I sometimes experience dismay when young people are surprised that I know how to use a computer, travel alone, or do household repairs. I have been doing all those things for decades and am not ready to stop doing them yet. The assumptions some people make shouldn’t surprise me, but they do. I am fully […]
Back in the 1960s, there was a musical stage show called Stop the World–I Want to Get Off. I never saw it, but the title has often come to mind as being appropriate for personal, social, or political reasons. Today it seems relevant from all three perspectives. I am living with pain which, in turn, […]
I need a couple of buttons on my computer. One would be a “What just happened?” button and the other would be “What do I do now?” button. If you could make those for me, tech people, I will be very grateful. Not that I am ungrateful, of course. In fact, recently I was celebrating […]
The funny thing about My Favourites on my TV is that they aren’t favourites at all. They are simply the channels that I actually get on my TV. I had to scroll through the hundreds of channels listed in the guide and find out which ones produce a picture, then add them to the favourites […]
Sometimes I get frustrated when I can’t figure out a technology right away, or if I forget how to do something that I once knew how to do. For example, each time I arrive in San Jose after six months away, I never remember right away how to use the TV remotes or how to […]
I was chatting yesterday with someone who is intrigued by my English heritage, and as we worked together at the Habitat for Humanity Restore he was encouraging me to say the English names for things—spanners instead of wrenches, lifts instead of elevators, and so on. The conversation then turned to English television shows, and he […]
