11:30am – Two “older” women enjoy their crepes (one savoury, one sweet) and caffeinated beverages in the downtown Chocolate Restaurant.
12:15pm – They pull out a couple of knitting projects, and peer through glasses while one repairs the other’s dropped stitches and gets her Scarf That Took Over Five Years to Finish back on track. (Maybe 2020 will be the year it’s actually completed?)
1:30pm – The brunch table is now strewn with a PC, a NexDock 2, a Mac, and a Raspberry Pi serving up the Ngnix server software. WordPress back ends are loaded up on multiple screens, and there’s talk of choosing Gutenberg blocks, creating child themes, programming robots, and using Raspberry Pi to block web ads at the network level.
Zero idea what the restaurant servers thought of us, but I do hope we defied at least a few stereotypes today.
Update
The original version of this post mentioned two PCs, but my friend has clarified that there was only one PC, with the other being a NexDock 2.
Before that, my career was building WordPress blogs for clients.
But this is my first blog.
I don’t count the bare-bones, default-header-bedecked site that mainly consists of beginner WordPress resources, nor will we speak of the single-subject and now inactive, anonymously penned site on some other blogging platform that shall remain nameless.
This is my first blog.
The milestone has made me reflect on all the other technology I’ve embraced kicking and screaming much later than most.
In rough chronological order:
rotary 4EVAH! photo courtesy of Clemson via Flickr
Touch-tone phone
Cordless phone
Voice mail
Cell phone
Laptop
Facebook
iPhone
Microwave
No, wait, I still don’t have a microwave.
I’ve…
…been giggled at by store employees (“You want a… phone with a cord connecting the handset to the base? Do they still make those?”)…
…been glanced at surreptitiously with a mixture of pity and disbelief (my heavy white Macbook at a company-wide meetup where I was the only person with a computer over a couple of years old)….
…been addressed like I was completely insane, or perhaps just senile (Bell Canada: “Madam, are you quite sure you don’t have a touch-tone phone? We would be willing to take the $2.55 charge off your monthly bill but I highly doubt you are not using it.”)…
…had my tape-answering-machine beeper stared in bafflement (a piece of technology so outdated and apparently un-memorialized – not even qualifying as hipster-retro, like the venerable cassette tape – I cannot find a single image of it on the interwebs)…
…had my little retractable-antenna-topped Nokia and later my scratched-up iPhone 3 stared at and outright mocked (with affection, since these were my friends we’re talking about).
I wore it all with a badge of stubborn pride and irony.
But now, with the new blog, and the arrival of an iPad mini in the household this week, I feel a small sense of loss and sadness. Now I’m just like everyone else, you see.
Except for the microwave. There’ll always be the microwave.
Kathryn Presner 