Today astronaut Scott Kelly returned to the United States after spending almost a year in a space lab exploring what long-term weightlessness and other things are like. Perhaps he would have called it one giant step for mankind if a colleague of his hadn’t used the term for describing a long-ago lunar landing.
It isn’t on a par with space exploration, although it feels that way: Earl and I are buying new computers. We are, as he told the consultant who’s helping us, “move from wood-burning models to laser efficiency” in one giant step. The consultant was kind enough not to laugh aloud. But we won’t be younger next year, the learning curve won’t be less steep, and our dinosaur hard-drives might not even see the New Year. So it’s time.
It’s also a time-consuming project because it isn’t just the computers themselves that are being overhauled. It’s switching to newer versions of programs, getting our new printer to interface with the updated computers, moving all our data, and making sure we have a list of relevant passwords. While the new machines are quite savvy, they are not clairvoyant and I’m betting we’ll have to input passwords at various sites at least once.
At the same time, I look forward to having a computer that is one hundred percent up to speed. Currently, mine has lost its ability to do certain functions. I can’t tell you how often I’m typing along only to find that my cursor has inserted itself into a previous paragraph and the result is gobbledygook. I spend a ton of time fixing such things.
So by this time in a week or so, I’ll be spending my time learning Windows 10 instead. I view it as one giant step in the right direction.
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