Monday 4-8-02 6:10 PM
I'll raise you two geeks and a nerd.

This is the first weekday of daylight savings time. It is probably 65 degrees (º) Fahrenheit (F) (being in the refrigeration business I am always scrupulous about my units) No shade or relief on my backyard picnic table. The sun is glowing at me in the East. It won't set for another hour or so. I hate, despise and otherwise don't care for daylight savings time. I figure, if I wanted to get up at three in the morning, I would just set my alarm clock for that very eerie hour. Last week my alarm said 4 AM when it clicked and spit sound at me and it was indeed 4 AM. Now it mocks me. Still says 4 AM, but behind the red lit digital dial, a massive smile on the rather cruel face of time. It snickers. “It is really 3 AM, sucker!”

I am a devoted person of the morning. I think the late night is reserved for reprobates, criminals and vampires. If you fall within the limits of my categories, well, I figure, you should probably find a way to straighten out your life. Nuff said?

Now that I have set the vituperative tone of this rather peevish post, I will move on to the other group of people (I know in my heart of hearts that you are all the same group, but I dare not let my prejudice show). Those who insist that it is better to write with a pencil than with an electronic keyboard. Those who spend inordinate times drawing lines on papers to make a schedule instead of using some (and I admit it) less than perfect piece of software. Those who have you fill out (been to a doctor's office lately) the same information of twenty disparate forms so that your writing hand that starts with a decent calligraphy (mine does not even meet that minimum requirement) soon shrivels your mitt into a withered claw.

Early in my computer experience the company I worked for used an accounting software that though low on the list of top thousand accounting packages, still soared above the best one-write system.. A woman at the front desk, who would enter data hour after hour, toiled mightily. One day I was talking to the guy who wrote that particular accounting software. He pointed out that with the wonder of the F8 key that you could save six maybe seven keystrokes. Well, hell, I thought that was just great. So I showed Diane. She looked at me like I was smiling from the other side of sanity. "No." she informed me and displayed the repeated the six key strokes with sure hard pecked vengeance, "it's much easier this way!"

This was my first peek into the unyielding world of all too human habit when referring to any change. I'm pretty sure what she was saying was, and I choice to be charitable here, instead of just flat out calling her dumb, ‘I have done these six keystrokes so many times that even though one keystrokes seems easier, it would take me an insurmountable effort to do something different.’

That thinking leads me to despair. But I can accept it. Instead she insisted when I repeated my observation that six keystrokes could not be easier to manage than one, that I was the one prone to idiocy. This thinking leads me to the other side of sanity.

So, you like to work at your typewriter because that is the way that you work with comfort. Okay! I can accept that. In fact, I'll go you one better. I just don't give a damn. Do it! All I ask is that you please try not to tell me that it is an easier way to go about writing. I spent many a dreadful day, with plenty of white-out and threw out many a soiled, pock marked piece of paper before I typed one that was acceptable. I felt that my time was utterly wasted. I wanted to write and create.

Use your pencils or pens, they are charming. I don't want to strip you of the pleasure of a long line gliding over a smooth clear sheet of paper. Just stop your yammering about how much better it all is than writing on a computer.

I am sitting on my back patio with my one month old Pocket PC, writing with a version of Pocket Word. Last year in the summer, I used my laptop. The pocket PC ids more easily read in the bright sun, it does not take a full three or four minutes to boot, it's battery charge lasts about ten hours, the laptop, at best three, I have innumerable books and articles stored that I can read when I tire of this writing and best of all when it begins to rain or I must move, I fold up the keyboard and put both it and the Pocket PC in my POCKET and move. This, I contend is better and is a definite improvement over the Poor Performing Palm Pilot with constant battery failure and not enough memory that I last owned.

This new technology is a marvel that continues to amplify my intelligence (and there are those who say it could use some mighty amplification). I don't much care about artificial intelligence, AI, but I do think that my salvation and perhaps our salvation will be in Intelligence Amplification, IA. This Pocket PC, my laptop, my desktop computer, my VCR, my Yamaha Keyboard, my toaster that actually browns rather than burns to a black cinder a piece of bread, the microwave that I use mostly for coffee and left-overs, my digital camera that saves me from going to the supermarket and waiting a week for the pictures that chronicle my life, all help make me a more versatile and interesting person.

Wow, this is way more of a soap box than I intended to climb upon. There are old ways that I revere. There are old times that I wish I could recapture. When I dream of time travel (I do more and more frequently. Time is definitely on my mind) it is with an eye toward the past. But the technology of the computer revolution disappoints me only in the fact that it doesn't advance more quickly. Moore's law just doesn't get it for me. (The amount of information storable on a given amount of silicon has roughly doubled every year and a half) And a hearty, Hell Yes!, most of companies creating software are too blinded by securing their intellectual property, IP, and creating really boring acronyms, than by moving forward to far greater rewards.

Amen Brother!
Can I have an Oy Vey?