You know you are on the other side of generation gap and fighting a losing battle when you can't even keep from drowning in technology acronym soup, less be able to keep up with it. When I came out of the caves, they were talking about MoSoSo and I thought that sounded a lot like MoMA.
The irony of discovering that MoSoSo referred to the latest social networking enabling technology and not a new art museum was not lost on me. I am so over the hill that even watching kids in action with their Gameboys and Nintendos makes me anxious as does a lot of recent cinema.
The pace and choppiness of the action wears me out. I seem to be retrogressing to an earlier generation that was happy to listen to really slow music, play solitaire with real cards and curl up on the couch with a good book and a cup of tea. I can find peace and joy in all of those activities. The chances of me catching with any of the myriad MoSoSo applications is remote to non-existent. Maybe I can leap frog a couple of generations in technology and catch up when J comes of age.
High up on my wish list for future technology is to see user interfaces that don't have multi-function keys that need to be toggled between modes and devices that don't need me to study the user manual like I were preparing for the board exams. A readable font size would be most welcome. How difficult can it be to devise something that the lowest common denominator such as myself is able to understand without burning out every last grey cell that have ? I'm not surprised that Alzheimer’s is getting to be so common these days. The demands of modern technology can burn out older people mercilessly quick.
To my credit, I am perfectly capable of using the self check out system in the public library and only sometimes need help with it at the grocery stores. It seems that the gaming and wireless communication industry has no use for the likes of me and can safely ignore us when designing their goods and services.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
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Think before what you wish for HC !
So are you trashing the so called great UI of the so called great Ipod ? Do you really beleive that a "absolute" guideline like that work ?
And congrats to you ... on the grocery self checkout. Recently even I managed to figure out how to handle stuff without bar code on the self checkout kiosk. But I still have to resist moving bagged stuff to the cart before the billing is completed
Prerona - Its cool isn't it ? Never thought I'd be able to figure it out so easily.