Sunday, July 12, 2015

Keep in Touch: A Sixty-Something’s Guide to !*#*!!!ing Technology


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!


1 comment:

  1. 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!!!

    ReplyDelete