The Lowest of Low Tech

Today I noticed my iPad screen wasn’t turning off automatically after a few moments anymore.  My daughter said, “You want me to fix it?” “No, I can do it…I think.”

It has nothing to do with my age, I’m not old.  It’s not even that I’m averse to anything technical.  I knit a Beatnik.  I knit two Beatniks!!  I can do tedious and technical.  I just don’t feel a need to be the master every kind of technical.

Take my washing ritual:  regular old dish liquid

and my blocking apparatus as an example:

(on instagram and ravelry and kollabora)

It’s working for me.  If my Settler Shawl looks a little wonky tomorrow, that’s okay by me.  I did try using blocking pins and a yoga mat for the Rattan shawl, but the mats weren’t right, or the shawl got pulled out of shape, or I forgot to buy blocking wires, or something.  So my blocking system remains old school.  Libby is starting a series about blocking shawls, so you might check that out if you’re a shawl novice, like me.

Then there’s texting.  I’m an old school texter.  Which would read more like “I’d school texted” if I typed it on my phone because it doesn’t get me and corrects everything wrong.  My middle finger one-letter-at-a-time texting gives my kids another reason to mock me, but I can actually type and if I use my thumbs, my phone can’t keep up and all of a sudden Marty becomes “Nasty” and everything becomes “every thong” and … you get the picture.

And I don’t do emojis.  I feel really stupid having just typed the word emoji.  Once, my husband sent me a text from his brand new iPhone full of emojis.  I think I hurt his feelings when I informed him that emojis are lame.  Poor guy- he’s sent plenty of emojis since then, but never to me.  The fact that I still smile with parenthesis and do back-slash sheepish grins is not lost on me.  :/

I wanted to send my son an emoji once, but I couldn’t find it anywhere.  So I made a homemade emoji.  One that stood for “laughed ’til I cried blood.”  I found that just drawing it on paper, clicking a photo of it, and then texting it is almost as fast as using an emoji tool.  Really.  And who wouldn’t want to receive this in a text?

My son is a teenager.  Just saying, in case that seemed disturbing.  We also have a darkish sense of humor.

Sigh.  I will never use all of my phone’s options.  Siri gets on my nerves, as do Garmin and Ford Sync.  I  will also probably never fully utilize all of the options on ravelry, bloglovin, kollabora, instagram, Disqus, aperture, or Photo Shop.  And I don’t want to.

When I finally put social media icons in the sidebar of this blog, I googled around until I found free icons for most of my social media sites in a style I liked, but I couldn’t find a matching one for Ravelry.  No prob, I thought, I’ll just make one… by uploading a solid colored circle, then using my mac’s paint program, which required a little reading up, to draw an “r” in the center with my mouse.  I won’t say how many tries it took to produce a steady letter worthy of the ravelry symbol.  Do you understand me?  It’s just one step above finger painting my own icon and uploading a photo of it.

A couple of years ago, I wanted my blog to have a clean, simple template.  Blogger wasn’t offering anything like that then, so I set out to do a patchwork template of my own.  My understanding of what I was doing was kind of like my grandparents’  understanding of Star Wars when we tried explaining it to them, as kids.  Every change I made required an explanation that required another explanation and change,  which required another explanation and change, etc.  What you see today is so Frankensteinian that if I ever change anything except the header, I think I’ll have to hire someone.  Even changing the header is a yearly – nope I didn’t even do it this year- slog wherein I finally remember how to do it after spending a couple of hours trying something way too complicated, then I immediately forget what I just did, insuring the next year will be another facepalm session.

But the one technical thing I have to tackle this year is streamlining my photo editing workflow.  My current system is: take photo, leave it in camera for months, dump and forget.  Find it later, run it through Aperture, export it to a “safer file” than iPhoto library (I know iPhoto doesn’t even exist anymore.  See what I mean?) since I’m not sure if I want to use my Aperture library for long term storage.  I also move a version into a file for appropriately sized blog photos.  Then, I forget about it, leaving all of these originals, and versions, of each photo to clog up my hard drive in record time.  I tell you it’s a gift.

So getting a handle on both Aperture and Photo Shop would be great this year.  To be fair, the last few years have been about other things and I haven’t had the mental energy to spend on learning anything I didn’t already know.   Our family is entering a new phase, on a couple of fronts, and I am getting hormones for my fatigue/migraines that is working really well.  So, maybe I’ll get a grip on this stuff in the upcoming year.  Besides, I am just happy to have continued taking some photographs and doing a few creative things these days.  I think I’ll be trying quite a few new things in the upcoming months, but I’ll never be going too geek on you.