I’m rarely comfortable. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of living with the body I have and am rarely physically comfortable for very long.
My mind is not comfortable either. It’s always synthesizing something new, making bizarre connections between little bits of information. It’s sort of like having a machine that makes something occasionally valuable out of belly lint.
I do almost all my computer work on an original MacBook that got so overwhelmed by all the stuff on it that I recently had to add two gigabytes of memory and use a great little program called Xslimmer to reduce the size of programs by removing unnecessary items like the Cyrillic alphabet and translations into Old English. Not that there’s anything wrong with them. Some of my best friends are Cyrillic and many of the rest are old, if not particularly English.
Anyway, I was feeling comfortable with this laptop. I could find anything I needed among the 25,000 or so documents and 1100 or so emails stored on it. Until yesterday.
Yesterday I started to install Mac OX5.6, code name Leopard.
Leopards are sleek, so I was a little surprised that this particular leopard would need something like 25 gigabytes, slightly more space than the 278 megabytes I had free on my hard drive. No worry, I did a complete back up, then wiped my hard drive clean. Plenty of room now.
Leopards are sleek and fast. Another surprise. I would have time to get in my car, drive 25 miles, half of it in city traffic, to work and teach a full period, then drive home, stopping for gas along the way before this Leopard would be done installing. Cool, I’m not going to work. I’m on spring break, which is why I’m doing this installation now. I’ll have the time to learn the new operating system and make some mistakes on it before I need the laptop for anything critical.
As I’m writing this approximately 29 hours after starting this installation, I’m still trying to reinstall all those email messages (after I semi-intentionally deleted about 350 of them), my iPhoto library, and assorted other things. I’m also trying to figure out why my bookmark synchronizer is synchronizing my bookmarks every three minutes or so no matter what I do in its preference panel.
And this is the first time I’m using Pages, the Apple program, part of a suite of applications that will convince me I don’t need MS Office anymore.
All of this has reminded me that whenever I get comfortable it is time for me to do something to take me beyond my comfort zone because no matter how much I know or how good at something I might get, there is always room to do it better or learn something new.
Like where did all those passwords I used to have stored go?
Education On The Plate 
Wow, sounds like an ordeal! And you’re dealing with it so much better than I would be! I have such a hard time dealing with technological inconveniences and when I bought my new laptop last year and it took over a month to buy, return, buy, receive, and then set up perfectly, I was almost in tears by the end…….I have a tough time with change, can you tell? My comfort zone is a nice place to be when it comes to technology – thanks for the reminder that sometimes we need to step out of it!
Relaxing?
If you want to keep it real, as it seems you do, correct the two typos in the second and third sentences in the second paragraph. Its should be It’s. Just trying to help you be eloquent.
Thanks, one can never have too many copy editors. But the occasional type has absolutely nothing to do with keeping it real.
There’s a typo in your response, too! LOL I know that typos have nothing to do with keeping it real. I just didn’t want to outwardly insult you!!!!
I’m not at all concerned with typos. I’ve got large arthritic fingers and bad eyes, so the occasional mistake just proves I’m human 😉
As long as my meaning is getting across I’m happy.