Another Step into Technology

Connected

I confess. I will be 70 this summer. And one of the greatest things happened to me 13 years ago Christmas eve. I was involved in a ski accident which compressed three discs in my neck and knocked me into my right brain - literally. Witnesses to the accident said I was hit hard enough by a speeding skier to fly into the air and land on my head.

The resultant closed brain trauma CBT or shaken baby head injury turned off my left brain control and let my right brain run completely free. It is why I paint, why I photo edit in such wild colors, and why I do not use manuals to learn technological devices. Hell, I confess, I cannot read manuals any more. Once when I was a technical writer I wrote them. I translated accountants to computer programmers and computer programmers to management. Boy, that wasn't easy.

Since the head injury I have adapted to digital cameras, digital post processing programs, laptops, tablets, and my latest, the ipod. And all without cracking a book. I divine them. If you look at technology as right brain tools to perform left brain tasks they are really simple. Especially since the advent of the mouse and drag and drop (or with tablets swipe and drop).

Meanwhile I seem to be surrounded with left brain friends that have to first download and print out the manuals some nerd wrote. I admit I have from time to time accessed briefly a manual but never downloaded it. It eliminates the search function. Okay, I downloaded my camera manuals to my tablet. But that does not eliminate the search function. The key here is the absolute worst aspect of any technical manual is the Index or table of contents. You are never going to find anything that way.

Today I complicated my Songbird (android ipod) with Amazon Music. But I knew on some totally alien level that the computer would put my music in a common file to be used by both programs. And it did. Back to drag and drop. So America, Seals and Croft, and the Eagles, automatically ripped by Amazon and put in the cloud for me, when I bought the CD's was downloaded today and then uploaded to my Songbird. I totally get clouds. I would not have bought the CD's but just the rips if it was not for Big Blue which does not have a radio with plug in for my Songbird or a USB port for a jump drive.

All of this has allowed me to tune into the songs of my youth before clouds were just those puffy things in the sky. And I think I can access my Amazon Music library in the cloud with my Amazon fire and tune in without downloading. I found the place the ear phones connect.

All of this is in answer to a friend who wants to know how I learned that? A younger sister has helped when I had questions but basically my right brain wanted it to be that easy and my cognitive trainer said, "Why not?"

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