Using my Christmas cookie icon here just because I like it

[sholio]

There are a number of seemingly unrelated computer and Internet observations that I started to make here, and then I realized that they all actually do have something in common: namely, they relate to my ongoing struggle to deal with the fact that the longer I'm online, the more changes I'm going to have to learn to deal with. I am the sort of person who wants to find some programs I like, make a cozy little nest on the Internet and feather it how I like it, and then NEVER CHANGE ANYTHING. Sadly, the Internet and every software manufacturer in the world have other plans.

First of all, LJ may be doing away with comment subject lines. *garblefarg* This is not a feature I actually use, for the most part, but I know that it's going to have a negative impact on commentfic communities, and I absolutely HATE the look of the new comment window that's going to be rolled out next year (see screenshot here). I think I mostly hate it because it's different, but I really like the stripped-down LJ/DW interface, the simplicity of it ... and on the LJ side, at least, I think its days are numbered.

This was a good reminder, though, that I hadn't done an LJ backup in a while ... which I did, and then discovered that changing my LJ username had screwed up the poor DW journal importer even more than I'd realized. >_> It's not their fault, I'm actually not sure if there's any plausible way around this problem, but not recognizing the existing entries pre-name-change, it imported everything twice, so now my whole entire journal prior to the rename consists of doubled entries. Poor importer, I didn't mean to scare it so.

And, seemingly unrelated to the above, I am seriously thinking about not taking my computer on the Louisiana trip. It would mean being computer-less for a little over a week, the very thought of which is sort of hard to take! But I'm going to be spending the entire week in close quarters with family (including small children), and I'm wondering if I would actually use the laptop enough to make it worth risking its lifespan by dragging it around with me. I've been feeling really protective of my laptop lately, because a) I can't really afford another one if something happens to this one, and b) Apple's latest version of the OS doesn't support its older PowerPC programs, which would mean NONE OF MY PROGRAMS WOULD WORK if I got a new laptop - I'd lose 90% of the programs I use on a daily basis, including all Adobe's CS2 apps, my FTP client, my word processor ... Which means I want to make this laptop last as long as I possibly can!

But what all of the above have in common is that I've got to be able to relax and let this stuff go. It bothers me that LJ keeps changing its user interface in ways that I don't like, but that stuff happens - it's naive to assume that LJ is still going to exist in 2015 or 2020 in the same shape that it does now (or, for that matter, that I'll inevitably still be blogging here). I had been viewing DW as, basically, a place where I could clone my LJ and still have all my entries and so forth exactly as I had on LJ, so that if LJ went down I could make the transition with little noticeable change, but it isn't really working out that way: my DW journal is a slightly different beast to my LJ journal, even before the entry-doubling. Frankly, my first reaction to noticing the doubled entries was a tearing-my-hair-out NOOOOOOO, but then I thought, you know, seriously, does it really matter that much? I don't go back and read my old entries all that often. So it's a little harder to find stuff. It's all still there, it's just not organized as nicely as it could be.

On the laptop side of things, I want to keep using CS2 and AppleWorks FOREVER because I'm familiar and comfortable with the programs and I like their interface. But Apple is making them go away, so I'm learning to get comfortable and familiar with OpenOffice. And heaven only knows what I'll be using to write fiction 10 years from now. Maybe it'll be better, maybe worse; I consider OpenOffice demonstrably inferior to AppleWorks, because I could do things in AppleWorks that are literally impossible to do in OpenOffice - save clean HTML, for one thing; it drives me batty that no other program in the universe is able to do that - but it's still possible to write fiction, and that's what matters.

I do think it's important for me to learn not to get so attached to any given piece of software or Internet site that I bewail the loss of it. Actually, I've been going through a similar process in RL lately too -- there are some childhood keepsakes that I've been dragging around with me for years, but I'm starting to wonder why. I had kept a bunch of toys from when I was a kid, for example, that I recently went through, picked out the broken ones, and gave the rest to my niece. It's not as if they're doing any good sitting around in a box; toys are meant to be played with, and I'd rather have someone getting some use out of them than keep them with me for the rest of my life. I'm thinking about giving her my Star Wars legos as well. I'm fairly attached to them, but I never actually do anything with them, and if a 3-year-old would get a lot of fun out of playing with them, why shouldn't I pass them along to her?

For me, it's almost a ... well, a spiritual thing, really. I don't want to be the sort of person who always has to have everything just so, and can't handle deviations from routine. I don't want to be sitting around at age 75 clinging to the relics of my bygone youth. I don't think it's good for me to prioritize things (keepsakes, favorite software programs, favorite Internet sites) over the reasons why they originally became important to me in the first place (which was mostly because they facilitated doing the things I wanted to do, or keeping in touch with people I wanted to keep in touch with).

I'm not really interested in novelty for novelty's sake, when it comes to the software and objects that I use every day -- I don't need to have the latest and shiniest things, and I'm perfectly fine with finding a program I like, and using it every day until the hardware no longer supports it ... but at that point, I want to be flexible enough to move on, find something new that I like (nearly) as much, and use that every day.

If I did lose all my old LJ entries, or couldn't access them anymore, it really wouldn't be the end of the world. I no longer have any of my emails from before 2000 or so, and I don't miss them. What would I do, go back and re-read them for nostalgia's sake? I still have most of my emails from the last 10 years, but even that is starting to feel a bit uncomfortably pack-rattish (do I really NEED all the mailing-list traffic from mailing lists I haven't been on in years?). And this is just going to keep getting worse as I move on through my life. We are DROWNING in information these days, you guys. I have a handful of photographs of myself when I was a little kid, but I have several gigs of photos I've taken since I got a digital camera in 2004. The fact that 2008 is a much better documented year for me, personally, than 1978 doesn't make the '70s any less real or important.

And frankly, my life does not need to be that cluttered! Having my house, my hard drive and my entire online existence awash in a clutter of information that I don't particularly care about makes it harder to find time and space for the things I do care about, which, among other things, includes my friends and my family, and my writing, and basically, living my life.

I'm resigned to the fact that I'm always going to be a packrat, and a total nesting homebody, but I don't want to end up being so much of a nesting homebody that something as trivial as a website changing their user interface is enough to throw my entire social life out of kilter, if that makes any sense.

Comments

[ratcreature]

We are DROWNING in information these days, you guys. I have a handful of photographs of myself when I was a little kid, but I have several gigs of photos I've taken since I got a digital camera in 2004.
otoh, those are much less permanent. I mean, to preserve digital data you have to invest much more active effort than preserving paper, copying it to new formats and media, making sure programs still work and so on. So it's very likely that a century from now your family's descendants will have less in the way of photos and letters from the digital era than from the analog before that.

[sholio]

That's a good point about permanence - though I think it's offset somewhat by Internet searchability and backing up - as well as the obsession that a lot of people have with archiving stuff. I would bet that most of what's currently being posted to Flickr and Facebook and LJ is going to continue to be available via places like the Wayback Machine for a long time to come. For that matter, I wouldn't be surprised if reading and converting old media formats becomes a booming business at some point - you might not be able to read great-grandma's 50 DVDs of vacation photos from way back in 2015, but you can mail them off to a place that'll read them and upload them to a website for you.

... maybe.

[ratcreature]

Most digital media can degrade fairly easily, especially if you are not careful about storage. Like, a few years ago I backed up all kind of stuff on CDs, but I didn't buy the most expensive ones, and I didn't store them ideally (like sometimes the spindle stood in in light, there was dust and such things), so several of them did not work right anymore when I tried to find something recently, even though it has not been that long and the format is not obsolete yet. They had read errors, and so on, like audio CDs tend to skip more the older they get, especially if you burned them yourself.

[sholio]

That *is* a good point! Actually, it reminds me that I probably ought to go through my really old backup CDs and see if there's anything that I would really mind losing. Back in those days, I had so little hard drive space that I didn't keep much on my computer, and there is a lot of art and downloaded media and stuff that is only on the CDs. I probably ought to see what's there before I run the risk of not being able to read it at all ...

[rheanna]

I don't think it's good for me to prioritize things [...] over the reasons why they originally became important to me in the first place.

This is a really good way of putting it (and good advice for anyone).

I'm not especially pack-rattish by nature. If anything, I tend the other way: I do periodic clear-outs of my house because I don't like the feeling of having too much stuff around. (I have never missed anything I've thrown out or given away, with the sole exception of books -- I've occasionally ended up buying books twice because I got rid of my original copy thinking that I wouldn't want to read it again, only to be proved wrong).

In terms of internet use, though, I recognize exactly what you're saying about your feelings about the process of change that keeps going on whether we want it to or not. For myself, I've noticed that in the last few years I've been more inclined to feel more 'Bah get off my lawn' about some of the new innovations in social networking -- I don't like Twitter or Tumblr and when I see fandom migrating away from LJ/DW on to different platforms I find myself getting grumpy and wanting things to stay JUST THE WAY THEY ARE DAMMIT. (For the record, I think fandom will always have a use for *some* kind of journal-based social network, but it will probably be a much reduced role in the future, with people taking much of their short-form interactions to places like Twitter). And, like you, I don't want to think of myself as the person who's going to let herself get out of sync with fandom because I'm not prepared to move with the majority.

[sholio]

I am a packrat by nature (fighting it, though, because I've seen where super-packrats end up, and I don't want to be like that!). But, yeah, that "get off my lawn!" thing has been happening to me more and more often, and I don't like where it seems to be leading me. So I'm deliberately trying to make myself a little more mentally flexible about this stuff, in the same way that I'm trying to be less clingy with my stuff and trying to purge it more often.

[ambyr]

I had to upgrade my Motorola-based Mac for an Intel-based Mac a little over a year ago, and oh, it was terrifying. Lost my beautiful word processor, circa 1991, that did everything I wanted, lost my antiquated version of Photoshop, lost all my time-wasting games. Had to learn new system software. Spent more time than I'd like to think about converting files. I'd been putting off the switch for years, and oh, I hated every minute of it. I hear your pain.

But now I'm here, and . . . I kind of like it. I downloaded vidding software the other day. Vidding software! If I'd tried to use it on my old computer, it would have exploded! (Hell, just trying to play vids put my old computer in danger of exploding.) My new word processor . . . okay, my new word processor sucks. I have no idea what happened to word processor development over the last twenty years, but it clearly ran badly off the rails. But the words keep coming anyway, and it's survivable. I am trying to teach myself to breathe and accept that technology moves on.

It's easier some days than others :-/.

[tei]

I have no idea what happened to word processor development over the last twenty years, but it clearly ran badly off the rails.

Jeez, this. I write essays in plain text editors because it's not worth it to deal with Word's shenanagins. Here we are in the future and we can't even have working word processors, let alone jetpacks.

[sholio]

Here we are in the future and we can't even have working word processors, let alone jetpacks.

heeeee, well put! I do a lot of my writing in a plain text editor as well. Where are all the word processors for those of us who just want to use them to PROCESS WORDS?

[sholio]

My new word processor . . . okay, my new word processor sucks. I have no idea what happened to word processor development over the last twenty years, but it clearly ran badly off the rails. But the words keep coming anyway, and it's survivable.

ha, yes, THIS. I adore AppleWorks (formerly ClarisWorks), in spite of the fact that it hasn't changed a bit since I started using it in 1998. All I want is a stripped-down, simple word processor that loads quickly and doesn't do anything annoying. Whyyyyyy so hard to find. ;_; And yet, somehow, I seem to be able to write in OpenOffice or BBEdit just fine anyway.

I, too, am trying to make myself stop and take a breath and resign myself to the fact that technology changes quickly. Most of the changes aren't bad -- I remember the days of floppy disks and SCSI cables, and how much we all complained about losing floppy drives in particular, but USB flash drives are so much better. And even when the changes cause us to lose some of the good stuff, there are still more important things to worry about than having to buy a new version of Photoshop. (Or so I keep telling myself. *g*)

[schneefink]

I like this post, a lot of it is very familiar to me. Should get rid of all the old emails one day... And I´m thinking of making actual physical photo albums out of my digital photographs. Difficult to make (especially the sorting!), but they last longer and I look at them more often.
But I know that I'm often so lazy as to be old-fashioned (no smartphone, no Facebook account - I'm rethinking both because it's starting to become really annoying. §$%"#$% Facebook.)
(Btw, this is the sort of discussion where I wouldn't mind unthreaded comments. I guess it always depends on the kind of discussion you want to have.)

[sholio]

*grins* Yes, I agree this would be a good one for unthreaded comments! At least I think so. Actually, it would be kind of neat if the journal owner could switch back and forth between threaded and unthreaded modes ... but that might be way too complicated.

Anyway, yes, I held out on Facebook for ages, until finally I had to get one because my family were all on there, and use it to keep in touch. (I still kinda hate it, but I'm there. *g*) Time and technology marches on, and I may not like all of the new stuff, but I don't want to waste too much energy clinging to old programs and websites when fandom is busy migrating en masse to somewhere new...

[lannamichaels]

I have no idea what your HTML needs are, but I do HTML and CSS in NoteTab Light, which is really great for it. I highly recommend it.