Technology a good thing...most of the time...
It was getting late on Monday night. I was getting to the point where I just wanted to turn this week’s column over to some sort of artificial intelligence.
Bob was keeping me company at the time, and I have to say that a cat’s intelligence certainly is not artificial. Just ask one. Besides, he was taking cat nap number 42 for the day, so he wasn’t going to be much help.
I had been spending a good amount of time trying to work some magic with my good old MacBook Pro laptop computer. Sadly, this particular 21st century technological tool is starting to show its age, as is the person who uses it. Messages are about my browser no longer being supported are becoming more frequent.
The magic being attempted late on Monday night involved some work to fine tune a photograph which had been sent to the local newspaper. The resources which are available on the aging laptop sometime allow me to work minor miracles when it comes to fine tuning a photograph.
That’s one of the many things I like about the technology which we have available at The Paragraph Factory. Modern day wonders came to mind one afternoon last week in a rather unexpected place.
I was paying my weekly visit to the Lincoln Memorial Picnic Grounds in Jonesboro for a walkabout on a hot August day.
A fellow traveler on the Journey Through Life happened to be visiting the picnic grounds at the same time. As we were walking, he paused, stopped and looked in my direction. He looked familiar. Very familiar. But I could not immediately place him.
Turned out we had met one another back in the day...on an icy cold winter’s day in Union County. We had not seen each other...for a number of years...
We caught up on some of life’s adventures. At one point, when the conversation turned to cell phones, we agreed that we just might be Luddites when it comes to some of the wonderful technology which is out there.
This is vastly oversimplifying the topic, but a Luddite is someone who isn’t all that excited about new, modern technology. Turned out he has a flip phone. I do not.
Don’t get me wrong. I truly appreciate many of the tools which we have these days. Long, long ago, I learned how to type. On a typewriter. Kids, ask your folks about typewriters. The typing class I took in public school even had electric typewriters. I don’t even know if such things are made any more.
I learned how to shoot photographs with cameras that used film. I shot, and developed, thousands of pictures on film.
Sometime, I think it might have been late in the last century, we began to use computers at The Paragraph Factory. Early in this century, we started using digital cameras.
Truth be told, I prefer a good laptop computer to a typewriter. And I really prefer a digital camera to the old school equipment which uses film. I do not miss time spent in a dark room working with the chemicals that were needed to develop film. And I really like my Apple tablet.
Laptops. Yes. Digital cameras. Yes. Tablets. Yes. Cell phones. No thank you. They are wonderful tools. Some of them even have wonderful cameras. I just look around and see so many people absorbed with their cell phones who don’t seem to be aware of the world around them.
I had a brief, and very disappointing, experience with a “smart” phone many years ago. Call it a lack of patience on my part. The phone ended up back in its box and was hidden away in a desk drawer.
Maybe I should break down and try again. I’m pretty sure Bob could help me out...
Meanwhile...
The Peach Festival has come and gone in Cobden. Big crowds were on hand last Friday and Saturday. Mother Nature did unleash a bit of havoc with rain and gusty winds in Cobden in the wee hours of Saturday morning.
Now, it’s time to get ready for the fair. No surprise, but it looks like it could be hot during fair week. Along with the fair comes the start of the high school football season in Southern Illinois. Just between you and me, football in August just does not seem right...