Catching up with the future

I've been involved in electronics all my life.  I've had a computer since I could build one, which predates microprocessors.  But building most things sort of stopped at VLSI and the PC.  No point.

Some people never adopt a personal computer.  If they developed methods for doing their work and organizing their life before PCs, they tend to stay with that.  If you grew up recently, you may not understand what is "under the hood" of your PC any more than your car or television.  It just works and you use it and rarely think about it.  How do they do ADSL anyway?  Few people care or know.  I know what's going on in the guts of computers because that's what I was doing growing up.

New generations don't bother to learn what I had to learn.  It's just taken as a given that there are cell phones and computers.  Move on from there.  So people learn to text faster than they can work a keyboard.  No big deal for them.  Big deal for me, because I have to learn a new method for something I already have perfectly good tools for.  So I don't bother.  There are enough learning curves to climb.  You pick your challenges.   I never learned to touch type either, but I'm really fast with two fingers.

Then I run across something I want to adopt, like syndication.  RSS feeds.  Getting my Twitter posts to show up on Facebook or vice versa.  I go through lots of fumbling around.  A bit like when I built (assembled, actually) my latest computer.  I was going to dual boot Windows and Linux.  Well, Linux turns out to have a really basic prerequisite level of knowledge to use at all.  Things so basic no one ever talks about how to do them.  This is stuff that seems even too basic for "Linux for Dummies."  But if you never learn it, you can't get in the club.  Since I didn't have a Linux-literate buddy, I stumbled.  I decided the learning curve wasn't worth it at that time.  So I still run Windows.

I ran W2K on everything until about a month ago.  Then I got a copy of Vista for the new machine.  Skipped XP altogether.  Works great, I like it.  Similar enough that I've adapted.  Open Office was like that too.  Out of sheer ornieriness I hate Microsoft Office.  Damned if I'm going to keep sending them money for new versions I have to learn all over again.  Once, in the dim past, I was a Word expert.  Then they changed and I didn't know anything.  So fuck them, I'll get Open Office, which works just fine.  It saves and reads the usual Microsoft formats (except docx).  It's cross-platform, so will work on Linux if that ever happens for me.

I have a website I wrote myself which is not yet an embarassment.  This is a blog.  I did a Textpattern based blog and the overhead was just a little to high to fine-tune it.  I don't have to learn XML for anything else.  I'm on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.  I sort of know what feedburner is, but have not used it.  I subscribe to feeds on iGoogle.  I was a loyal Firefox user until it started crashing every day and so I switched to Chrome, which I love.  So I'm not exactly Neanderthal.  But this morning I'm stuck trying to connect Twitter and Facebook.  Playing catch-up to the technorati a generation younger than I am.