My other 9 fingers are getting jealous of my right thumb

I got a new (used) toy for Christmas, an 8 gigabyte ipod touch. I am proud to say that I am using it to read the likes of  Carl Sandburg,  Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain. This is a wonderful way to pass a 45 minute bus ride to away games during basketball season in Iowa.

However, I am ashamed to say that I haven't written much at all since the addictive little UFO came to live in my breast pocket- and as you all know, I was once a blogaholic.

What can I do? Thumb exercises? There are free apps for training yourself to speed type- but the 2"x1" qwerty board is just not the same. I wonder if this is what Mike Royko felt like when he gave up his old cast iron Remington for an IBM PC.

Also, because I got the AOL instant-messaging app so that my wife can get a hold of me at school all day, my 8 year old niece thinks that I am an facebook and wants to chat with me. Since I don't reply, she thinks I'm a big meanie (not that I understand why her parents allow a second grader to have a facebook account).

While I'm at it, there is this app for LinkedIn, a professional networking site- but who do I REALLY need to network with anyway? I'm just a high school Art teacher. Should I keep that app? Do I network with other Art teachers? I don't really know any. Okay, one- and she wanted to Skype with me, but my wife got my ipod used on eBay so it doesn't have a camera, let alone a front-facing one. What exactly would I Skype with anyone about anyway?

I never wanted the Visaphone on the Jetsons, just the flying car. Of all the things from that show to come true- why the Visaphone? You'd think the vacuum-tube elevators would've been much more fun.

So I ask you, how do I make myself write again? Will I ever write again? Did I only THINK that it was a compulsion and an integral part of who I am? Have any of you found yourselves limiting your writing to 140 characters or less? Have peculiar symbols crept into what little writing you do do, like "@" & "#?" (by the way, I've been reading a lot by Rosanne Cash and Steve Martin too- but not her memoir or his novel- their tweets. I highly recommend them both. Don't get me wrong, Conan's okay and Corbet's a hoot, but BP is over and God's not everything he's cracked up to be.)

So what do you think? Do I just have to FORCE myself to sit down with the old laptop once in a while? Will that be the only way to get really WRITING again? Do you think maybe I should try writing letters? Would that do the trick? Do you think that might get the old juices going again?

Click "like" if you think I should. Share this with anyone you think may be going through the same problem I am. Or else I guess you could retweet it, whatever.

My gas guzzler puts around on the info super HWY

Taking a class to renew my teacher's license this summer, I decided to become one of those people who sit and use their laptops in Starbucks. Little did I know that this would be like taking my "trusty-rusty"  small 2 wheel drive pickup out cruising on a Friday night- embarrassingly out of place.

I opened up my 2003 model Dell Latitude, with it's plug in D-Link card to take advantage of the Barnes&Noble free WiFi. I'd read a journal article and now needed to spend some time writing.

On the other side of a divider, at another table sat a couple of young turks playing with their smart phones and a brand new ipad.

I waited for my edition of Windows XP to load while they laughed and talked about celebrity gossip and the variety of new free apps they were exploring, all the while their conversation peppered with profanity.

Here I was a forty-something abandoning my family so that I could work on professional development, so I can keep my job to put a roof over their heads and clothes on my back- and these college-agers were planning a solo vacation to Washington DC, playing Eminem music as they did it. At least when people wore a Sony WalkMan or even an Apple ipod, their music was private.

I struggled to listen to the jazz that Starbucks plays, but felt like I was stuck at a stoplight next to teenagers in a "pimped-out" sports car blasting hip hop or heavy metal out to the whole neighborhood. Whereas I have to struggle just to hear the AM radio in my little truck over the knocking and pinging of the motor.

My truck has well over 200,000 miles on it. We bought it used at an auto auction.
My laptop doesn't have enough RAM to run Photoshop and a web browser at the same time. I got it for about $240 on eBay.

I take solace in the fact that my truck is utilitarian. It gets me to school and home. It can haul furniture, trash, lawn clippings, groceries and supplies for cheerleaders to the football field or the concessions stand at track meets. I can blog and compose tests and share pictures with my modest, hopelessly obsolete laptop. So who cares that I can't read ebooks on it or use it as a GPS device?

I remind myself that people are more important than things when I'm stuck next to teens and twenty-somethings in shiny new vehicles. I need to do the same with the adolescent techies and their expensive cyber-toys.

Okay, my Judeo-Christian ethos and Buddhist-ish political leanings can help me to maintain my non-materialistic values and not covet their toys. But my middle-aged, overweight, disaffected white guy personality REALLY finds their taste in music annoying.

Ah... finally they've left for the food court to fraternize with the all the female teen mall-maggots. Just me, my TAZO green tea and the Ella Fitzgerald muzak.

Aw shoot- a text from my wife asking me to call as soon as I get a break. Probably needs me to pick up something at the store or to hurry home so that our kids aren't left unsupervised so she can go to some meeting or something.

So much for the romanticized ideal or writing in the cafe like some kind of mid-twentieth century French Existentialist or a New York Beat poet.

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are" ~Teddy Roosevelt ( I might add- and do it in what little time you have to do it.)

Modest, practical and utilitarian. That's the Iowan way. I should know how to be happy this way, after all I'm Lutheran. Guess it's just the curse of being an Irishman living among the Germans.

Time to pack up my archaic computer and head back home in the family minivan. At least it has air conditioning, unlike my pickup- which I left parked at home. Because minivans are so cool and manly for driving around a college campus in summer.

Roadkill on the information superhighway

Last week I had said that I hoped to start running cartoons above this column. Meanwhile I attended a web programming class at Iowa Western Community College. Sure you can draw a cartoon anywhere, but try finding a scanner when you want one.

Absent of scanner, I followed Teddy Roosevelt’s advice and did what I could with what I had, right where I was. In this case I had a digital camera and a laptop with Adobe PhotoShop.

Brad Swenson, our publisher would like to take everyone’s pictures around the PRESS office and start running little staff biographies each week in these newspapers. He even suggested running mine with my column- please, God, don’t let him decide to use this one.

It really illustrates how I felt this week- trapped inside of cyberspace.
Sure I guess I kind of know my way around a computer- enough to get by. Any summer-fill-in newspaper graphic designer and most high school yearbook advisors have to.

But this latest class I took at IWCC really made me feel like a pedestrian on the “information super highway.” Other teachers at school are always coming to me for help with whatever computer problems they have, but I can’t help them.
I use three programs and email. Sure I do a little blogging. But that’s like asking somebody who drives their truck to work on weekdays and does a little off roading on weekends how to realign a differential. Wha? Huh? Exactly. A casual computer program user or a graphic designer do not an information technologies (I.T.) expert make.

Allow me to explain some of what I’ve learned. This class was 8 AM- 5:30 PM all week. We were not allowed to use any programs to create web pages, we had to write them completely in XHTML code.

XHTML stands for “Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language.” Wha? Huh? Exactly.

First of all, calling the World Wide Web the “information superhighway” is an incredibly appropriate analogy. Back in the 1950’s Eisenhower did not insist on an interstate highway system for leisure and tourism travel, not even for interstate commerce by semi-trucks. This was the cold war, after all.
Ike wanted interstates for rapidly moving our nuclear missiles, quick mobilization of troops, and efficient evacuation of major cities in the event of WWIII.

Just like that, the Internet was developed in the 1960’s for electronic communication between military installations like the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) and all those missile silos peppered across the Dakotas.
Like so many trucks on the interstate, it’s now big business and commerce, along with scores of joy riders that clogs the arteries of the Wild Wild Web.
XHTML is just the latest computer programming language to be used to... uh, well, to lay down the gravel and rebar and concrete and asphalt to make that super highway travelable.

So after this last week, I went from being average Joe motorist compared to the NASCAR drivers of professional tech administrators (aka: “geeks”) to being on a road construction crew compared to the surveyors and civil engineers that are the code writing millionaires at Google and Pixar ( aka: “filthy rich geeks.”)
What was I writing? Stuff like this:

function calcLine1()
{
var rate = document.invoce.r1.value;
}

Wha? Huh? Exactly. And that was barely one piece. If it looks Greek to you, me too. Learning a program language really is like learning another language just like Greek or Spanish or German...or Martian or Venusian, exactly, I agree. But difficult as it is, it’s not impossible. Kind of like I can survive in a Mexican restaurant with my limited “Spanglish,” after this week I should be able to recognize enough of what real coder writers do to be able to use it in my school’s web pages and hopefully fix some problems, but I’m no Google guy.

If you remember enough of your English Grammar, I can give you some comparisons. In HTML, an “element” is like an “object” in JavaScript. A JavaScript object is like a noun in English.

A “method” in JavaScript is like a verb in English. In other words, a door swings, a noun verbs, an object methods, a “function calcLine” calculates on a spreadsheet.

“Properties” in JavaScript are like adjectives, they describe the nouns. It’s not just a function, it’s a rate calculating function. in JavaScript, a “value” is like a preposition...Which rate? “r1” the first rate.

I know, it still barely makes sense to me. The point is, it has to go in a certain order, a “syntax.” There’s logic to it.

So why did our professor prohibit us from using user-friendly web page designing programs instead of writing this all out? Why do Algebra teachers force student to write out their work, rather than just writing down an answer? No cheating and so we learned how to do it right. It also made us realize that we’re sort of like the volunteer candy stripers compared to all the brain surgeons out there.

If you'd like to see the website project I wrote visit http://ted.mallory.googlepages.com/default.htm