Daily writing prompt

Your life without a computer: what does it look like?

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Recently the daily writing prompt was something like what would your life be like without music. The answer to that question can serve as the answer to this question as well. It’s literally the same answer.

There would be no life for me without computers. At least no life that I would recognize.

My family got it’s first computer back in the early 80’s. It was an Apple IIe. I used it to type up papers for school and to play games. That’s about it. It wasn’t until after I dropped out of college in the 90’s that computers became a big thing for me. It was America Online, specifically, and it served as a pseudo social life. By 1997 I was ready to go back to school and at that point the computer became my academic field. I finished an Associates Degree and then went to a University to finish my Bachelors Degree. In both cases my major was Computer Science. I graduated in 2004 (yes, I was a career student for seven years) and then started my career a month or so later. I’m still with that company that hired me in 2004. Computers had become my career.

Based on all of that I can definitively say that life as I know it would not exist without computers. That’s not the main idea of this whole thing though. Remember when I mentioned AoL being a stand in for a social life? That continued after AoL fell by the wayside. In 2006 I was using the hell out of Myspace. Social media had it’s hooks in me and I was toast. Late in 2006 I met someone. A woman. Her name was Jen and she was brilliant. She was a software engineer and her skills and knowledge put mine to shame. I was super impressed. In April of 2007 we went on a date. That was it. I was hooked. In 2008 we got engaged and in 2009 we got married. In September 2023 we both caught Covid-19 on a trip to Disney World and now you’re pretty much caught up on our relationship.

So you see, without computers I would not have met Jen and life as I know it would not have existed. Not even a little bit. I would still have music but I would be writing and recording home demoes on tape rather than a computer. I might still have photography, but not digital photography and that was what allowed me to learn everything I have without paying a fortune in film costs. There’s also the whole instant feedback thing that digital allows for. I would never have been as into the whole thing as I am today without digital cameras.

Really, computers have been so foundational to the life I live that I would not recognize anything about myself without them. I’m pretty happy that they are a thing and I don’t want to ever have to go without them. Simple as that.

Daily writing prompt

What skill would you like to learn?

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Skills, skills, so many skills. So much to learn, so much to want to learn without ever actually working toward learning. I think that’s going to be the theme of this post. Things I’d like to learn but won’t. Something like that.

I’d like to learn to finger pick. I play guitar well enough, but I am a servant of the flat pick. I am useless as a finger picker. I’d like to be better at it, at least. Every now and then I go looking for practice exercises and then spend one or two days working on it before picking up the pick again. Same with slide guitar. I’d like to be decent at it but I probably never will be.

I’d like to be a better programmer. Ever since being promoted to supervisor at work my coding skills have gone down the drain in a big way. I’d like to be better. I would also like to learn different platforms, not the least of them being the other proprietary system my company uses. I would also like to learn how to develop iOS apps. Just for fun.

I’d like to learn how to use Photoshop and Lightroom and other photo editing software systems. I have the teeny tiniest idea of how to use Lightroom, but not enough to use it well. Everything I do ends up looking terrible. There’s a small part of me that wants to learn how to develop film too. That includes dark room printing. I doubt I’ll ever do it, but it sounds like fun in a crazy sort of way.

I would like to learn how to design and build electronics. Specifically guitar pedals and amplifiers. I soldered a circuit together once back when I was in college. It was for a Logic Design course. I know I can do it, I just don’t remember how and what I did was pretty shoddy work.

I have mentioned this one before, and recently. I want to grow my own peanuts. I want to learn how to grow them and then cook them. I already know how to eat them. It seems silly, but that kinda sounds like fun to me. I am not sure why.

One more… this one is insane but I did talk to Jen about it on our Covid drive home from Florida. There is a small part of me that wants to learn how to fly a plane. I think having a pilots license and renting a little single engine and flying around for fun (or for actual travel) would be awesome. There is about a 0.0001% chance I would ever pursue learning this particular skill, but wouldn’t it be awesome?