Fiction Daily

If you’ve been reading FD for a while, you know I’ve recently purchased a new laptop computer. It’s got these crazy guts … really, it’s a “gaming computer” … not sure what that means, but it sounds fast and dangerous!!

So here I sit, a writer whose craziest day means a trip to the grocery store or a long run through a nearby neighborhood, sitting like an outlaw at the helm of this outrageous laptop. It has a 64-bit version of Vista operating system … 4 GB RAM … I can’t even remember the hard drive size but it’s so big it has a partition with a mirror image of itself. (It was on sale. I am a writer, after all, not a futures trader.)

During the day I write my articles and short stories … then at night, it becomes my DVD player. (We watched “Into the Wild” a few nights ago. A riveting story, incredibly well-made movie, about a young man leaving civilization to live in Alaska on his own.)

The new technology in my life was just getting started, because about two weeks ago, my iPod battery died in earnest. I had purchased an extended warranty, so I traded it in for the “3Gen” video iPod Nano. It’s a squat, square thing, and so I had to purchase new cases, learn the commands, get a feeling for it. I was just getting used to it when yesterday I read that Apple is announcing a new iPod Nano … back to the tall thin design, but with a larger video screen.

My FM transmitter wouldn’t work with my new iPod (it sends music to my car radio … can’t live without it) and I’m waiting for a replacement.

Meanwhile, our wireless router is dying a slow, painful death … seemingly worse after I spent $32 for a so-called “firmware upgrade.” When I called the company to tell them their “upgrade” killed our router, they offered me a new, discounted router, for only about $82. What a bargain! I am too tired to fight. I coughed up a credit card number. I bought the refurbished router … am waiting for delivery … which means installation … port and gate numbers … obscure settings that mean the difference between flowing Internet service and “DNS error” and “Page failed to load. Try again.”

If there’s a point I’m making here (and I’m not sure there is), it’s that computer technology is leap years ahead of where it was when I got my first newspaper job in 1986. In those days, our entire newsroom used a 2 MB server. Yep … 2 MB. It crashed once a week or so.

These days, there’s not the sense of an emergency surrounding our computers the way it was in the old days.

Still, you have to keep up, or the world changes so fast you’re in the dark again. No matter how unpleasant, I’ve found I have to keep up the pace behind the “betas” (or early adopters, those people who jump first onto new technology).

For a writer who finds it all too easy to do something else, I have to make sure technology doesn’t replace meaning.