New Tricks

     They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks.  It is true that the older you get, the more daunting it is to pick up a new skill.  You've become comfortable with what you can do, and you're pretty good at that stuff. Considering going back to where you're no longer on top of things can be frightening.  You'd be facing a feeling of incompetence and a mountain of new data to absorb, armed only with learning skills you probably haven't exercised in a while.  Insecurity could prevent and old dog from even starting down that road.  But if you've been at anything long enough, you know it always changes.  What you learned at the start doesn't always apply when the years go by.  Adaptation is necessary to keep up with anything.  So, if you're going to be an old dog, you're going to have to learn some new tricks.  In fact, old dogs have more practice than anyone at learning new tricks.

     Way back when I was a pup in early grade school, I only had a dim awareness of computers.  This was before personal computers existed in any practical sense, so for most people, the huge mainframe thinking machines were a mystery.  We imagined they could do much more magical things than they could, imaginings that didn't approach where they've actually gone since.  My first direct experiences with computers were in high school.  A segment of our math classes was carved away for teaching basic programming, and we had to take turns giving orders to the 8k machines.  Their programs were stored on cassette tapes and consisted, at least at the level we were practicing, of very simple logical steps.

     I didn't have any significant time on a personal computer until my first marriage.  My father-in-law was technology-inclined, so we had access to a variety of refurbished clunkers that could manage some simple games and word processing.  By the time our daughter was starting school, computers had made their way into the classroom, and her whole generation has a much more comfortable and practical relationship with the technology.

     Somewhere in my 20s, I took an interest in HTML.  I think it appealed to me both as a kind of language and as a creative tool.  This was before we had internet access, so I wasn't using it to build websites.  It was all just for fun.  I liked puzzling out what to write to give me what I wanted on the screen and playing around to see what I could do.  When I started seeing programs that could duplicate what I was doing with very little effort on the part of the user, my interest waned.  If I could do it with no challenge, where was the fun?  Since then, I haven't done anything with HTML beyond peeking at a page's source to try to follow a broken link.  Setting up this blog was the closest I've come to building a page, and that was a fairly simple process with no technical knowledge required.

     Now, I'm actually considering building a website.  More importantly, I've decided to learn the skills and programs that will help me toward that goal.  That means new jargon, new processes, and new ways of thinking.  It's a little intimidating.  The original plan was to farm out the structural work and only supply the content myself.  But the more I think about it, the more I'm warming to the challenge.  The computer world seems to move faster than the rest of the world.  Technology is always changing, and skills can grow stale quick.  I have a feeling the bits of HTML that I can remember will be of little use in this project.  I'll be able to ask advice and get help from others who are more experienced at this, but the decision to learn is set.  Yes, my old knowledge may be outpaced, and yes, what I learn today may be old news tomorrow, but that's life.  None of it should keep me from leaping in now.

     This is what we human beings do.  We adapt and grow.  We learn new things that keep us moving forward.  There is never a point where we know it all or even where we know enough to last us our lifetime. No matter what we have known before, there is always incentive to learn new tricks.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Felt

Significance of Numbers

The Magic of Things