Modern technology

It never ceases to amaze me where technology is moving! For a really long time I have been trying to persuade a close friend that Email is way more user friendly than is SMS on your cell phone (Mobile to the uninitiated!)She refused for literrally years to listen to me, but her last cell upgrade was to a Blackberry phone. That has a QWERTY keyboard - just like a compuuter keyboard.

The only thing that I cannot see is that she can create colour coded messages! I can on my QWERTY keyboard so it will not be too long before you can do this from a cell phone!

This week I found out something! Her handset was stolen from her - at her gym - and she was forced to go back to her cheapie cell. Her insurance is going to replace her fancy phone, but that will take at least another week! She really misses being able to Email rather than SMS! Makes me think back to the first time I had anything to do with computers. I was in the Pay Corps in the Army, and there was one of (I think) 2 computers in the entire country! It was huge, and occupied 2 floors of the building, 10 stories up (to protect it against dust!) and the building occupied 2 blocks in downtown Salisbury (now Harare!) Even being so huge, it could barely do anything! Now you get computers that fit in your pocket, and call the other side of the world! Not only that, it is a camera (among other things!)

I have a cell that is less fancy, but is a satellite instructed set of maps! It even tells you where you should turn and even warns you if you are travelling too fast! Trouble is that - being of the male persuasion - I can sense where to go and it often moans at me "I told you to turn there!" and I can sense that it throws it's hands in the air when it says "Make a U turn" because I have taken the wrong turning and gotten lost! I often have full on conversations with the GPRS! It tells me "Turn here!" w3hen I know a faster route! Then it says "recalcularing route!" in an exasperated tone - before it screams at me "SLOW down!" Michele found that I am better at maps than she is in the passenger seat! On honeymoon she would often say "I told you to turn here/there!" followed by a stony silence during which I was not lost, and found the destination!) There is a common fallacy that men dont ask directions - why do we need to? We know where we should be going! A GPRS set only confirms what we know - but not all of the time!

I bought myself a colour printer for my laptop. That enables me to print off snapshots from my digital camera! That is if I dont wish to send them on Email or my blog! When I was given my first camera (aged 14 or so) it would only take 24 black and white snapshots before the film had to be sent to be developed - and that took pretty well a month! Now I can store up to 700 colour snapshots on a tiny little memory card - unless I buy one with 2 or 3 times the memory capability! Something so small can hold literally thousands of photos! So different to when I was in the army and the computer filled 2 floors of a building that covered 2 blocks! Sci-fi fantasy of phones that fit in your teeth, or cameras thet fit into pinholes, is not that far fetched!

When I started to blog, I had the option to change the font colours. Then this myseriously vanished from my toolbar! Today, I found out how to do it again, so instead of only blogging in black and white, I can blog in glorious technicolour. I missed that capability! It goes to show that there is ALWAYS something that you can learn - about anything!