Thursday, July 24, 2008

I Deserve a Gold Medal in Boredom

I literally have nothing to do today. Nor did I yesterday. The day before, I typed 5 words on a typewriter(!), and made 60 copies.


The typewriter has definitely been the highlight of this week. It's an electronic one, so it had a QWERTY keyboard (as much as it pains me to say something as toolish as qwerty, that's what it's called) and backspace and font changing and whatnot, so the only typewriter-ish thing about it was that you have to stick in the paper and like roll it through.


Or something.


I struggled with that for a few minutes before I looked it up online.


Does anyone else think that's funny? I use the internet to figure out how to use something prehistoric? I do.


Speaking of ancient technology, last week Mike needed help on a PowerPoint presentation, and he asked if I was good. I told him about the lesson we took in 6th grade and the wonders of 7th grade Computer Tech class, and off we went down memory lane.

Apparently, when he was in 6th grade, he was learning to use a slide rule. A slide rule, for those of us born after 1800, is a thing people used to do math. It's not electronic! It has a sliding thing that somehow or another does math.

It sounds a little sketchy to me, but apparently that's how all math was done until like 1975. Allegedly, they managed to get to and from the moon several times using these little doo-hickeys.

I'm still skeptical.

They also reminisced about buying sweet Apple computers as big as a house for like a bajillion dollars and thinking they were the coolest, using RPN (Reverse Polish Notation-- I told you I have a lot of time on my hands) calculators to get through some sort of science grad school, etc etc etc.

I felt like a baby, and they made it perfectly clear that they felt archaic.

Which they are. A slide rule? Seriously?

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