I have been wrestling with technology, slowly, but surely beating it into submission. Afterall one shouldn’t be ruled by machines. Yesterday, our new desktop PC arrived early. I unpacked it and began setting up. I hit a snag when I realized that our old monitor’s VGA cable was not supported by the new machine. A trip to the Micro Center was in order. Even in non-pandemic times this store is dangerous. Not so much to your health as to your wallet. Tomorrow is when my vaccine is supposed to achieve immunity, but I decided to chance it and jump the gun by a couple of days. The store was crowded and reeked of geek. Everyone was wearing masks, but between the crowd and the store’s narrow aisles, six feet was asking too much. Vaccine don’t fail me now. I found the connector aisle and a helpful clerk was ready and waiting to help. He called for backup and between the two of them I was soon on my way to checkout, with my new VGA to HDMI converter in hand.

Returning home, I plugged it in, booted the new machine and was good to go. I spent much of the rest of the day configuring the new machine to operate like the old one did. A lot of this task involved restoring bookmarks to all of my favorite websites. Anne and I share our two computers and in order to stay out of each other’s business I use the Microsoft Edge browser and she uses Google Chrome. So, imagine my chagrin today, after spending hours yesterday restoring my old links, when with a push of a button Anne restores all of her old favorites at once. That’s technology for you.

My other complaint about technology involves this website. For months now WordPress has been modernizing the behind-the-scenes workings of this blog. You never see any of this stuff, but I do. Systematically, they have been removing functionality that I like and replacing it with a newer, but dumbed down version. Their latest blow has been the removal of the dashboard. This was a webpage that afforded me control over all aspects of this blog. I will mourn its demise. VGA cabling, WordPress dashboards, what’s next to die?