I am an analog guy. I was reminded of this yet again when I pulled out my watch from my mail drawer – don’t ask – and started wearing it. It’s SO much easier telling the time with a 90-degree flick of the wrist.
Sometimes, when I needed the time, and no one has a watch, it seemed laborious for people to pull their various devices from their pockets. Why is so important repairs watches? I have to tell you, I found the best! Times Ticking helped me to fix my timepiece.
Also:
* My blog briefly became much more difficult to create. As someone explained to Dustbury: “WordPress 5 changed to an entirely new editor where construction of a post that historically just involved typing now involves pasting together a series of blocks that have to be added, for example, just to have quoted text. Am I missing something?”
It was dreadful. Usually, I write in my test blog then cut and paste the whole thing, except for images, into my real blog. The new and “improved” system made me enter the text one paragraph at a time. I didn’t see a way to switch back to the familiar. Fortunately, Dustbury directed me to the Classic Editor plugin, which restores the previous editor.
Oh, the weird sizing in the text of this post – WP5. I could have rewritten it, but…
I’m also using FastCGI, and I don’t even know what that means.
* One of my buds has been experienced the blue screen of death repeatedly on his laptop and asked for assistance. He was sent these instructions, which, if I understood them, might even be useful. I experienced this irritant once myself, but the hard boot seemed to work so far, knock wood, or knock pixels, or whatever one raps upon.
* I pretty much hate my current smartphone.
1. It’s too small. It’s not just that I misplace it in the sofa or between the creases of my backpack. I was in a hotel in DC, sitting at the desk in my room, and it seemed to just disappear. It slipped under this odd, unnecessary ledge.
2. It doesn’t always work. When I fully charge it, then turn it on, it’s already down to 95%. I had it at that conference in DC and the only way to get the schedule was by downloading the app. Well, in this hotel, there were four floors BELOW the lobby, and the app did NOT work on the lower two floors.
So when I get a train ticket or tickets to Yankee Stadium, I order them online but get physical copies rather than getting them on my phone. An analog guy, I tell you.
Here’s another thing. They tell you to “protect your social network accounts with a strong, unique password and use two-step verification, when possible.” Every time I do that, I manage to lock myself out of my own devices because I’ve forgotten the password of the second step in the verification. I know there’s a password saver thing, but…
To quote Brian Wilson, “I guess I just wasn’t made for these times…”
I’m younger than you are but I am similar. I *like* having a wristwatch. (I don’t have a smartphone, though that may have to change at some point: my dumb old flip phone doesn’t hold a charge like it once does).
A common complaint I make about “upgrades” is “Why did they mess with it and ‘break’ it?” (BlackBoard, a CMS I have to use for the classes I teach – they keep adding bells and whistles to the point where the basic functions are MUCH harder to use, and since I DON’T teach online, I don’t need any of the bells and whistles)
And I hear you on the passwords. There are several sites I need to use v. infrequently – but in some way related to my teaching – where a data breach would….not really allow the hacker to do anything bad. And yet, they expect a “Fort Knox” password, none of which I can remember, so I keep them written down on a card next to the monitor…yeah, that’s great for security.
From my extreme youth onward I rarely wore a watch because everyone else did, I didn’t need to. I’d just ask some passing stranger, “Excuse me do you have the time?” And they would flip their wrist, maybe pull their sleeve and tell me. And I’d always say thank you. But then one day I asked for the time and the person said, “Sure, just a moment.” He fished into his pockets, pulled out a device, turned it on, poked it for a while, frowned, looked puzzled, then annoyed, then blank and then said “Here we go. Um, just a second.” And poked some more at it, then studied it intently, and then announced with an air of triumph… the time. This became the norm. So I stopped asking people. I still don’t have a watch and I rarely carry a device, but I don’t care what time it is anymore.
Analog is also better in cars: you can actually interpret a pointer on a dial faster than you can read a digit or three, if the dial is properly designed.
An example of improper design: a shiny dial center. The eye is drawn to that rather than to the scale along the periphery. My car does the opposite: the gauges are backlit, but the centers are blanked out.
I’d be absolutely lost without my devices, not because I can’t operate in an analog world—I am a digital immigrant, after all. But I need my gadgets for everything. My iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch and desktop Mac are all connected to each other—one address book, one calendar, one email. I can do something on one, and access it on all the other devices.
And I don’t get the problem seeing the time on a smart phone. Mine, and every one I’ve ever seen, display the time when the phone is simply raised or, at most, touched. Before I started wearing a smart watch, it took me at most 2 seconds to see the current time on my phone.
Maybe my digital immigrat status is just too far long now…
Arthur- I started wearing a watch again because, as Dan described, it was too muh of a hassle to ask strangers for the time, in precisely the manner. I think maybe Kiwis are more savvy than the digital folks here.
Thaks!