Once again, technology is getting away from me, and it is my own fault, if anyone's. Software is something I'm interested in and like to understand, but it isn't my work, paid or otherwise. Which makes it just so hard to keep up. And that's frustrating.
The immediate problem is a slightly ill-thought-out attempt to "redesign" a couple of my websites. And the scare quotes are there because I didn't actually do much thinking about the design. Just looked at a bunch of templates and saw one that looked kind of what I wanted. So I paid for it, and it was indeed almost what I wanted. But not quite. I poked about under the hood, because I have a tiny bit of ability in that department, made a couple of adjustments and then, realising wearily that my abilities have once again been left in the dust, gave it up and resolved to make do with almost. For a while.
Would you give a three-year old child a knife to play with? Well, maybe not to play with, but to work with? Definitely. Nathanael Johnson at Grist rounds up the arguments in favour of teaching children knife skills, as part of cookery skills, which, of course, are survival skills. Johnson thinks that the lack of overt hostility to an article by Sarah Elton advocating just that "signifies a tipping point in American culture" (conveniently annexing Canada for the sake of his argument).
The insoluble mystery -- is one home on the internet better than several -- continues to puzzle me. It came up in discussion on ADN, without any resolution. The reason I have several homes is that perhaps people who are interested in bread aren't interested in podcasts, and vice versa, while maybe...
This morning I went for a dawdling walk to play with my new toy: an adapter that lets me put my old, manual Minolta lenses on my shiny, automatic Sony camera. (There's a set on Flickr, completely unprocessed, if you want to see more). It was fun, for all sorts of reasons. Like, having to fiddle with aperture, shutter speed and focus. The camera does a brilliant job automatically, but it is also gratifying to make decisions.
I've always hated a certain word-processing package, because it is is just too complicated and powerful for most people. Would you let a kid play with an automatic assault weapon? 1 And yet people daily do untold harm by their uninformed use of this particular tool. That's just one example though. There are lots of others, in software and in real things, although many of the overcomplicated real things have software at their heart, I suspect.
