Tag: technology

Online Romantic Advice

Too funny not to share.

A lazy day in EC blog land.

But still, funny, funny.

The young woman who submitted the tech support message below (about her relationship with her husband) presumably did it as a joke. Then she got a reply that was way too good to keep to herself. The tech support people’s love advice was hilarious.

The query:

Dear Tech Support,

“Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slowdown in overall system performance, particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5, and then installed undesirable programs such as NBA 5.0, NFL 3.0, and Golf Clubs 4.1. Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and House cleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. Please note that I have tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems but to no avail. What can I do?

Signed, Desperate

The response (that came weeks later out of the blue):

Dear Desperate,

First, keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an Operating System. Please enter the command: I thought you loved me.html and try to download Tears 6.2. Do not forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update. If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5.

However, remember, overuse of the Tears application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0, or Beer 6.1. Please note that Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Snoring Loudly Beta version.

Whatever you do, DO NOT, under any circumstances, install Mother-In-Law 1.0 as it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources. In addition, please do not attempt to re-install the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend Cooking 3.0.

Good Luck

Tech Support

Conversation Cafes

“Come up with a crazy business idea.”

That was the WordPress prompt today.

So here goes. Conversation cafes. This would be a Starbucks-like franchise (Tim Hortons-like for any Canadian readers).

You could even set up one of those “mug walls” where regular customers come in, grab a mug and a coffee. Like the good old days.

You could still get your long, tall, short, skinny, grande, cappuccino or moccaccino with or without whipped cream and cinnamon. The choices would be as generous as they would be in any urban coffee bar burning through mounds of ground coffee hour after hour for a grateful paying public.

Now, here’s the wrinkle. My conversation cafes would not allow any technological devices to darken its doors.

No cellphones or any other kind of communications technology. No iPads. No laptops.

The speed at which technology has become central to our lives to the point of absolute necessity is astonishing. So much so, it is hard to remember what life was like before technology.

Rectangular paper maps to get directions to go somewhere? Unwieldy and messy. I could never refold the blasted things the right way.

A busy signal on the other end of the phone line? “Oh. S/he is talking to someone else. I’ll call him or her back later.”

Remember coffee dates or dinner dates where getting together to have a conversation was the main idea? Neither do I. Not well anyway.

Like many Boomers, I grieve the loss of conversation as much as I grieve the loss of cursive writing. I am glad my adult children were exposed to it and can sign checks when and if needed. Oh wait. Checks. Also an out-of-date twentieth century business practice.

So my conversation cafes would have a nostalgic vibe, obviously. Big hair. Hoop earrings. High heels. The women would dress retro, too.

The conversationalists might either know, or not know, each other. And if they didn’t know each other, they would not be allowed to look up their profile picture and bio on Facebook, LinkedIn or X account. (For the uninformed, Twitter recently became known only as “X.” High marks for originality there, Elon Musk.)

Imagine the thrill of sitting down with a near stranger and not really knowing whether he (or she – no gender bias) was a potential axe murderer.

We’d go by the old cues. Through conversation. What do you do for a living? Who do we know in common? Where did we grow up? What school or schools did we go to? Not bad for a first conversation cafe “getting to know you” date script.

These days, the strength (or even possibility) of a first meeting depends on how closely your profile pic matches what you really look like.

If you look wildly off the mark in person, you can be ghosted before the connection is even made. Not bad in terms of efficiency. Kinda lame in terms of real human connection.

So this is an admittedly desperate attempt to steer our society back to the exchange of pleasantries that were so vital at a different time in history.

It is a call to insert humanity back into every day social discourse. An impractical attempt to hold apart the walls of technology’s inevitable march before it utterly engulfs all of collective humanity.

So my solution is conversation cafes. A place to talk. Hang out. Chill. People watching. Remember that? Conversation cafes is a wild, and probably impractical, business solution to an evolving social problem.

I admit it is hard to conceive of a world now where technology isn’t front and center in our lives. Our secretaries. Our pals. Our lifeline. Our dictionaries, encyclopedia and old wives’ tales all rolled up in one tidy and portable package.

So a conversation cafe where no technology is allowed is a stretch. And likely, if I’m being completely realistic, no business either.

I’ll admit even the notion of promoting human connection sounds old-fashioned and irrelevant these days. Which is seriously sad.

Technical Glitch

Today was weird and terrifying.

I lost my blog. Now a blog is not a thing you can misplace like a purse or a set of keys or eyeglasses.

But I did. I went to open it after clearing my browser’s cache. I went looking for it. I could not find it. Some damned link was broken

Today I learned a hard lesson – as have many others – about my dependence on technology. I am at its’ mercy. So many of us are its’ mercy.

It occurred to me I have not so much as printed out all of my blog pages.

Perhaps that’s an old-fashioned idea. Paper copies!

I am not even 100% sure if I can download them to a thumb drive. (Are thumb drives still a thing??)

Today spoke to that horribly uncomfortable feeling I have occasionally about technology. We are slaves to anonymous masters. It seems to be the way it is.

After today, I personally felt my vulnerability to the technology powers that be out there.

It accomplished one thing. I am not going to leave my creative output out there in the cloud where it could easily be blown away by the whims of some anonymous techno administrator.

For a writer who talks and writes a lot about boundaries, I learned another vital lesson about them today.

My writing. My filing cabinet. Waterproof and fireproof.

Call me old-fashioned. I’ll happily accept the compliment.

Defragmentation

Sometimes I feel like a police scanner – to the extent I even know how a police scanner works. I scan constantly through my computer and phone throughout the day, every day. It is kind of a ritual but more of a neurosis, if I’m honest.

It is an odd combination of FOMO (fear of missing out) but also a form of hyper-vigilance. I look and constantly wait for “things that need to be tended to.” A utility bill. An enticing post or meme. A bank statement. Friends’ birthdays. All things that may need my “urgent” attention.

I am so familiar with this pattern now and the feelings it is trying to manage.

My life’s work has been trying to pull back together the fragmented pieces of myself that flew apart when I was a child and young woman. Pieces of myself flew apart on several occasions before I hit the proverbial brick wall.

When I was younger, I suffered from a bad case of arrogance of youth. I overestimated my importance and ability to change the world. It is a common arrogance that life thrashes out of most of us.

Most of us settle into familiar routines as we grow into adulthood. I see that as a gift life gives us. Even plants have to find a place to dig in and take root if they are to become fully mature and productive. It underpins the philosophy “to bloom where you are planted.”

These days, I am not so sure young people are able to access and develop those routines as easily. Young adults fret and fuss about the basics way too deeply into adulthood. Their conversations are an all too familiar commiseration about how difficult life has become. Houses are unaffordable. In longterm rental accommodation, equity cannot be built. And equity has always been the most familiar and reliable route to financial security.

So people everywhere – just like me – are enraptured by the world available to them on their rectangular anchors. Problem is – and the problem is becoming much clearer to many – the online world is illusory. It is full of bias and singular POV’s and fragments of truth.

Constantly surfing the internet is like eating and eating at a buffet and yet never feeling full. It is like watching kids play on the other side of a chainlink fence. It is like blowing kisses to loved ones on the other side of a glass wall.

Nothing can take the place of that perfect first bite of something sinfully delicious. Nothing can replace that extremely particular sensation of joy and pleasure. Nothing beats good old-fashioned hugging and giggling to bond us to each other.

So I’m devising a plan. To wean myself away from this obsessive ritual of device scanning and become more deliberate about how I spend my time. The aim is to calm my mind. To stare down the internal “to-do” list. The aim is to settle down incessant demands that are largely self-created.

For the past several months, it seems all I needed were tchotchkes from online stores which I was sure would add heaps to my sense of peace and security and wholeness. Those tchotchkes have not done that and the message is coming through loud and clear that I need to shift direction.

So I have set a path. The boundaries of that path are ill-defined at the minute but that is the process new ideas go through to get born. Less time online. More quiet time with myself and in nature.

I could wrap this up by saying something clever like, “I’m heading to the internet to find articles on exactly how to do that!” But I won’t. I’ll take my coffee outside to listen to the sounds of our community starting its day in the distance and the birds in the trees around us waking up.

There is inherently more comfort in nature than chasing illusions on the Internet. We all need to relearn that.

I’m pretty sure those birdsongs will comfort and settle me. Excuse me while I turn this off to go do that.

Ain’t It Awful?

There is a personal payoff in being a little withdrawn and isolated from the world occasionally. Many people spend a lot of time observing the world and listening to the news and hearing politicians expertly and bloodlessly dissect their opponents. Those people, understandably, often have a very dim worldview.

A common complaint I hear about the state of the world is that it is awful and they can’t do anything about it. For the most part, they are correct. But what most people don’t get is that what happens out there in those other theaters of life isn’t of much importance or relevance to their own daily lives.

Yes, of course, the decisions of politicians and policies and laws that are enacted affect our pocketbook and standard of living. They may decide what we can and cannot do or where we can and cannot go. As for our regular daily lives, they are simply so much noise. It is our choice whether to listen to that noise or not.

I feel sorry for young people today who are held sway by the endless pageantry of new developments in technology and the Internet. There is this influencer who must be followed and then that one and have you seen whats-her-names newest trend-setting video but he’s all the rage now and she no longer counts. How in hell do they keep it all straight in their heads. Maybe they don’t.

Unplugging from technology seems analogous to committing social suicide these days. It is particularly sad that young people – teenagers say – who are at the very point of trying to discover who they are and what they want to be in life, have to dig through, filter out and mirror their life choices against the preaching of dozens of online personalities. Strangers in point of fact.

I am not as vulnerable to this information overload as I once was but I cannot say I am not influenced. Some websites and video reels catch me and have an uncanny power to eat up a half hour or more of my time before I am even conscious of it. There are several excellent writers out there who have my attention and I feel I can barely keep up with their output.

The chief culprits in my life presently are Facebook video cooking reels. A revolving cast of chefs from all sorts of genres display feats of culinary prowess that I would give anything to replicate. The videos are almost choreographed ballets as much as they are recipe-sharing. Happily, I am old enough to realize, that while they are dazzling, I am not inclined to beat myself up if I cannot recreate their splendid creations in my own kitchen.

I take that analogy and apply its potential to more impressionable and searching young people. I can only imagine that they must suffer for not always having the “right” clothes, or the most up-to-date cellphone, and maybe spontaneous weekend trips to anywhere but here. It is kinda diabolical.

As old as I am and with the resources I can draw on, some of these come-ons attract me. I don’t act on them and I don’t suffer for not acting on them. But if I were younger, I might feel left out.

I was at first bemused by and then a little sad to learn there is an actual thing out there called FOMO – “fear of missing out.” It seems to be there is so much technological space litter available out there that you can’t help but be missing out on something.

It is like some kind of fiendish device that is deliberately designed to keep us all “off-balance.” It seems to force people to rely exclusively on “significant” “others” “outside” themselves to find joy and happiness. They even seem to rely on them to tell them who they are. That is the biggest fraud of all. And a dangerous one if you are particularly fragile or vulnerable.

My version of “Give Peace A Chance” is unplugging from time to time. I rarely watch the news on television anymore. It is an irritation to the spirit and has an eerily similar sameness with its litany of tragedy, and skulduggery, and focuses on the worst of what humans are and do.

Books give me greater comfort. I can pick and choose among them for lessons I want to learn and master and access the emotional experiences I want to have. That is why popular successful authors are so popular. They are reliable and predictable in their style and output. Sure seems to me that in a world that is most kindly described as a little topsy-turvy, I’ll take a circuitous John Grisham novel bashing the legal system over CNN and Youtube anytime.

It keeps a rein on my sanity and a paddock for my well-being.

Starved for Insights

The sheer volume of technology tools and advice and platforms and writing blogs available today (present company included) are mind-boggling. But for all of the technological frou-frou, book writing is still, and I believe should remain, primarily a human endeavor.

I approach new technologies with curious trepidation. I don’t like relying on everyday tools that require the in-depth knowledge of a computer scientist to operate. I have no patience with panaceas. Every new “solution” brings a new (and unique) set of problems. The trouble with the massive amount of choices we have is that most of them are not easily digestible. We are awash in information but starved for insights.

I could make a very long list of the technology I have deployed and abandoned in the past. Only the stalwarts that add real value to my life have survived. Microsoft Office, for example.

Does anyone remember learning to drive a car with a manual transmission? The old stick shift. Four on the floor. There was a real knack to it. Automatic transmissions were available, of course. But the generally accepted view was you should learn to drive a stick shift first. Automatic transmissions seemed a little “less than ” and their drivers a little lazy. Anyone could drive an automatic transmission, after all.

Driving a manual transmission took skill. It was scary at first. Not only did you have to learn the vehicle’s particular shift pattern. You had to coordinate the feel and shift of the changing gears while pressing the clutch to the floor. (I accidentally hit the brake more often than I care to admit in early lessons. I don’t think I am alone here.)

At the licensing bureau, the man with the clipboard looked solemn and judgmental. It was so great the first time you could drive the car around the pylons in the parking lot. You finally mastered shifting seamlessly from first to fourth without grinding the gears. You brought the car to a full stop without smashing into any of the pylons. Or smashing your nose into the steering wheel. Receiving a pass from the grim adjudicator and finally being awarded your driver’s license was equivalent to winning an Olympic medal. There was little back then to match that sense of accomplishment and the freedom it foretold.

Today we seem to have a population that believes all of life’s rewards should come effortlessly as their due and birthright. It’s a regrettable loss of the magic and uncertainty and payoff that comes with creative ingenuity and sustained effort. Sure life and many of its rewards are hard to attain but like many hard things, the rewards can be sweeter.

In adulthood, the “first-time” thrill of accomplishments is mostly behind us. But the potential excitement has come back to me in this journey to write a book. There are more metaphorical gears and clutches and brakes and accelerators in this undertaking than I had imagined.

As a lifelong writer, I know that information isn’t knowledge and we still need humans to interpret it. To make sense of it and give it meaning. Perspective is key. A bowl and flour and eggs and sugar and milk sitting on a counter are not a cake. As much as new technology is out to dazzle and engage us (or take over humanity, according to some) someone still needs to put that cake together. Someone needs to pop it in the oven, then ice and decorate it. Put the candles on it and light them if the birthday celebration is going to hit the desired emotional mark.

I am not saying we should always be resistant to technology trends and new ways of doing. But we should push back and take our time to evaluate how these new technologies serve us, not the other way around. Slow, steady, and considered effort, seasoned over time often produces a more satisfying result for both the product and the soul. That analogy applies whether we are talking about cars, cakes, or books.

I Ain’t Afraid of No AI

The interweb is drenched with horror stories about the looming prospect that our brains and very livelihoods as writers will be overtaken by AI (artificial intelligence), accelerated by the recent release (November 2022) of user-friendly ChatGPT.

One short hop – the horror-struck assert – to total world domination by HAL’s (of A Space Odyssey fame) technological descendants. “Humans will be replaced.” “Writers will lose their jobs.” “Humans and writers will become redundant.” Great sci-fi plot drivers but, in reality, I’m not so sure.

I’m heartened by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s take. “Fear of new technologies is always driven by scenarios of the worst that can happen, without anticipating the countermeasures that would arise in the real world.” Ref: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/02/will-chatgpt-replace-human-writers-pinker-weighs-in/

Ego-driven, self-preservation-mandated lot that humans are, Pinker doesn’t think the worst-case scenarios currently being bandied about will happen. Neither do I. We are famous for bringing ourselves to the edge of crises without actually going over the falls to eradicate humankind. Ergo, saber-rattling around World War III. As objectionable as Vladimir Putin is, I doubt he is seriously inclined to wipe out the world as we know it in order to reclaim sovereignty over a small piece of Ukraine. That would be the most unfortunate Catch-22 ever.

Unfortunately, this does mean I won’t rely on AI to write the book I have committed to this year. Sigh. Pinker anticipates considerable pushback from our collective ego and common sense to allow that to happen. He cites this example: “Another pushback will come from the forehead-slapping blunders, like the fact that crushed glass is gaining popularity as a dietary supplement or that nine women can make a baby in one month.”

The speed at which technology can do damn near anything better than humans since it arrived in popular culture some thirty years ago has hornswoggled us all. Quantity trumps quality. Bling trumps class. Speed of output has won out over deliberation and thought. Technology is so pervasive we struggle to define or even remember what it is to be human.

So we suffer. En masse. And self-help book publishers, therapists, and a great swath of pill pushers reap the rewards. Even if there was no other argument to make for the value of writing, what matters is that it captures for us what is essential for us as humans. There is a crucial role – and one might argue an essential role – for humans that focus on human stories and issues now more than ever.

So, AI, honey. Hold my beer.