Confessions of a reluctant techy: books & dirt are better
June 11, 2007 By: almostgotit Category: technology, books, freelancingWhile I own my own comp copies of PhotoShop and Dreamweaver (if I said any more, I’d have to kill you), I’m ashamed to say that thus far I’ve only used them minimally for my web work.
I am, at heart, a luddite and compost maker, preferring the Zen of Making Use Of Simple Things. Nourishing a garden with re-purposed organic material (= old dead stuff) is a beautifully redemptive thing, and works better than chemicals anyway; I can strip code and manipulate photos with great facility using only the default “notepad” and “paint” features that come with every PC. Moreover, I take a sort of perverse pride in doing so.
But after a certain point, deliberate ignorance is just stupid.
The web is a great resource and I’m trying to use it as intelligently as I can. Web Worker Daily publishes several good articles every day, from practical advice on best practices, personal development and time management for the freelancer to esoterica only an obsessive-compulsive techy could love.
I’ve also (finally) built and am populating a solid feed reader so I can better skim through the latest and best material in my field every day.
Some of this professional development work is fun. Some of it isn’t… Feed readers, for instance, should be a lot more user-friendly than they are, but I am surprised and gratified to find that, even among my web-savvy friends, I’m not alone in finding myself put off or even daunted by many of these “necessary” technologies.
In the end, there’s no substitute for a good book. So today, I’m going to go buy a book about using PhotoShop. Digital storage media becomes obsolete every few years, and can be wiped out by system or human error; books are always fully compatible with human eyes and last hundreds of years.
Plus, you can read them in the bathtub.
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June 12th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Hey, Almostgotit. I gotta say, it’s comforting that there are others who get a bit intimidated by new technology. My job gives me a laptop, and for a while there, I refused to use any other function than MS Word. It’s all I needed, and we got along just fine. But I realized that I might be missing a lot so am now taking small and cowardly steps into the techsavvy pool. It’s a little awkward!
Puddlehead
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Thanks for weighing in, Puddlehead! Confession is much easier when someone else will chime in with an “Amen, Brother/Sister!” Share, if you will sometime, some of the steps you’ve been taking…
June 12th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
I will certainly pass along the steps I’ve been taking, though I suspect it’ll be unintentionally quite funny for my stone age tactics. I might as well torture the laptop, beat it with a rubber hose until it coughs up its secrets.
June 12th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
Longing for compost…
As I sit here engrossed in the guts of what is the modern database — the buffer manager, the write ahead log, the index tree, query processors and more… My wife kindly reminds me that it could all be done in Excel.
So much technology for such simple needs. It’s amazing any of it works at all.
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What’s the answer then, guys? For a few to forge ahead, figure it all out, weed out the dross, and then make it accessible for the rest of us? Or does humanity in general have to evolve to the point that we all know how (and all want) to use all this stuff? INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW.
…or that we do!