Opinion : The Wacky, Wonderful, World Wide Web

I STILL find this whole internet world a bit weird...while finding it wonderful as well...but at the time, a bit too nosey for my taste.

A couple days ago I "celebrated" my birthday, I use that word loosely.

At our house, we greet holidays, birthdays and anniversaries, holding our breath and tiptoeing out of bed...traditionally, these days are known for something bad happening on them.

The birthday went well, even though a black cat crossed the road in front of us on the way to town.

After a relatively crappy week, I thought I'd throw caution to the wind and change my profile on facebook, so everyone would know it was my birthday.

At the end of the day, I checked my account for everyone's greetings, and found myself smiling at the simple "Happy Birthday wishes" and the funny ones...and realized that the guy who invented this weird contraption, wasn't so weird himself, he knew how to cheer me up.

I try to figure out how it is that it seems like I work at my computer for 8+ hours a day sometimes, and feel like I've accomplished so little, then I realize I really did do a lot, it's just measured in bytes...and I can't show it to anyone.

I am starting to warm to this internet thing, and guess maybe it's really here to stay. :)

After reading through my greetings, I realize how my life has changed in the last few years, again for the better. It seems just as we start to get comfortable, something wild and crazy comes along and moves us into something scary and exciting.

There are days I open the website and still say to Dean, "Wow, sometimes we impress me!" and most every day I am amazed by the brains that created this website. How do they make it do all this stuff that we do? I haven't got a clue.

I can still remember the days of dear old DOS, which I believe stands for "disc operating system". Those amazingly long lines of code we'd type in to get to a simple word file so we could type a letter on our fancy computer with a 256 mb memory.

When I started back in the 80's (miss those hairdos...and the hair to do them:) I had a notebook with directions of what to type, and very patient friend to sit with me hour after hour patiently guiding me through the backslashes, telling me "No, that's the 'forward' slash, you need the backslash" and explaining that cd then meant "change drive" and *.* meant all the files in the drive and so on and on and on...

And that was BEFORE I knew what the internet was.

Now the intelligent folks like Kurt and Wes make it so all I have to do is point, click, type, click, click and by magic you at home read what I just wrote. That STILL blows my mind!

Then we mess with the pictures adjusting the brightness, size and etc. to make them look good, and by magic click the right spots on the back end of the website and "Tada!" you see pictures.

THEN if we are feeling really brave we can link a video...

On days like today I remember where we came from.

I remember the late nights getting a phone call with a weary voice on the other end asking "Can you bring the kids down to the newspaper and help us lay out pages?"

I'd lasso the tribe of 3,4,5,6 kids however many I could find, bundle them up, buckle them in, and unload them and turn them loose in those poor peoples office while trying to put hot wax on paper, and putting thin tape around pictures to make a newspaper.

We've come a loooong way, baby.

Those were the good ol' days and someday I will tell my kids how we used to get the news out and I know they will look at me funny like they do when I mention the 8 track tape deck I had in my car under my CB radio.

But mostly, I'll tell them how we were blessed to have had our last newspaper sold out from under us when we THOUGHT we knew it was the end of the world.

Then I will tell them how it brought us closer to our friends in the area and how when you have a crappy week, you put something simple like your birthday out there for folks to see and the kind folks in your life will zap you a smile in return.

So while I sit and ponder all these sweet newspaper memories, and the wonderful friends we met along the way, I find myself embracing this new world of "news-papering" .

While I miss the good ol' days sometimes, I really enjoy the new and improved days much better...except now the kids are always messing with stuff in MY office!