Technology

Technology is on my mind today, for many reasons.

I'm on our tech committee at work - and I attended my first meeting on that committee earlier this week. Much of the subject matter went completely over my head - charts and graphs about how many ports we have, how many we need. What our options are....it was confusing and I listened intently and still have no idea what we are doing, nor what we should do. Glad there were a lot of other people there far more technical than I.

I also recently acquired a Blackberry for my job - so I now have access to my emails 24/7. This is a good and a bad thing. Good, because I am out of my office quite a bit and it leaves me feeling out of touch and a bit on edge. Bad, because I am out of my office quite a bit and it has me feeling too in touch and still on edge. It's beckoning me, all the time, to check for new emails. So I'll know what crap is happening - and allow me to intervene before huge piles of it are created. But it's bringing out my OCD tendencies, in that I just can't NOT look at it. And yesterday, at an all day off site class, I learned a couple things. First, if you're like me and you are so technologically challenged that it took you several days to realize the 'receiver' wasn't actually on, so you weren't seeing your emails. I sort of realized this - nothing 'new' in my mobile while my in box at work was full - but I'm such a 'duh' when it comes to this stuff, I couldn't figure out what to do. SO J. finally helped me on Thursday evening. And on Friday morning, when I 'received' a bunch of emails all at once, I realized that if you leave it off, all the 'new' mail it receives will come in like it was received that day. When in fact, on your laptop Outlook mailbox connected to your mail server, they were actually received on a variety of dates - which were not all yesterday. I'm not sure how it 'syncs' itself and realizes that these seeming 'non-matches' are in fact, the same email. I will hopefully figure that out when I'm back in the office next week and decide to 'sync' my handheld with my laptop. And I learned that typing on it is a PITA. But I'll get better. It has the 'feature' that it tries to 'guess' what you're writing. But to me, the choices it selects make no sense. I could be typing 'be all you can be' and it will decide I'm writing 'beef bouillon' - it's crazy. J. says I can deactivate that feature, but...you guessed it....I can't figure out how to do that, either. But I brought the manual home, so there's hope.

Secondly, I learned this week that when your home laptop gives you pop-up messages stating 'updates are ready for your computer' and you keep selecting 'remind me later', you will pay for that in some way. Since loading TurboTax last weekend, I have periodically received a 'blue screen' error - not the 'blue screen of death', though the first time it happened, I thought it was and went running upstairs and woke J. up at 5:30am pleading with him to come help me. He graciously put his shorts on, and padded downstairs in his skivvies to try to help me. All it took was following the instructions - shut down the PC (hard shut-down) and then restart. It was fine. The wording on the screen said something about 'removing your files' which scared me - but it was having trouble 'reading' my hard drive, apparently. It restarted fine, but it kept happening and it was troublesome. We backed everything up - every single document and all the financials on this computer, including multiple years of tax returns, investment info, all of our banking information for close to 20 years, etc. And this morning, when it happened yet again, I finally did a Google search on the 'kernel-stack-in page-error' message we were getting and bingo - the fix was right there. And all it involved was accepting the Microsoft updates that I had been ignoring. And 'lo and behold, the PC is running better - pages load in milliseconds now, instead of taking their time. Fonts look better. Pages are more 'cleanly' formatted. It loads up pages and games like it was brand new - quickly and effortlessly.

So the next time it prompts me to update, I'm doing it right away. Not postponing thinking I don't want this update - no, I do, I REALLY do. Lesson learned.

And how amazing is it that we can all do searches in milliseconds for ANY TOPIC your mind can think up - and have hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of 'articles' about that topic at your fingertip? Who could have ever imagined that way back when? Makes me wish we'd bought Cisco way back when. Oh, we should have. We didn't. I even had the gall to tell J. 'the Internet will never last'. What was I thinking? I couldn't visualize all this 'change' happening at such lightening speed back then. But now, I can. Technology is constantly evolving and changing and I can't imagine what our kid's kids will have at their fingertips someday. It truly boggles my mind to think about it. Libraries will probably be a thing of the past - or if they exist at all, they will just contain row after row of computers where people can research and read and 'transfer' reading material onto hand held document readers. I can't wait. I'm going to be in my 80's and be more excited about getting a new computer than my kids will be. I just love, love, LOVE all that the Internet has brought into my life. Blogs, news, games, writing...it's just great. And none of it would happen without technology.

Remember these simple rules:

a) If offered updates, accept them.
b) Read the manual. My husband would say something else with a swear word in it - but I'll just stick with 'read the manual'.
c) Blackberries are your friend. Use them judiciously. The email you were missing 4 days ago before you HAD the Blackberry will still be there when you check your email next time. It will be OK if you don't attempt to type a fairly complicated response on a keyboard the size of a credit card. People will understand. And you can always call them if you need to...if it's that important.

PS - Blogger spellcheck is now also miraculously working, after weeks without. Guess it required the updates, too.