass soon, as we have talked about my going down to spend a couple of days with her every now and then ... certainly cheaper than flying to Texas for a visit!

When I dropped Lynn off, I started to drive in to Sacramento. Pat had decided to take me up on my offer to help her with some computer stuff and I was looking forward to learning more about how her system works. It's always so easy to glibly tell someone "just do this and this and this" when they ask for suggestions, but unless you're sitting in front of their computer and see what they are seeing, you can't possibly know Pat has XP, but it doesn't look like mine does so it took a bit to figure out how I could do the things she wanted to do so I could show her how to do them.

But in the end, I hope that we came up with some ideas that she can start feeling comfortable with as she starts to experiment by herself.

The big deal with keeping photos organized, I have found the hard way, is to be scrupulous in creating and naming folders and keeping folders together in one logical place. That said, I am forever losing that perfect photo that I KNOW I put in such and such folder. So I'm a great one to talk with someone about how to organize photos on a computer. I'm more of a "do as I say, not as I do" kind of teacher, because I know all the "bad" things to do--because I do them myself all the time!

When people's eyes glaze over at the bunch of stuff there is to learn and tell me how much I know, I always remind them that when I started using computers, there was no Worldwide Web, at least not in these parts. I started out with a black screen and yellow letters and e-mail that you had to read on the server and couldn't even save on your hard drive (whoever heard of a thing called a 'hard drive'?) As technology became more complex, I learned what I wanted to know and so 15-20 years later, I know a lot. But I know what I need to know.

At one time I could (and still can) create a web site in simple HTML coding but I still haven't been able to figure out Front Page's "web design" function because I know how to do what I need to know and I've never needed to know the more advanced stuff. And now I'm too old to figure it all out! I would probably feel like my mother if I had to learn all that I know now all at once!

When we'd finished the work we were doing, Pat and Rich took me out to lunch at a local Vietnamese restaurant, which was delicious (and enough left over for lunch tomorrow too!)

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On my way to Sacramento, I put on the audio book of Diana Gabaldon's Book 2, "Voyager." I have had this book forever and never got around the reading it, but after driving to Sacramento and then back home again, I am now hooked on it and may do the amazing thing of actually reading the book instead of listening to the audio book or reading it on the Kindle!

Walt was gone when I got home from Sacramento. He has gone back to work 2-3 days a week, about 2/3 time. When Obama freed up some stimulus money for water projects, there was money in the budget to offer him a salary, so he's taken it. I was so sleepy that I took a nice 2 hour nap, and then started playing around with photos on my own computer.

When Walt came home at 4 p.m., I suddenly realized that I have to write a newspaper article today and that will require interviewing two people. Gleep! I'm off to try to find phone numbers!!!

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