Catching Up

I've really been surprised at what I've learned the last few days about what you guys have accomplished with this Internet. Looking at some other blogs, I'm impressed. Even someone's child's sniffles take on some importance. The question is, can we handle so much information? How to filter it down to what is of interest, but not close the door on learning about something unknown which would be of interest? From what I've seen, I expect that the questions have been answered, at least in good part, by those of you who have been around longer.

The pay per post idea sound interesting for a retired guy looking for some extra income. It is all fascinating.

I'm working on learning HTML. Made my first "web page" yesterday - it's not online, just on my hard drive. But it worked!! When the web first came into existence, I looked at HTML and said, no, I learned all that kind of coding to be a typesetter, and now it is totally worthless. I'm not going to waste all that brain power on something which will be useless in a few years. Well, know that thinking has changed, and it's time to learn. Wish me luck.

(This used to be in the profile. Now I have to figure out how to get it back there.)

Well, as I said before, I'm new at this and I expect to have to learn a lot. Like what happened to my picture in the profile? I had to reinstall my system software yesterday (had to get X11 installed in order to use Open Office 2. Maybe that had something to do with it. I know these web pages have to know where to look to find something, and probably something changed along the way.

That's one thing I love about computers—they show the fallibility of the human being. Computers only do what we tell them, so if the result is wrong, it is usually the human's fault, not the computer's, although we do have to allow for hardware malfunctions and software glitches, just to make problem solving more difficult. Those who can say, "Maybe I made a mistake" will get back on track much faster than those who can't.

Open Office seems really cool—all kinds of features for free, and NOT Microsoft! But there is a learning curve and the tools, at least in draw and database, are not intuitive. Resources for learning are not easy to find, at least so far. There is an extensive help file, but the terms are not explained. But maybe it's just my ignorance. I've only been working at these machines for 25 years or so.

Just Starting

They said "Create Blog" so I clicked it and here we go. Now that I have almost all the time in the world and I already spend a lot of it at the computer, it's time to catch up with the rest of you. Actually, I've been an online guy since the late 1980's, a Delphi BBS member since back before AOL, when everything was just text, no graphics. Progress is amazing. Let's see where this goes.