Still Living Out of Boxes . . .

You are a long-suffering bunch, and this is certainly to be commended. I have been messing around computer-wise for a number of months, and the effects have been clearly visible, some of them mud-fence ugly visible. I wanted to take this moment to praise you, and for not swearing at me in the comments.

I also wanted to explain. So let me explain a little bit. I am a technoramus, and I can only learn my way through computer stuff if I labor heavily, with beads of sweat on my brow, and with my tongue sticking out of the corner of my mouth. In some fields of knowledge, I read or hear something and the datum that I just read or heard has little bits of velcro all over it, as does certain parts of my brain, and — ta-da! — that information will be readily available to me until the day I die. I have control over some of this, and no control at all when it comes to other aspects of it. Why do you build me up, build me up, Buttercup, baby, just to let me down, let me down, mess me around, and then worst of all, worst of all, you never call baby when you say you will, say you will, but I love you still, I need you, I need you, more than anyone . . .

When it comes to other kinds of knowledge, I can do it, but no longer with velcro brains.

No, now  it is teflon brains. Nothing sticks. Mechanical knowledge is like that for me. I have done serious engine work on some of our cars before, and have figured it out, but I have a high level of assurance that if I had to do the same thing over again a couple months later, my mind would be the acme of Locke’s tabula rasa, worth preserving in a jar on some philosopher’s desk. Wood isn’t like that. When I learn how to do something in carpentry, I remember how to do it. Which brings us to the painful subject of ones and zeros.

This whole field bewilders me. I am a tyro, an abecedarian, a mere colt, a rookie, a neophyte, a greenhorn. I have been at it for years, and am still regularly flattened by this stuff. This is is not to say there has been absolutely no progress — for I have detected some movement, some unbending of the programmers, in the direction of user friendliness.  In other words, I don’t think I am gaining on it, I think some senior executives in the business world have laid down the law to the programmers, and told them that idiots are a potential customer base as well.

Well, you might say, instead of whining and complaining like some grouchy Israelite in his wilderness tent, why don’t you just hire people to handle that stuff? Well, computer experts for hire come in two basic versions. One version says that every other designer out there is an idiot, but that if you place yourself into his hands, he will scrap everything you have up to this point, introduce some new gee whizzery that will address all difficulties. He will do all this for you, then divorce his wife and run off to the Bahamas with some floozy to become a beachcomber. There are variations on this, but that’s the gist. And there you are, staring at a situation that has fallen significantly short of awesome.

The other kind is honest, competent, on top of his game, and as a consequence finds himself crazy busy.

So I decided — win, lose, or draw — that I am going to have to learn how to do all that stuff I am not naturally good at. I am going to have to tote that barge, lift that bale, and not only so, but will have to remember where I left that bale after lifting it, and where the rope goes next time I have to tote anything. This is a tale of sorrow, and you should really feel my cyber pain.

So a while ago I left Joomla! and moved over to WordPress, and after trying out various themes, I got Michael Hyatt’s  new theme called Get Noticed! It has lots of boxes in the back room that I have not yet opened, but I have been systematically learning WordPress generally, along with the turbo-features of this particular theme. All of which is to say — remember that long-suffering of yours that I mentioned at the beginning? — we are about a third of the way there.

If you noticed that I have introduced something that strikes you as perfectly foul, please say so. It may not be that I have settled on that particular thing. It may be that I was just in the back room,  flipping switches, seeing what they did. That happened, for example, when are flipped the order of the comments around, so that the most recent ones appeared at the top. After this excited some comment, I flipped the switch back again. And maybe, if you were objecting to the weird colors I was using — “Look at this, Kimberly,” you said to your wife. “All his taste is in his mouth.” Yeah, well. Maybe it was because I hadn’t figured out the color buttons yet. And if you go up to the very top menu bar, and take a gander at the drop down menu that remains to this day, you will see at a glance that I have not found all of them yet. Pesky little things.

I have also been fooling around with the insertion of pictures, and for this post, a cartoon I drew with my very own finger on my iPad.

Changing the metaphor yet again, we are in the midst of a shakedown cruise. Thanks for coming along. If you see a glaring problem, just glare back at it. Say something. And after I learn this baby, and I can remember what I have learned, then I am sure I will be perfectly insufferable. Fortunately for all us, that should be a while yet.