PART 5 - There's a system for that. (In case you missed part 4, it is here)
Is it possible to get through the holiday season in a calm and sedate manner? This has always been sold as a time to be with family and relaxing by a fire, but for many it is a harried exercise wher...
The above picture was taken on the first day that all three of our kids were back to school, virtually, of course. Our tradition has been to take individual photos with each child on the first day of a new school y...
Before properly starting the story about Marty's experience of teaching through a pandemic, I need to address a few administrative matters.
I'm not sure if you have ever personally taught in a formal setting or not. I believe that to be a hard-prerequisite to having a qualified opinion about the art of teaching. For me, I "taught" for four y...
After Marty got her online-curriculum process in place, she turned her attention to students who seemed to be struggling with this new virtual schooling. Her idea was to invite small groups to video chats and talk through the challenges they were having. Before doing a for-real call with her first set of students, she wanted to practice running a Zoom meeting. Like all of us, she had heard the horror stories and didn't want to be the next casualty. To this end, she sent an invite to Bella, Alex, Anthony, and I. In the invitation, she asked us to (1) join her on a practice Zoom call and to (2) try to wreck the meeting.
At the appointed hour, I joined the meeting. Marty's office is right next to mine, so after joining, I went to her desk to explain the process. Bella was down the hall in her room, and the boys were downstairs in our "computer cafe."
Bella was next to join the meeting. Bella and Marty were talking nicely when Alex chimed in. The second he appeared, he started screaming. Loudly. Then Anthony popped up and started screaming too. Also loudly. Remember, Marty asked the kids to try to wreck her call. I've held many Zoom calls since starting my company, and the most significant challenge I've encountered is a lagging internet connection. I was about to learn how badly one of these could go.
From the moment they joined, the boys were screaming jokes and trading memes, totally taking over what moments earlier was a peaceful conversation between Marty and Bella. Marty immediately got flustered and asked how she could shut them up, hands flared over the keyboard. I, leaning over her shoulder, helped her find the Manage Users / Mute option. She hit it for Alex, and his voice dropped out. Then she hit Anthony's switch. But the moment she muted Anthony, Alex's voice returned, saying demonically, "I will not be silenced, mother."
More panic. A deeper dive into the settings revealed a second mute switch that would let the meeting organizer mute people and keep them muted. After silencing Alex a second time, you could see she was starting to understand the setup. But the moment she killed Anthony's mic, Alex started writing on the screen in a huge jagged scrawl using the Annotation tool--TURN OUR SOUND ON!!!
It took Marty a few moments to find how to disable the writing tool. All the time this was happening, Bella was helping Marty find the settings and giving her additional suggestions.
BELLA
Mom, make sure you don't have any porn tabs up.
MARTY
I tend to not run a lot of porn in my browser, so I should be safe.
BELLA
Well, check your history too. People have been bitten there also.
MARTY
Again, I think I'll be safe Bella.
BELLA
And make sure other people don't play porn on their screens.
MARTY
They can do that?
To this question, Bella changed her background to a beach scene. In the time we asked her how she did that, she changed the picture to an old boyfriend. While we asked how she did that (again), she contorted in her bean bag chair, pretending to make out with his large smiling face. While we looked for how to defend this setting, Bella put up a textbook drawing of a penis with some medicinal (I hope) thing on it. Even though Marty had figured out how to silence the boys of both their verbal and annotated barbs, we could still hear them downstairs howling hysterically at Bella's phallic background.
After much laughter and more than a few obscenities from Marty, she figured out how to run a defensive zoom campaign. Granted, she spent the whole time squinting at her screen and hovering over her keyboard in a frenzied battle-pose, which made her look like our own Ender Wiggen.
In one of her first meetings, she had a couple of kids show up she didn't recognize. She immediately asked them who they were and why they were there. When they didn't respond quickly, she bounced them from the room without pause or question. She then turned her attention back to her for-real students as if not a thing had happened.
If you would like to rent out the DeArmitt-children for your own Zoom training or Marty to run your Zoom-events, they all have an unprecedented amount of free time on their hands.
most everyone has some level of chaos behind their computing setup. wires are just part of the package when you get into computers and their accessories. the bigger your rig, the more wiring you have to contend with. i have been battling this cable mayhem since getting my first true home computer, a gateway desktop in the early 90s. though the word 'battle' implies that there is some give and take in the situation, but that is unfortunately not the case here. i have never won or even come close to winning this altercation. it has been nothing but a full-on beatdown from day one. and my internal OCD-wiring, which is thankfully better organized, has felt this loss every hour since i powered up that first gateway computer.
when i thought about any unfinished business i had with my forties, this curiously enough, came to the forefront. i concluded that i wanted my computing "basement" (e.g. wiring) to be every bit as presentable as my computing "living room" (e.g. desktop). that was my challenge.
i spent a week, maybe two, just thinking about my options. once i had a viable idea in hand, i took to it. i shut down the operation and gutted the works. and when i say the works, i mean everything had to come out. the magnitude of this may not land for most, but i have been sitting at the same desk for nineteen years. for someone that works and dabbles in tech, this equals a lot of wiring buildup, some vital and some that may have been decommissioned as long as ten years ago. in example, the wires below my desk could still support a palm pilot, something i haven't used in at least, cough, three years. but all new visions require a pristine palette to start, so that is why it all had to be cleared out.
this project has produced a new issue though--now the underbelly of my desk is such a piece of art, i wish it wasn't so hidden away.
BEFORE : what 19 years of unchecked buildup looks like
AFTER : new beginnings
AFTER : detail right
AFTER : detail left
AFTER : detail centerpiece
to the obvious question of what is the round thing on the floor. it is a 50's circular fan and doubles as a (1) footrest year-round, and (2) a fan in the summer months to combat the heat produced by my yoked mac tower.
to a less obvious but still relevant question, yes, that main outlet strip across the top does have pivoting lights which makes working on the setup not only easy, but almost fun.
some people recently learned marty still didn't carry a cell phone. as most, they pushed her on this doing little to hide their incredulity. her response.
The only reason I would need a cellphone is to call people to tell them I'm running late but everyone I know already knows I'm going to be late so what's the point?
a lot of science has come out in the last few years about the power of posture, namely on our mood. the classic example being smiling helps your mood in a number of ways, in fact it is impossible for smiling to not improve your mood (TED the hidden power of smiling). then there was this reasonably popular treatise about how you can change your complete emotional state by simply altering your posture (TED: your body language shapes who you are). i'm mildly embarrassed to admit to trying this before a few important encounters i had a few years back and can report there are definitely some merits to the claims which i will also report surprised me more than a little.
a friend recently turned me onto the newish tim ferriss podcast. he is the 4-hour workweek/body guy. his shows are long and he talks more than he maybe should (i assume his interviewing and editing skills will improve as he does it longer) but there have been a couple of affirming and revelatory bits of info pass through thus far, which for those who are familiar with ferris is surely what one would expect to happen given his dense and intense way of approaching things.
i won't bore you with the affirming parts as no one cares about that except me. but one of the revelatory snippets talked about people and their cellphones. it turns out that any person engaged with their phone screen is in a classic "losers" position. think of someone who just lost a tennis match. head down. shoulders slumped. disengaged from what is around them. and if you give any credit to the body position and framing studies above, this is doing you no kinda favors. and now when we see older folks grousing about all of these losers and their smartphones, it turns out they are a little more on point than we may have first given them credit for.
and lots of science has also verified that people's connection to social media is a fraught and losing psychological endeavor--put differently you will never win the psychological health award by playing a game that never ends and hosts an endless stream of players. now, not only are people losing emotionally, they are also losing physically.
this will give me a new game to play as i wait on people sitting through green lights, blocking sidewalks, and holding up checkout lines because i know, based on the above ted talk, smirking is better than scowling.
yes, please don't sweat so much on our fitness band -- it's not good for it.
l have been seeing more and more articles on how fitness trackers are not living up to their expectations. based on my conversations with people most of these trackers need a boxing about the ears. my five second evidence-light sense is, apple watch aside, the better a tracker looks, the less functional a tracker is. i exclude the apple watch mostly because i think it is far more than just a "step-counter" which is essentially where all these trackers initially took hold.
here's one sample case, i bumped into a guy wearing a fitbit. i always thought those were very sleek and sharp looking. but after a ninety second conversation with him the thing seems like little more than an expensive wrist bangle. first he said he got it wet and it stopped working. how the hell can an activity watch not handle moisture. then he went to show me one of the readouts but it was too sunny and we couldn't read the screen. he cupped his hand over the truly miniscule display and pulled it close to his face before reporting that he just couldn't see it. really? unreadable in the sun. but, to be fair i could see how handling water and being readable in daylight could get missed during the design requirements session. i mean those are pretty unusual asks for something fitness related.
while the man was blocking light and moving his hand around looking for an angle that would let him see the readout, i glanced down at my wrist and noted the large, readable print. print that you could still read even if someone aimed a bright flashlight right on the readout, in the daylight. like with the kindle paperwhite folks, the makers of my band have this screen-in-the-sun business fully figured out.
if you are one of the reported masses struggling with the form or function of your band, before giving up on the market i would suggest looking at garmin's vivofit 2. it is surely not the sharpest looking band on the market and looks downright utilitarian, but that is because it is. by my account, it is the functional and smartly designed workhorse of the activity watch lineup, but for reasons i don't understand it is not part of these tracker roundtables, the ones i'm reading at least. i think it may be yesterday's news even at garmin as i see they just released the vivofit 3.
i initially had the first generation vivofit. i got it to let me know when i was sitting too long. it was ok but i had three gripes about it:
i wanted an audible chirp when the alert to move took place.
i wanted a backlight so i could read it at night.
i wanted a stop-watch feature.
when they announced the vivofit 2, it possessed all of these features. i upgraded mine the day it came out and have worn it every day since. so if you're finding your activity tracker wanting, i would highly recommend looking at a vivofit 2.
and for what it's worth i'm leary of garmin's vivosmart which is a "connected" version of the vivofit 2. i predict too many distractions. i know i'm in the minority here but like to keep my gear as simple as able. i'm confident i wouldn't benefit from the connected features because the reason i have it is to tell me to move (and record my vitals and activity) and twitter or messaging is not part of that equation. not only is it not necessary, i deem it counter-productive. this is part of the reason i don't like the apple watch as a fitness band. i've seen way too many exercisers standing on the side of the road/track punching out messages on their mini-computer. not helping.
as noted above, i just saw that there is now a vivofit3 but they changed the screen pretty dramatically, seeming to model it after some of the more stylish/connected trackers. my spidey-sense tells me there is trouble ahead. the amazon reviews are also middling so i'm not seeing anything to run me off from my 2, especially since the 2 is fully meeting my needs at present (i have nary a suggestion for improvement). one possible good thing to come from the release of the vivofit 3 may be the vivofit 2's are now only $60 now -- cheap enough to try it out or get a backup.
i don't know what is harder with good design: coming up with the initial idea or protecting a proven one. why are we so averse to letting something that works do what it does, work, and leave it alone or at least better protect the refinements.
that above sentiment reminds me of something i heard someone recently obvserve about self-help books. there are loads of them that teach/tell/help you become successful, but there really aren't any that teach/tell/help you STAY successful. thinking on it for a few moments, success is a different animal that carries some new and often confusing challenges. it is a most astute point and worthy of some attention.
marty was driving home from georgia after a week away with the kids. i was in a meeting in my office. in the middle of a sentence my phone, which was sitting the desk between the man i was meeting with and me, began to ring. in the seven years i've had my phone this might be the eleventh time it rang as no one really had my number and those that did knew using it was about as effective as screaming my name out their front door. surprised to see it come to life, i glanced down at the screen. it read: SEX GODDESS. i swung my eyes to the man on the other side of the desk to see if he noticed the caller. he had not. i said i had to take it and answered the phone and heard:
hi troy. it's marty. we got a flat. everyone is ok, but we're stalled out here and i wanted to let you know.
i later told the guy what happened and was relieved at the time that he didn't see it. he said if he did see it and i wasn't going to answer it, he surely would have.
i recently bought amazon's most recent technology offering--echo. it is very similar to iPhone's siri but instead of being carried around in your pocket, it sits somewhere in your home. i situated ours on a window shelf in the kitchen. it's a fun sort of toy that can play 80's music (my preference) while you cook, make note of things you need from the store, tell you jokes (anthony's favorite) or ...
there are also fewer fights around the dinner table thanks to all those facebook feeds
kottke recently shared a story from a guy that said since smart phones arrived, nobody picks up coins they see on the street anymore.
From 1987 to 2006, he averaged about fifty-eight dollars a year. Then Apple introduced the iPhone, and millions of potential competitors started to stare at their screens rather than at the sidewalks. Since 2007, Pasquier has averaged just over ninety-five dollars a year.
my smartphone observation, and one of the few true boons of the technology would be an immediate and sharp decrease in the incidents of road rage you hear about. turns out people are too distracted to get annoyed at anything.
and there is a comment marty made a few years back that stuck with me. if you recall, marty taught 9th grade science for eight years in the 90's. then took nine years off to be home with the kids. she is now in her third year back in the classroom. when she first returned i asked her what, if anything, had changed in the educational landscape. her response: "well, there weren't smart phones when i taught before." i'll leave it to your imagination to ascertain if their impact on our educational process has helped or hindered our mission to grow a new and improved generation of thinkers.
the further we advance in time, the more the movie wall-e looks like a documentary and less like a kids movie.
marty voiced something i've been wondering a lot lately but haven't trusted myself to speak about. she commented:
Who in the world is everyone talking to on the phone? When i get to work at seven in the morning, over half the people getting out of their cars are on the phone. Virtually everyone I know is still in bed at that hour.
i've had that very thought (not the early morning hour bit, but the who is everyone talking to) as i watch cars go by as i ride my bike or sit at red lights or do anything that puts me in the path of other folks. please note that this part of the sentiment is not a judgement but just an observation as well as a genuine curiosity. the logical part of my mind anwers the question of who everyone is talking to is, obviously, each other.
this is not to say that i don't have judgmental notions about people's distracted states, especially while driving (seconded by when they are conducting transactions). after our last day of skiing, an 18-wheeler drifted fully into our lane at 70 miles an hour and i had to drive my car, also going 70 miles an hour, onto the shoulder to keep from getting side-swiped. the man never saw me before, during or after his maneuver. then the next day when we were literally one mile into our 1,300 mile drive home a girl came barreling through a red light where we were turning and came inches from caving in the passenger side of our van at better than twenty miles an hour. she definitely saw me as i could see the sheer terror in her face as she saw the near collision unfold.
i continue to be struck that more is not done regarding the legality of using a phone while driving. i'm convinced that this is largely due to the fact that one of the greatest abusers of this tenet seem to be police officers themselves. it's rare that i see a cop rolling by who is not on the phone (i wouldn't say the same of state troopers i've observed). and suit/business types seem to be another high-frequency abuser of one-handed, half-minded driving. i assume some of the these folks are the ones we would turn to for help in changing the law so when the law-makers and law-enforcers are big users themselves, it's hard to think there might be help close at hand.
the frustrating part of it all is in time i think this behavior will go the way of our pre-seatbelt and biking-helmet existence. there is just no sane, rational or intelligent argument in defense of the practice. none. i just wish we'd hurry up and come to our collective senses already.
one final aside related to marty's initial question above. back in the nascent days of cell technology (e.g. car-mounted, brick phones) a friend of mine, man-who-screams-like-woman, had a scanner that could listen in on the conversations at hand. he and another friend would stay up way into the night searching for and then listing to any nearby conversations they could detect. as it was still a newish thing, i asked what sorts of things merited the need for being able to call someone from anywhere. he said that well over half of the conversations they picked up on involved people in extra-marital affairs. and this was exactly what i told marty when she asked who all those people were talking to at seven in the morning--their lovers who they couldn't talk to at seven the previous night because their wife was around. for anyone thinking the percentage can't be the same given how many phones there are in play now i would only say the divorce rate trends will not support your argument.
marty's favorite spring break moment didn't emanate from one of our family members, in fact, it didn't come from a human at all (part 1). instead, it came from my iphone. it was our first night on the road and we were nearing our first planned stop. as we approached the city, marty punched the address of our end destination into my iPhone and hit the ROUTE button. the computed voice took over and began guiding me to our hotel. in less than ten minutes we saw our spot on the other side of the highway. the iphone instructed me to exit the highway. at the top of the offramp, it told me to turn left. after crossing the highway it, curiously, told me to get back onto the highway. i recalled there was another exit ramp about a mile down the road and assumed, without much time to think about it, that perhaps the proper way to get to the hotel was using the previous exit and the mapping software was correcting its oversight. so i pulled back onto the highway and headed back in the direction we had just come. as we began to pass by the hotel the iphone advised me that our destination was on our right and that we had reached the closest navigable location and should park and walk the rest of the way. were we not sitting on a federal interstate and were there not a fence between us and our destination i reckon that is maybe what we might have done but since we could see all sorts of roads leading up to the hotel on the other side of the fence we chose to push forth and actually drive to the hotel's parking lot.
i'm sure it would not take much to convince you that the phrase "you have reached your closest navigable point" said in an automaton-miming voice was repeated often over the next nine days. it is a surprisingly nimble phrase that can be contorted to fit a shocking number of situations. in fact, i'd be rather surprised if those simple words haven't just become part of our family lore and will make appearances in our family vacations for decades to come. further, that experience has just become my latest and greatest bit of ammunation in my debate (with the world) on the evils of gps systems.
the recent news that microsoft was looking to buy mojang's minecraft had the elementary playground in a frenzy. at one point a kid ran up to anthony, shouted the news in his face and when anthony didn't really respond the boy grabbed him by the shoulders, shook him and screamed that he was totally under-reacting to the news. alex and i had a timely dad-lunch scheduled later that day. our entire hour was filled with talk of the sale.
after going over the perils of tinkering with something at its peak (never mess with a winning game) i asked alex what he thought Notch, the rumored hold-out owner should do. without much of a pause alex said, "well, he seems to love what he does and given how many people play minecraft i guess he has enough money to pay for his house and live, he should probably not give up the thing that makes him most happy."
to my emphatic retort of, but alex, it's a billion dollars.
his reply.
but what if he can't find another thing that he enjoys as much as this. then he traded something he loved for something that he doesn't.
i'm often struck at how quickly kids can boil down adult decisions.
after a little more digging into the story we learned that while Notch loved the creative and creating side of his minecraft project, he very much did not love the business side of things, so the release of the project made more sense than initially thought.
when the news of the sale finally hit, every minecrafter i knew, young and old alike, were visibly pensive at what was in store for their beloved technology in the hands of an organization known for fumbling easier slam-dunks than this.
on the first morning with marty's new phone in the house, the low battery alert started chirping at 4:45 a.m. starting my day two hours and fifteen minutes earlier than i had planned.
on june 5th at 12:55pm in an exchange that took a total of 35 seconds, marty walter made her very first phone call from her very first cell phone.
while marty was examining the cheapest flip-phone models the store had to offer, bella kept drifting towards the sexier, smart-phone options. seeing bella's longing glances, the young salesman sidled up next to her.
SALESMAN
you want a smartphone?
BELLA
oh my god. yes. they are so awesome.
SALESMAN
what is it specifically you need it for?
BELLA (stammering)
uhhh. well. uhhh.
SALESMAN (turning to marty)
that's what they all say to that question.
if you don't recall the start of my minecraft career, it might be prudent to refresh yourself before continuing.
i'm continuing to log minecraft hours with the boys. playing with the boys reminds me why adults often talk about how quick kids are to pick up new technology things and how young people view us as slow and addled. after ...
i have a text-able phone but it is pretty exclusively reserved for work matters. when people outside of the office ask me for my number my pat response is "you'd have better luck getting minka kelly's number than mine." and even with work, i use the texting feature namely as a pager, meaning you can send me a text but i would not suggest depriving yourself of any gulps ...
i'm sure by now you've all seen this video, but still...
this strikes me beyond the well done sentimentality as it points to a gaping hole in my screen policing philosophy, a hole my children are just beginning to discern. the loophole is this: i will allow my children immense access to technology in the name of active creation. and i will restrict, with equal vigor, the time they use technology for numb consumption.
as for my criteria of what is creation, they are broad. i'm indifferent if you're plotting out a website, writing a short story, shooting a video or even trying to make a wonky maze in minecraft—if that's the plan, plug in and hack away. conversely, if the agenda is to troll other people's websites, read the stories they crafted, watch their video-making achievements, or play a wonky maze someone else made, time is up, log off, go outside and get dirty.
bella is the first to begin to glean this paradox in her father because even while on restriction from screens, she's noticed any kid with a plan in hand gets greenlit to the machine of their choosing. before you start picking at my methonds, please know one needs more than a fanciful vision to get past the logon screen. outlines, sketches, mockups are the sorts of keys that can make the doors swing wide. lacking that level of planning, a child will be sent off to better collect their thoughts. if they can't get the plan on paper they either weren't serious or they weren't ready.
and if you gave me ten years, i don't think i could have transformed this belief with anywhere near the payload this apple ad achieves in a mere ninety seconds. fully ridiculous. holy smokes are their people good (ahem, creators).
as for me i think i've done about all the creating i've got in me for 2013 so i'll be stepping away to relax by the fire, smile at the dinner table, and tell animated stories with friends and family while lazing on comfy furniture next to lit trees. may your next weeks be rich with laughter, contentment and liesure while we all get a societal kitchen pass to spend time with our friends and families.
see you on january 6th.
p.s. speaking of creating, after entering this post into the database, i noticed that it is the 2,001st entry in the monorail blog. things, good and bad, do have a reliable way of accumalating on us. it's the quiet beauty of the slow drip.
this is an issue soundly in the "getting worse" column.
we live near a university campus and the students just returned for the new school year. since their arrival i've seen multiple astonishing demonstrations of obliviousness due to "living in their phone-itis". the most glaring case being a guy who walked into a busy intersection at a snail's pace. aside from the slow shuffle of his feet, all of his attention was spent trying to block the glare of the sun from his screen. meanwhile a long stack of cars waited for him to cross the street. i'd say he's mostly lucky the person behind the wheel of the lead car wasn't doing the same thing he was, otherwise all they would have found was a red smear and a shattered iphone.
between blocking traffic, having unusually loud one-sided conversations in public spaces, walking into people, sitting through green lights, slowing down order lines, derailing live conversations (the most unfortunate of the lot for me) and on and on, i think we need a new term to describe such indiscretions because the words we may have used in the past, like, say, "inconsiderate", no longer convey, fully, the numb egotism of this behavior.
before the school year began marty went to school to work on her room. alex tagged along. once in the room alex asked if he could play on the smart board. marty said he could but it wasn't working. she explained it stopped working towards the end of last year and she had to have someone come look at it. alex asked what was wrong and marty gave the number one answer by non-technical minded folks to technical-minded folks saying "it was broke in the kinda way that when i tell it to come on, it doesn't come on".
alex began his silent rumination on the problem. in this studious state he is perfectly still. if you watch him really close you will see his eyes dart over the landscape in question. in this case his eyes travelled from the screen to the ceiling mounted projector to the computer on the desk. after a bit of time he went to the desk and started lifting and separating cords studying where they went. marty continued her organizing hardly noticing the quietest of her children. in time alex said, "you should try it now mom". patient and open as always, marty fired the machine up and began going through the steps. as it came to the point where the routine failed she proactively announced that "and this is where the projector should come on but just stopped working one day" but in the midst of that sentence the wall behind her lab table lit up and displayed the screen from her desktop. marty lit up brighter than the wall, turned to her ten year old son who was wearing a barely perceptible grin and gave him a giant appreciative hug, the deep kind one pulls out just for special occassions.
Last Tuesday my laptop stopped working. Signs pointed towards hard drive failure. Being a faithful user of the wondrous and reliable Time Machine, I feared not for my data making the situation merely inconvenient. Being the middle of the week I didn't have free cycles to give to the repair so tabled it until the weekend.
I mentioned my downed machine to a friend later in the week. When he proffered the expected 'bummer' I replied it surprisingly wasn't much of a bummer, and it was actually kinda nice. Without a machine to mindlessly, magnetically be drawn to in the evening, I found my time at home sedate, like the most sedate I can recall (caveat disclaimer-an iphone allows me to see I have no pressing email and/or issues (which I never really seem to have, like ever)). Wednesday night after dinner and getting the kids down, I finished a book. Thursday night after dinner and kids I visited a bookstore walking the aisles for over an hour considering candidates for my next read. Friday night we were out but when I came home I was spared the usual draw to my machine to just check on 'the state of the world'. Instead I made ground on the much more personally relevant book I had bought and actually slipped into bed at a sane hour like a sensible human instead of wrecking my weekend, the crown jewel of my week, before it really got underway by starting if off bleary and unrested.
Saturday evening, aleo and I ran out for a replacement drive. Upon returning, aleo, looking at ifixit.com directions, fully completed the repair-- opening my machine, pulling the bad drive, installing the new, and closing up his titanium patient--pretty dang neat to watch. I planned on using my post-kids Saturday evening to restoring my machine from backups. Upon firing it up the machine still struggled. Further inspection makes the culprit look like, not the drive but the drive cable. Another night without a computer, which translated to another night of reading and enviable quantities sleep. In fact, after we discovered it was the cable I told aleo drats and confessed we might need to pull the drive he just installed. He said, "That's alright dad. But maybe we should do it in the morning. We don't want to be tired and crabby on mother's day." Rock star!
The good news is I scored a few more days without my digital crutch, which aside from chatting with you all I find I don't really require much these days outside of work hours. In the same conversation mentioned above with my friend I told him of a local business-owner here, like one of our city's most successful and creative and certainly the modern-day architect of my community, does not and never has had an email account. If you want to do business or interact with this fella you call him or make an appointment for a live conversation. I find myself regularly thinking of this man's choices. My friend put it best when he assessed his chances for such a lifestyle by saying
Technology has become nothing but a tool to me and I'm no longer excited by its offerings and just get annoyed when it doesn't do what it should. But, it is admittedly my only viable skill that I can offer people so I think I'm stuck with it for the moment.
His sentiment pretty accurately describes my boat as well. And let's be clear, I'm not angsty about my situation. Without the technology boom of the late 90's I can't imagine what I'd be doing for a living but I can near guarantee I wouldn't be enjoying it as much as I do. If I've learned anything this week, it is that not only can I manage with less digital minutes in my life, but that my life would be more pleasant and sedate without them (this realization is no kinda good news for my kids as I was already a bit of the amish-style dad on the street). Now if I could just find the strength to break the hold my computer has on me without using a hammer to do so, i'll have more restorative evenings and proper nights of sleep in the time ahead.
note: the astute eye will see the above post uses punctuation. worry not. this does not mark a new and conforming troy. just a troy that doesn't have his usual tools at his disposal and given the temporary nature of his plight doesn't feel like losing minutes with an amazing book he stumbled upon to correct the annoying side effect of an auto-correcting word processor.
before you find our turn of the century digital ziggurat. by most standards it would be deemed quite modest. i called it minimalist. in the reflection you can see our tv room which was considerably more modest than our digital investment. we called this cozy. and cozy it was, as long as you didn't have company. it proved perfect for a single person, upright or stretched out. two people, upright or ...
