Aha! Week 2

I'm becoming overwhelmed with thechnology!  At age 42, not having a techno background, so many digital phenomena are new and foriegn to me, but as I keep plugging away, I recognize my vocabulary slowly changing and, if I look closely enough, my comfort level expanding to include things I thought were voodoo a month or two ago. 

I had a conversation with a friend last week who I'd always thought was fairly wired in -- he has a job in a technologically oriented field and I'd always relied on him to help me with techh problems in the past.  I was describing some of our class projects, specifically the creation of blogs and the challenges I've had appending video, RSS, etc.  I was taken aback when he told me he really didn't know much about blogs, and that he'd always wondered what an RSS feed was.  Aha!  All of a sudden I wasn't the dumbest guy in the room -- at least it didn't seem like it for a few minutes. 

I've come to understand that there are many people (in my age group anyway) who've privately felt uncomfortable and perhaps just a little bit inferior because of the gap in thier technological aptitude.  Once I've expanded my knowledge and ability, even just a little, with technology, I've increasingly noticed a great number of people for whom technology, and especially the alarming rate of its increasing complexity and ubiquity, has become scary.  I've long been kind of ashamed of my technological inexperience, and I've held the notion that I'm way too far behind the curve to ever catch up.  What I've found, though, is that's not even a little bit true.  Undoubtedly I have a long, long way to go, but even in a few short weeks I've seen just the slightest glimmer of promise that, some day, I'll get it.