I Guess The Dog Was A Laptop Model, Too

We used to have the cutest dog. When she was a puppy, we took her out to the river in case she wanted to swim. She didn't want to swim. She'd never even seen water. Her ancestry had led her to want to jam her face into holes in the ground and bother rodents with it, not swim.

But we were curious, so Dave picked her up and walked into the water with her. The most amazing thing happened. Suspended above the water but still dry as a bone, she began paddling with all fours for all she was worth. All Dave had to do was lower her into the water and she shot off like a toy boat with a rubber-band motor.

That is some freakishly specific brand of smart. I'm a little higher up the evolutionary tree, and if you'd suspended me over the water, I'd have hollered and scratched and bit and dropped to the bottom of the lake like a plumb-bob.

So the problem I have with my computer is I don't know if it's more like me or my old dog.

I do like my laptop. It replaced a massive antique Dell that looked like an old-fashioned TV set. That one started getting creaky and after a while I was afraid Everything I'd Ever Written would disappear one day and Columbo and the Murder She Wrote lady would have to climb out of the screen and go looking for it.

Remarkably, the transition went seamlessly. Everything I'd Ever Written fit on a one-inch thumb drive--I don't know how to feel about that--and showed up unscathed on my laptop. I thought I was home free.

But one thing about the new-fashioned computers: they're curious. This one wanted to know all sorts of things. It's like pudding: you have to know a lot just to get it to set up. There were keychains. Passwords. Suitcases to bring to the Cloud. Extra underwear. It wanted to see my previous computer's birth certificate and tax returns. If I answered stuff wrong, it basically rolled its little eye at me. I think I might have contributed a password full of pet names and numbers, but it kept asking more and more questions, and then I just gave up. I'm still not on the Cloud.

But regular as shit, the darn thing wants me to update stuff. Asks me every day: do you want to install this? The furthest it will put me off is "Remind me tomorrow." I already know what I'm going to say tomorrow, but apparently, as smart as it thinks it is, it can't anticipate. And sometimes it wants to change absolutely everything. It wants to upgrade me to a new operating system. The Mac operating systems were named after jungle cats for a long time, and now they're geological wonders. I don't know what OS we're up to now: Saber-Toothed Tiger On Top Of Old Smoky?

I have no wish to do any of this. If I do an update, the next day will be a slog of all the old questions before I can play. It will want me to authenticate all of the crap I never quite authenticated before. I still won't be on the Cloud. And if I upgrade my operating system?

I don't know if Everything I Ever Wrote will be dog-paddling above the machine ready to scoot along or if it will drop like a plumb-bob.

On Cloud Fine

When it first occurred to me that I should have some kind of system to back up all my literary output, rather than having it merely traced into pixel vapor, my friend Walter gave me a lot of good advice. Redundancy was the key. I should have my documents copied on all my computers. I should have all data sucked into an external hard drive. I should print out everything I write and mail it to a friend whose house is unlikely to burn down at the same time as mine. I should transfer all my files onto  a thumb drive nightly and strap it to a homing pigeon. I should engrave my novels onto granite slabs and rubberize them against acid rain.

And I took all that advice to heart and bought an external hard drive, parked it next to my computer, and put new batteries in the smoke detectors. I felt marginally relieved.

What the external hard drive does is copy all my files and jam them into a little box, and it does this faithfully for a couple months, and then it does a big stretch and a yawn for another month and then sends a little oopsie note to the computer, which says "oh, by the way--you haven't backed anything up for the last month." This earns the external hard drive a trip to the mothership via US Mail, and another one shows up on my doorstep in a week. The new one does the exact same thing. So does the third, but by then the factory is no longer interested in sending me a new one.

But times have changed. Now it is possible to Back Up To The Cloud.

This sounds like something a good Christian would do to get out of dying. But I am not a good Christian, and I have no confidence that the Cloud will have me. Walter sends new, updated advice and a link to a backup service. Inasmuch as he did all the research for me, I believe I owe him the effort of sorting through the reviews on the backup service. And there I encounter this:

"After many, many kernel panic crashes, trips to the Genius bar, and drive wipes, I uninstalled Crashplan and never had another problem."

Kernel panic crashes?! I'm unfamiliar. But if it's anything like suffering an abrasion of the dip-nodule or having your winkle spindled, I want no part of it. I'm totally on board with the trip to the bar and the wiping, so I tend to trust the guy. And the prospect of never having another problem is very attractive to me. So I'm going to uninstall Crashplan.

I'll have to install it, first.

All The Pretty Little Pixels

Dave was the one who thought I should get a digital camera. He said it would be really useful for my artwork. I didn't want it, because I'd have to learn something new, and I hate that. He bought it for me anyway. A week later--I'm sure this has happened to all of us--I wanted to draw a picture of a Tyrannosaurus rex peering through gingko leaves, but I didn't have any reference material for a gingko tree. (The tyrannosaur was hard to come by too.) So I took my new camera a couple blocks away and fired off some shots of a gingko tree. My computer hoovered them right up and displayed them for me. Damn. That was slick.

The thing took better pictures than my fancy camera and cost nothing to process. Now I can point it outside my window and fire off fifty pictures in a row of my resident alpha hummingbird, whom Dave named Hannibal Nectar, just in case he turns his head just right and I get the bright fuchsia flash. Three or four of them will be terrific, but all fifty of them will be in my computer. I've now taken four billion photographs, give or take, and they're all in there somewhere. If I need to find one, I have to remember about when I took it, and that is not my strong suit.

In fact, if you asked me to name three things that happened to me in the Eighties, I wouldn't be able to slide a stake into any one thing for certain. One of the things would have really taken place in some other decade, and one of them will have happened to somebody else altogether that I have confused myself with. Remember when I fell off the back of the boat trying to give a toast? and someone will say that was Harold. And you weren't there. Oh.

Or if I'm trying to find a picture of a particular person, in theory I should be able to use the face-recognition feature on the computer. But I've boycotted that little sucker ever since the day I got an odd angle on a 4-H exhibit at the state fair and my computer asked if it was me.

There has to be a way of organizing these things. I hadn't had the digital camera that long--long enough to have a couple thousand photos though--and Dave said, you know? You should pick out the best ones and print them out and put them in a real album, like the old days. But the sheer volume of photos is overwhelming, and has a way of stripping you of your last round tuit.

There it is!

Somewhere I have a good photo of an automobile that is completely covered in moss. It would be a great illustration for a blog post about our local climate.  I needed it once and by the time I'd flipped through all four billion photos on the machine I realized I could take a new photo of a different mossy car faster than I could find the original, and I was right. I don't know where anything is. I have no idea what to do about this problem. It's like riffling through my entire vocabulary in alphabetical order to find the end of my sentence. Sadly, in fact, I happen to know it's exactly like that, dammit.

Supposedly there's some kind of cloud out there where I can put all my photos, but that sounds awfully ephemeral for someone already contending with brain fog. Once I sent them up there, how could I rain them back down?

It doesn't matter what you have a picture of now--if you ask people if they want to see your candid photo of Donald Trump in an updraft, they'll say sure! and wait for you to finger through everything on your phone, or they'll slouch behind you at your computer waiting for you to find the shot, but they don't really want to see it. Everyone is sick to death of looking at a screen. They're just being polite. People do still like pawing through the old albums. Time passes more reasonably in the albums; flip a couple pages, you gain a few years. They look at pictures of you thirty years younger, and then back at you like you're a cautionary tale. They're alarmed, but they love it.

No, I'm not scanning THOSE photos for you.

Some day my computer will blow up and smithereen my photos, and that will be that. It's just as well. They'd just be a burden for my nieces and nephews some day when I'm dead and gone, and besides the naked pictures they might be interested in are all in the old film-photo albums anyway. I've put on a few pixels since then.

The Blackcord Jumble

Recently I reached into the jumble of cords in a drawer and pulled out the very camera cord I wanted in a matter of seconds, and I realized: I might not own enough Devices. I might be falling behind. What to do? Should I run out and buy an iPad?

I asked my friends. What do you do with your iPad? What does it do that all my other shit doesn't do?

The answer was universal. Nothing. It doesn't do anything that your other shit doesn't do. It just does it splendider. It strokes instead of scratches. It coos instead of squawks. It brings you beer in a fine cold glass instead of a red plastic cup. You will love it.

Good enough for me! I tootled off to the Mac store and was much relieved to find it virtually empty of customers, with an eager trio of employees behind the front desk smiling at me as I came through the door. I know how these things go, and there's always some humiliation involved. Somebody is about to find out just how old and ignorant I am, and my chances of understanding anything are much better if my salesman isn't pressed for time. Also, if there are fewer people in the store, there are fewer witnesses to my decrepitude.

"May I help you with anything?"

"Probably," I said. "Apparently, I don't have enough Devices." I like to start out like this. It introduces me as a fairly funny person. At least, it does if the other person chuckles. If the other person does not chuckle, but merely stares at me, and fingers the bone in his ear, it introduces me as an odd and possibly idiotic person. If a comedian pratfalls in a forest but nobody is there to laugh, she is just another pitiable heap of humanity struggling in the duff.

"We have devices," the youngster said after a moment, trying. "What did you have in mind?"

In for a penny, in for a pound. "I was thinking one of those tabletty thingies," I said. I like to start out like this. It lets the salesman know that he has a lot of work to do, but that it might be amusing, if he would just relax already. And not keep staring, and fingering the bone in his ear.

We walked over to the iPad display. "What do you want it for?"

I have no idea. What does he mean by that? He sounds like someone who has just been asked if he would lend out a valuable personal tool, and would rather not.

"I don't know. I would like something portable to be connected to the Internet with, and maybe to be able to write on it. Like a word processor. I'd do a lot of that. Writing."

"You don't want this, then."

But I do! Because of its splenditude. I said, okay. I don't want to write on it. That's the last thing I want to do. I want to do all the other things. What are they, exactly?

Follows a tutorial at warp speed in which I am introduced to someone called Siri and various images slide across the screen and flip about like zoo monkeys. It looked splendid. Abandoning all pride, I begged him to talk slower. It's possible he did, but I couldn't tell. Well! This particular device is forgey, I learn. I don't know what this means. Maybe it forges ahead. That's probably good. And also, you can store a cloud in it. I don't know why you'd want to, but it sounds splendid. Oh! It's not that you can store a cloud in it. It's that you can back up into a cloud.

That's never as much fun as you think it's going to be. My mind instantly detoured into a recollection of being a little kid and saying something to my dad about how neat it would be to sit down on a cloud. And he told me we could probably go into a cloud the next time we went to the mountains. We drove up to the Blue Ridge and sure enough there was a cloud parked up ahead, right on the road, and I got all excited, and then we drove into it, and it was not fluffy at all. I decided to ignore the bit about the cloud. The salesman was still going on about something and I still had the expression on my face appropriate to a person who is paying attention, and I think I was getting away with it. It seemed important to me to appear to be thinking thoughtful thoughts and taking in this high-speed information, but sooner or later the jig was going to have to be up, so I decided to just buy the damn thing and hope it would teach me how to use itself later.

"Uh-huh, uh-huh," I said, "so how much is this thing going to cost?"

Well. It depends. It depends on how many jeebies you want in it. Did I plan to watch a lot of movies on it? Did I plan to jam all the music I'd ever heard in my whole life into it? Not really. Again, I am not really sure what is going to happen between me and my new Device. Basically, we were going on a blind date.

"Well, you could probably do just fine with a couple of jeebies," he concludes. I thought so too. I probably wouldn't even be comfortable with a whole lot of jeebies. And I went with the little cute tabletty thing instead of the bigger one, because I am a small person. We were all set to go settle up, and then he offered to show me a selection of hats for it. I got a snap-on number. And took my new Device home, and set it on the counter, hoping it would be forgey enough to strike up a conversation.