About Technology

So...a few words about technology; the good, the bad, and the “oh well”.

I love this stuff and I love electronic gadgets; things that are shiny, pretty, and cost way too much. The more buttons on the gadget, the better. And joy of all joys, my contract is up on my cellphone! So you know what THAT means??? It means I now have the perfect excuse to go out and get an electronic gadget!!! Woohoo! Right now I have my eyes on a cellphone that has GPS, is an mp3 player, and will enable me to watch TV on it. Keep in mind I never watch TV at home so why would I want a cellphone with TV viewing capabilities? (Shrugs) Because I just want one? Well, ok, I do watch occasional TV, but only "Ugly Betty." I love Ugly Betty! I'm working on trying to get hooked on "Lipstick Jungle" but that remains to be seen...literally. I've got it recorded on my handy dandy cable digital recorder and haven't watched it yet. If a TV show can make me laugh out loud I'm instantly mesmerized. Looks like I'm going off on a tangent, ok back to technology.

So anyway, isn't this techie stuff wonderful? I can, in the palm of my hand, listen to my favorite songs, call a friend, watch TV, order a pizza through the web, send and receive text messages, and get visual driving directions via the handly GPS feature, and all from a single device. Wow.

In the Ying and Yang of life, with the good comes the bad. As much as I love technology, sometimes dabbling in it makes my head hurt and leaves me feeling like the way that poochie up in the left hand corner looks....exhausted and flustered. Kinda' like the day when I fired up my computer, clicked on my itunes library icon, saw a strange message about "corrupt" something, then found that I lost nearly all of the music in my itunes library. One minute it was there, then the next minute, wait not one minute, it was a mere second!...Poof! Gone! There were nearly 25 gigs worth of music that disappeared, probably hidden in some file buried deep within the scary and untraveled recesses of my computer; somewhere where I've never ventured before…the DARK SIDE. Yikes! This is where that fear of deleting the wrong thing creeps into one’s mind. It’s enough to freeze anyone in their tracks. I think I know a fair amount of stuff about computers but I even get spooked! I'm of the "try it and see what happens variety" of computer techie wannabes, which can get one into alot of trouble. But hey, some of us have to learn the hard way. You never forget those kind of lessons.

Do you have any idea of how many songs 25 gigs is? Well... a 30 gb ipod can hold roughly 7500 songs. So, in one click of a button, thousands of songs went bye-bye. Isn't technology grand? Well, yes and no. When I ran my virus program that same day, it now said that I had a Trojan virus. Oh boy, ever had one of those??? Well, it’s truly a pain in the behind. Don’t even get me started…because It’ll just make me say “@##%$%^$#” kind of words. So, I found the yucky virus and deleted it. After reading thread after thread online on what to do when one’s Itunes library disappears, I kinda’ gave up and decided I’d just start all over again. I rationalized that I was getting tired of those songs anyway and would put add NEW songs into a different library.

A couple of months later, after listening to me whine about what happened, Luis, one of our systems guys here at the library told me that within like 30 days of that happening I could have restored my computer back to the day before I lost the music and might have been able to get all my stuff back. Sigh. Oh well…so I learned a lesson about technology the hard way; BACKUP your files AND your itunes library!!!

I still love technology though. It’s fun, it’s interesting, and yeah, sometimes a little scary.