I consider myself a rather tech-savvy person. I first started learning to program (using BASIC) when I was ten on my father’s Osborne 1. My proudest accomplishment on that dinosaur was a randomizing fortune-telling program (”You will soon sprout yak horns!”… “Don’t look now, there is someone behind you!”… “I predict you will turn this machine off in the near future!”) — silly stuff, but world-changing for me. Being able to manipulate computer code at ten gave me a big tech confidence boost that has stayed with me for years. Now when I am up against a new piece of software, or I’m trying to troubleshoot a pesky piece of php code, I don’t feel like all is lost. I’m not afraid to dig in deep, explore, and make mistakes (on a test site, of course). I think this is why I enjoy providing technical help and giving tutorials to our clients, as I’m often asked questions to which I don’t always immediately know the answers.
Not everybody enjoys exploring, however, and I can respect that. I wouldn’t dream of trying to figure out the intricacies of how my audio-engineer husband has wired our home theatre system. I’m uninterested and somewhat afraid of learning how to do anything more than pumping gas and checking the oil level in my car. I’ll leave those things to the audio/video-philes and car enthusiasts out there.
But researching new computer and internet technologies is daunting, even to this self-proclaimed tech-savvy gal. For every one comprehensive, easy-to-understand article or tutorial out there, there are myriad others that do nothing but confuse and mystify. Thanks to the power of some good tech blogs, my feed reader and the fact that I am up every morning at 5:30 (I have four-month-old twins), I am discovering all sorts of useful and informative things that I plan on sharing here on the Wax blog on various Tuesdays (but maybe not all Tuesdays… remember the twins?). Why Tuesdays? So I can prepend the pithy little title of “Tuesday Tech” to each post title.
Because as tech-savvy as I may or may not be, I am truly a cornball.
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Abi, good to see you brave the four-month-olds (TWO OF THEM, too) for an attempt at a weekly blog.
And I had to laugh at the picture. I used that very same dinosaur to connect from home to the school computer in grad school. And I was in my 20s then.
Yeah, and that “dinosaur” was considered cutting edge when my dad had it… it was (I think) the first portable computer. Some laptop!
Abi, my roommate years ago had one of those computers. It was considered the height of geekdom to have one. Thanks for the smile!