As the introductory post for this blog, this is a long one:)
I watched a biography of the late great Jerry Garcia last night, reminding me of my active deadhead years and the tag the Grateful Dead used on all communications from them, phone and print messages for tickets, merchandise, and music: keep in touch. Once again they are my mentors as I sail forward into today’s electronic forest to find the best tree for me. I have decided that although I have used computers, and even installed my own systems and software, for twenty-some years, it is time to bridge the gap in understanding that I inevitably feel when I consider electronic working parts. I believe by now that, excepting out for individual talents and proclivities, this gap is generational and for people between the ages of 60 and 80, almost universal. We have all seen that our own older generation (80-100) has the same kind of gap with even the telephone, many senior seniors barely able to find the right end to talk into, many unable to answer something with buttons and no “receiver.” My take on it all is that if you were not introduced to a technology at an early enough age, it will not come naturally to you; and whatever skills you might have developed to cope when you encountered it are the first to go as you slow down. I have a permanent deep crevasse between me and my electronic devices and I have decided that it is important to build a sturdy and stable bridge over that gap. If we do not stay connected as we grow older we become increasingly isolated. Not that this doesn’t look more and more attractive, considering those damn kids today. . .
This quest is today really
all about the devices we have available to use to communicate. An embarrassment of riches for those
fluent in electronics, for me it is more like standing in a tornado surrounded
by whirling little phones and glowing laptops, feeling like I must dodge the
BluRays that surely are coming from space invaders and trying to grab something
solid out of the air to talk or write on without having to sign up for a
graduate class in computer science. It probably doesn’t help that I am not
mechanically inclined and always have had to read the manual repeatedly to make
things like televisions and video players do my bidding, but, with enough
focus, I have always been able to make it happen. One difference now is that
the path forward (what I want) was more obvious then – there were not so many
solutions to your viewing needs, for example. I still believe that Beta was
better, but it lost to the competition and video was king. Who remembers
Super-8? But another important difference is that it is more difficult for me
to focus on things I don’t particularly like as I get older. Why should I? I don’t want to! And most discouragingly, it is almost
impossible to retain what I learn under these conditions. The “repeat and
learn” part of it all has seemed to become enormous in just the last five
years.
Recently my husband and I
invited my mother (77) and her older sister (79) to meet us in a nice hotel in
a city halfway between where we all live for an urban adventure. My aunt had
with her a new little red cellphone that was packed with features and a very
nice hi-res camera. She was
enthusiastic and used that device constantly, taking the manual out of her
jeans pocket to look up each thing over and over; in fact, she got some great
pictures and always could tell us what time it was. I was supremely impressed, as her attitude had all to do with
it. She would cheerfully explain to us once again that it was a new phone, whip
out the reading material, adjust and try the result. It must have happened 30 times in the 24 hours we were all
together.
It made me think about my
curmudgeon approach to my computer and the phone I grudgingly obtained at my
daughter’s insistence, the free-with-service one that I dropped and cracked a
year ago. I can use the camera,
but I can’t figure out how to save my files somewhere other than memory–I am
always having to delete something to get a new text photo of my grandkids. She did teach me to Bluetooth into my
computer, which I have done maybe three times in the last year, but I still
must look it up in the manual every time I try it, and I let it stay full a long
time so I don’t have to bother. I find the phone to be a pain in the ass and
wish I didn’t need to carry it, but the reasons for are a lot more than the
reasons against: I have handled two surprise abnormal births into my family and
a bone-crushing basement-fall/surgery emergency on that phone, and it was a
godsend to be able to contact people so easily. I also keep it on my person so
that if I needed help I could call someone to my rescue. Help, I’ve fallen and
I can’t get up. Perhaps I am not quite ready to hang something around my neck,
but with a phone in my pocket I should not need to. As a graphics person I have
always been interested in cameras, and some new phones (like my aunt’s) can
easily double for a good camera so I can carry one less device when I travel.
And a mobile method for email (which I like a lot, by the way) is great.
So where and how do I start
looking to the devices I would like to have? How do I learn what their features are when I can’t even
understand what the marketing means? What is a 3G network, anyway? LBJ took the
IRT. . .
Well, it can’t be more
confusing than LSD. So off shopping on the internet, I find two techniques
immediately helpful.
•Look
up definitions of every term you don’t understand; print to study or keep a
notebook for review if you need to.
This makes the going very slow, as I found three items in the first two
sentences on a comparative phone site. Be patient, do your homework.
•Ask
the young people who know things. We all have family and friends who seem to
understand how it all works. Get
explications and hands-on help as much as you can. I have a great IT person where I work who thinks it is his
calling on earth to help people understand their computers.
•Resist
the urge to electronically just do it and not understand why, like if your son says
you need a remote device for your laptop and he gets it for you and it makes
your laptop run your tv. That is
great, but how does it work?
Everywhere you gather knowledge you gather a piece of the puzzle, a
place to hang the next bit of information. That is how our brains work anyway–go with it in a big way.
The Confusion of Connectivity
Connecting to the
Internet: Services
Okay, now I am really lost.
There are so many options for so many devices and so many apps and so many
programs that I am completely confused when something goes wrong and I have to
address an issue. Just how things
connect to the internet is fraught with wrong turns and double meanings.
For
one basic example, take the difference between cable access to the
internet and wireless access to
the internet. Intuitively you are
correct to think one comes through a cable and one comes through the air. Seems
simple enough. I have a city
wireless service as my home internet access and so I have wifi (wireless) service, just as the coffee shops do. It comes
through the air. I am lucky to live in a city that developed this kind of
network citywide, but I find that it is a little clunky and that any videos I
try to watch on the internet, which are available through the streaming of bits and bytes to your
computer screen from the saved version that is on the internet, are buffered (they stop and load more bits
and bytes every few seconds before proceeding). A movie would be impossible to watch, although a young
expert friend says that if you order one to download
(transfer to your own computer hard disk) and go away so the video buffers
itself completely into your machine, you can then watch it because it is
already inside, not outside on the internet any more. I have not tried it. I
rent DVDs at Redbox.
The
result of this experience, along with my publishing background (i.e. big and
eccentric graphic files) makes me cautious about sending things through email
to others, so often I will ask someone what kind of connection they have. Several
of my friends in distant locations have told me they have wifi and that they
don’t experience any problems with buffering like I do. I was feeling quite
sorry for myself and called up my service to come tweak me, but so far it is
only better some of the time. This
is because the air is full of the signals, if you are not tuned well to the node where the signals are emitted you
will get interference. I understand this pretty well as analogous to radio and
television signals and I am old enough to remember endlessly screwing with the
rabbit ears.
But
my friends had none of these problems and I was really feeling stupid, so
finally during a visit to one, I left her with her laptop in the living room
and went to her office, where I found the cable. It has become standard for
cable services to put a modem (receiver/translator)
on the end of their cable into your house that sends to a router (broadcaster), which is another piece of equipment that you must
buy, that sends the information through the air to your laptop, so you have a
private network that is indeed wireless, while your network service provider is cable. My network service provider is
wifi. My friends to a person did not know the difference but thought they had
wireless providers–and in a sense they do, but the definition of provider is a technical one having to do
with the company that gets you access to the internet. My friends have cable
providers, and the signals through the cables are not subject to as much
turbulence as mine through the air are. The wireless private broadcasting does
not have to go very far to get to the living room.
Adding
to the confusion is the smart phone. These have, in addition to the phone
service (also wireless), their own wireless internet networks, but they are called
3G or 4G or some such that has to do with their speed and not their
connectivity. When you sign a contract with AT&T or Verizon, you are buying
a network service provider to give you an internet wifi network. Smart phones
also offer a Setting where you can turn this direct network off (as you are
paying for how much time you spend on it) and the smart phone will access the
internet through your local wifi that you are already paying for from your
cable or through-the-air service provider. If you don’t have an internet service provider at home and
you only have a smart phone, all your connectivity costs are through that
contract.
The
newer Kindles offer the same connectivity to a wifi network, for yet another contract with Amazon, so
if you have one of those you might have a third wireless network that operates
from the tablet. These networks are always available to your device (if you pay
your bill) except in very remote locations. However, other tablets can be
purchased that offer no 3G or 4G networks (no option for monthly service for
wifi networks purchased in addition to the cost of the tablet) but use your
home internet connection, so you can Set it up to automatically jump on your wireless
network (either cabled in to you or through the air) to get full access to the
internet that you are already paying for. However, if you leave home and are
riding the bus or the train or such, that signal will disappear when you move
away from it and you don’t have any connection at all. You can use these wifi
enabled tablets in coffee houses, airports, hotels, and businesses that offer
free or inexpensive hourly access through their own wifi networks by choosing
whatever local wifi network is in your vicinity in the Settings folder of the
tablet (they automatically show up there). The same is true of your smart phone
if you want to save money by disabling it’s own network access.
Connecting Between
Devices
Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range broadcasting system that
will transfer pictures, music, and other information from one device to another
within a defined small distance. Wireless speakers work on Bluetooth, so that
mp3 music files from phone, computer, or ipod can be played through them in the
back yard, or on the porch or whatever. You will find a Setting for Bluetooth
in almost every computer and small device (including in your car), where when
you enable Bluetooth, it scans the neighborhood for another Bluetooth enabled
device and gives you a list of what it finds (each has an identifying number).
You then choose the device you want to connect to and enable their two systems
to talk to each other–this, for example, is how you enable a wireless mouse on
your new computer, or it is how I was able to see and then grab-and-drop photos
from the hard drive of my phone into the hard drive of my computer.
USB USB stands for “universal systems bus” or some such;
it has been so long I can’t exactly remember. Before this connector became
standard across computers, getting one kind to talk to another was difficult
and took voodoo specialists to find the right incantations . The desktop
revolution made it imperative that you could plug your scanner or printer directly
into the desktop computer, and so this universal plug was developed. You will have two or three USB plugs in
a home computer or laptop, and if you have more peripherals than that to plug
in (like an external hard disk for storage, a wired mouse, a big screen, etc.)
you can buy a bus with four to eight extra plugs just like for electrical
plugs.
Firewire Firewire
connections were developed to move data a lot faster between devices than
through USB. Most computers began
to have a firewire port into which a backup server or a camera connector might
be inserted, through which the bits and bytes traveled at even faster speeds.
Thunderbolt The newest fastest connector (as of summer 2014)
between devices is made for high-definition transfers and so you will now need
this for a new computer screen to be plugged in or to use the computer to send
movies to your television screen. The connection uses something called HDMI
(high-definition) technology and
these devices need an HDMI connecting cord to be purchased as well as the adapter device to plug into the
Thunderbolt connector.
Storage and Backup
In the beginning was the server. There were no “desktop” computers, and the servers were
directly accessed with complicated coded messages designed to get answers from
calculations based on on or off, 1 or 2 positions within the mechanics of the
beast, by operators who typed into the server keyboard. As the mechanics became
larger and faster and more questions could be answered and calculations
performed, the “languages” developed to speak to it were codified so that
regular people could learn them to use them to punch 1s and 2s into cards, that
were then fed into the servers that were by then so large they took up half a
floor of a library (you remember that, from about 1970, right?).
The technology for moving
components in the machines closer together, based on how much heat the
traveling electrons emitted and how well the materials used could take it, advanced
exponentially through the 80s, mostly through the innovations of Seymore Cray,
the eccentric genius of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and suddenly the monsters
were tamed to the size of (and looked like) a hotel banquette while they could
crunch enough numbers to impress entire nations. No one then envisioned a
laptop.
But the desktop computer was
the next big thing (well, small actually) to come down the pike, and then the
competition was for making as much memory
or space for calculations inside the tiny things as possible all through the
90s. At the same time, the desktop design facilitated their use in all kinds of
businesses that could not have afforded the cost or space of the previous
computers. Once this started to happen, and the little things could not store
all the bits of information from a whole big company inside, the familiar term
“server” came in use, where the desktops downloaded their data to work on from
machines in the back of the house that could store much, much more. They used to sell racks for stacking
the servers higher and higher as companies needed to keep more and more information,
and from these the desktops became cable-connected “workstations” that would
then “backup” or transfer the new data they created through the cables to the
on-site servers every night. Basically, this is still how it works in most
large corporations, but the exponential growth of memory has made servers much
more compact and easier to have around. Since the internet has become
available, the amount of saved information boggles the mind.
Now, there is the Cloud. I have had
little direct experience with the Cloud, as I am paranoid and assume that one
day we will wake up and nothing electronic will work. I am placing my bet that if I have electricity to power the
iPad I can read the books I have stored in it (which BTW was the reason I got
it to start with–over 200 books and counting and not a bit of shelf space
used!). I am purchasing a
hand-crank generator for that. Whereas, if you have stored information on a
remote Cloud server, you could not access it without the internet. Which is probably doomed, but it is the
only communications game in town these days. I hear they may shut down the post
office! New devices incorporate the Cloud for your information almost whether
you want it or not. I doubt it can be avoided for very long.
The Cloud is a very large
bank of servers created by companies in electronically centralized but
physically redundant and widespread places where you (or the company you work
for) can store your infomation off site (the site being your computer or
device) for a fee, of course. Your servers will back up to their servers
through the internet. Actually, some services, like my Kindle e-book service,
provide the extra Cloud space so you will buy more and not worry about filling
up the multigigabytes you have in the device at no overt charge to you. Other online Cloud services like Dropbox provide a smaller amount of
memory for free (like 2 gigabytes)
and then if you want more, there will be a charge. The Cloud location
out there in the universe is handy if you have two or more computers, say work
and home, because you can access it through the internet from any location.
They make it easy to drag and drop a file from one computer into the Cloud that
can then be found and downloaded into another. This is the best benefit I see in
the Cloud, although I guess if I had kilogigs of music or maxibytes of
scientific data I might be more interested. Still too paranoid to rely on it, I
am bummed to find that all the computer applications I know and love, like Word
and the Adobe Suite, have begun to be available for upgrade only by purchasing
licensed monthly access from the Cloud. Buying an upgrade for your applications
is another shining artifact of the past, and I find this makes me very anxious. I do believe there is little recourse
if you intend to stay connected, however, so I am going to just suck this up
and do it. Everything I own needs upgraded, a bit of old-fashioned planned
obsolescence if I ever saw it!
This piece is way too long. In future I will break it down and repost the parts by individual topic. Thank you to all who read through to the end!!!
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