I picked up my laptop about half an hour ago to show my husband how I had added a button to the home page so that you, sweet reader, could buy my children’s book. I was so proud! When I pulled it up, however, I realized that the “subscribe” button at the top of the page was hidden for some reason. After fixing that issue, I went back to the home page to see that the embedded picture of the book was now gone. Undaunted, I started clicking through menus trying to bring it back. After torturing myself for a bit and remembering that it was necessary to log in to my Amazon page, at last it is restored.
Phew! While I’m relieved, it makes me realize that I’m not exactly tech-savvy. At this point, pre-formatted themes and being able to download my pictures from Google Photos is my jam. Someday, you will come to this site and see beautiful backgrounds lovingly curated from my artful photos. Until then, I hope you are satisfied with my amateur efforts.
I guess it’s all relative, really. Back in 1979 my friends and I had the opportunity to learn BASIC on a Radio Shack TRS-80 in a classroom at Margaret White Elementary School in a little town in California called Blythe. Our teacher, Mr. Lapin, taught us how to make the screen fill up with whatever we wanted to say by using simple commands. Most of us stopped there in our computer programming careers, with the exception of one boy who ended up writing for Microsoft! Matt, you’re an inspiration!
After that, my computer skills were limited to some simple word processing in college, ordering cars at a dealership, working a computerized cash register at a truck stop, and eventually using computer-aided dispatch programs during my law enforcement career. All DOS-based, simple things until Windows happened to all of us…
Now we write in one program and cut and paste it to another, all willy-nilly like we’ve been doing it our whole lives! We PicCollage, Venmo, Facebook, Instagram and Canva our little hearts out as if the days of hand drawing the program of our senior band concert never happened. What’s next? I’m tempted to go back and start watching Star Trek all over again just to see what the next big invention is going to be, because Gene Roddenberry kinda knew what was up!
If you are my age, you have gone from phones always being attached to the wall to NOTHING having to be attached because we are all connected in the “cloud”(as my husband says, you called a place to see if someone was there, and now you call a person to see where they are). Some days, that cloud feels like a thunderstorm to me, but I’m proficient enough to get by.
I do love learning, so playing with formats and themes and moving things around here is fun, let’s just hope I don’t delete the thing completely!
What do you consider to be your first “leap” into technology?
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