Confessions of a reluctant techy: books & dirt are better
While 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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Related posts:
In defense of thoughts
Copyright violation & blogs: a tricky subject
Book tour cancelled: taking my Damitol instead
