Technology is wonderful, right? Hmm, sometimes. I pondered on this after struggling last Saturday to turn Mrs Summerhouse’s doodles into a Kindle book. I’ll come back to this in a moment. Just let me say in the interim, I sometimes, often at times of frustration, allow myself to wallow a little in a bit of nostalgia.
Often it happens while I’m reading one of my Agatha Christie novels. The ones set in the 1930s, usually. You know along the lines of how much simpler and less stressful life would have been back then. I would have known where I was in the order of things. Known my place so to speak.
Then I wake up. I wouldn’t have liked my place. Life might have been better for the upper classes but I would have been stuck in my working class pit village. No 11 plus (which we spit on of course), no grammar school, university, FE grants, social mobility.
Oh and another thing, right now I’d be dead. I suppose you could argue that would definitely have made things simpler. I looked it up on Google. The average life expectancy for a man born in 1930 was 58 and 62 for a woman (with a retirement age of 65). These might be approximate figures because I just took the first ones I came across. It’s a lot more complicated than this and boy, am I glad I don’t have to read articles closely, as I would have when researching stuff in my job. So those figures will do for this retirement blog.
Sound of whooshing as we move through the decades to this weekend. Back to the technology of today and its dubious benefits. Back in the ‘30s, I would not have been spending all of Saturday trying to set up Mrs SH’s doodle book (an actual proper book). Probably for her to give away as presents. Because I have had some experience of producing a proper book, The Vineyard Years, I thought I would try Kindle / Amazon self-publish again. The only difference would be I would use their comic / graphic book format rather than a normal book, book.
It all seemed so simple when I found this format. Fill in a few details and then start adding the images which are already scanned and in jpg form. And for the first 3 additions, all went swimmingly. This is too easy I thought. And, do you know, I was right. It was.
After the first three images, without me doing anything different, all my work simply disappeared. No warning, no explanation, just gone. Boy, I bet Agatha Christie didn’t have this problem either writing by hand or with her new-fangled typewriter (if that was what she used). So I started again and again and again, same thing each time even though I tried everything I knew to get a different outcome. Very annoying and definitely caused me to question the usefulness of today’s technology.
And while we’re on the subject of the benefits of today’s living, I’ll just mention another aspect of Mrs SH’s use of the IT world. She’s setting up, in a modest way, to run her yoga classes on Zoom. It does make me smile a bit in the sense that Mrs SH is the least tech-oriented person I know. But then she has the secret of success – she gets other people to do the work for her.
Me, in the case of the Doodle book, and her daughter in the case of setting up Zoom. Whether our daughter’s tuition proves sufficient to get her going we will see. I’m pretty sure I will get dragged in as they (daughter and son-in-law) are off to Croatia for a fortnight and then self-isolating for a further two weeks when they return, so we won’t see them for a while.
Which leaves yours truly and I hate Zoom. And it’s not as if I haven’t ‘given at the office’ so to speak. This ‘giving’ was being involved in her group emails to class with added attachments and even more of a challenge, Youtube video clips. The latter caused us to change our internet server which brought with it its own challenges. Including paying for Sky Q. To which I will return in another moment.
Not that I am, in any way, against the idea of using the young people (or even old people in the case of the podcast) to help out with the technical glitches. So when daughter and son-in-law arrived with the 48th wedding anniversary / 40th birthday pizza, added to the bottle of Bollinger we had to hand (boy we know how to celebrate), I got him involved with solving the Kindle mystery.
To cut it short, he couldn’t. Of course there’s a certain grim satisfaction in that it’s not just the old folk who can’t make the tech work, but it’s transitory because the problem still exists of course. What he could do that I couldn’t was Google something or other that told him others were saying that the comic book version of Kindle was highly unstable and others had had the same problem as I was having. Some comfort there.
What this led to was the decision to give up on Kindle and try Lulu as a free self-publishing tool. Free unless you want a proper book that is but that’s fair enough and the prices for a book didn’t seem extortionate (unlike Pastbook on Facebook who wanted something like £40 a book). So what’s not to like, goodbye Kindle, hello Lulu. What could go wrong? Well, only that Lulu* wants its images as PDFs not the jpgs the format that the images are currently in, pardon the grammar. So more modern-day, technological complexity ahead.
Which brings me back to Sky Q to finish off. Nothing like this in the 30s. You’d be lucky to be gathered round the wireless back then. It might be argued that this bit of kit, Sky Q, just adds a great deal to the complexity of modern day living without very much improving the quality of it. But we have found a few things we like – Lincoln Rhyme (always been a fan of Jeffrey Deaver’s version); The Young Offenders, the language is difficult to understand except when they’re swearing which is most of the time but it’s clever and very funny; The Twilight Zone which is disappointing, not a patch on the original, imo.
And finally to Dirty Harry. We’re on film version 4 and they have predictably got weaker as they’ve gone along but they have a certain charm as does Harry. I wish I could bring him back I’d set him to vigilante the litter louts. I’m not a fan of vigilantes or capital punishment but I would be happy to make an exception in the case of the pricks who drop litter in our park. And on that cheerful note…
*Would you believe it? Lulu won’t let me sign in, says it’s ‘host error’. Try later or contact your server. Sometimes you just can’t get ahead.