~~When you have the computer blues sometimes you need to hunt a reason to smile.
- At least my pencil never crashes. -Author Unknown
- The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back. – Author Unknown
- Never let a computer know you’re in a hurry. – Author Unknown
- User, n. The word computer professionals use when they mean “idiot.” – Dave Barry
- To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer. -Farmer’s Almanac, 1978
~~You might be able to guess I’m having a few computer problems. I got somebody to work on it. It got worse. Before only a couple of things weren’t working. Now four or five more things aren’t working. Makes me a little leery about trying to fix it again. I don’t know which is worse – the virus or the cure. At this rate I’ll soon be using that pencil. ~~Pencils or perhaps quills dipped in ink used to be the instrument of choice for a writer. But it would be hard to go back to that time now. The same as it would be hard to go back to drawing all the illustrations for the newspapers the way they were doing in the mid 1800’s. In mybook, The Seeker, due out in July, one of my characters is an illustrator for the newspapers and he follows the Union Army recording the battle scenes. Photography was in its infancy and Mathew Brady did take pictures during the Civil War. It took a wagonload of equipment and the subjects of the photos had to stand very still to have their images captured. My artist character was happy with his sketchbook and pens and pencils, but if he had lived in modern times he would have had to find a new occupation. We depend on photos now to show us the news. ~~Cameras have certainly progressed until now we have these digital cameras you can carry in your shirt pocket or that are part of your phone. You can point and shoot and then look at the picture right now and simply hit the trashcan symbol if you don’t like your smile. The word processor is the same kind of advancement on the early typewriter, with similar delete options that can make you smile or lose your mind. According to whether you intended to delete or not or whether the crash of your operating system happened at an inopportune time. You know, just after you’d finally figured out the perfect words to put in your character’s mouth. Perfect words that get eaten by a computer never find their way back into your head. ~~Guess I’ll try to reboot the computer now and see what happens next. I’ve got all my words saved and maybe the dreaded blue screen won’t attack. Hope all your computers are humming and singing and showing the right pictures when you click your mouse. Here’s a final quote to encourage the writer in us all. “Computers have lots of memory but no imagination.” Thank goodness.