February 14, 2006
Our Family
Tony and Norma are middle-aged Calilfornians, living in a modest suburban ranch house with step-daughter Cybil, 24, her fiancee, Phillip, 22, and step-son Karl, 21. All the kids are still in nearby commuter colleges pursuing various degrees. None of us are professional technical computer people, however, we admit to being power users in the past.
Tony was a PC database guru back when Ashton-Tate’s dBASE dominated the market, and MS-Access didn’t exist. Norma has a minor in computer science and used to be competent programmer in Pascal! Phillip used to be a Cisco CNA only two years ago but has not maintained his certification. Karl took two years of community college C and C++ programming courses while still in high school. Today he is proud of being at level 59 out of 60 in the network game Warcraft! Apparently that is more challenging than C++. Cybil, an art history major, is the only family member who has never warmed to mucking around under the hood of a computer.
OK. So we’re not typical. We used to face technical puzzles with relish. It used to fun and fulfilling to struggle to make things work together. Today we just want our computing stuff to WORK the first time, everytime. We yearn for our computing to be simple.