Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Gettin' Old

Last week I celebrated my birthday. Not a milestone birthday. Just a normal run-of-the-mill one that's not even over-the-hill. I'm not one to make a big deal about my birthday or fret over how old I now am.

I'm the youngest old fart you ever met. At work I'm known to have a great disdain for GUIs and prefer the command line. Even this post was written in my favorite editor (vi). If I have to use the mouse, I feel like I've been slowed down. Now, I'm not completely opposed to progress. I do use a virtual desktop (with pretty much everything mapped to keyboard shortcuts) and there are some tools that are better in a GUI world. In this day and age, writing documents in LaTeX is not really needed when you have a full-featured WYSIWYG desktop publishing program like FrameMaker at your disposal (Word on the other hand gets in my way).

Yes, I have computers older than some of the some employees at my company. But none of this makes me feel old. What sort of gave me that feeling of getting older was my annual ski outing with my daughter a couple of weeks ago. After her lesson, her instructor was letting me know what she needed to work on. When he was done explaining that she needed to lean forward in her boots, he said "and as for you..." What!? Was he watching me ski around taking pictures while she was in her lesson. No. My skis were old. They've been obsolete for a couple of decades. My boots, rear-entry. They only made those because, at the time, the plastic technology wasn't far enough along to make it reasonable to get into another type of boot. After seeing that he was wearing a local ski shop jacket, I figured he was just trying to get a sale, but later on the lift, not once, but twice, a fellow lift rider would make a comment like, "That takes me back. I haven't seen a pair of straight boards in ages." That's the kind of comment that someone would make to an old geezer. Not a father out with his elementary aged daughter.

Maybe I am getting old...did I tell you about skiing with my daughter last week?

2 comments:

Llama Momma said...

:-)

Lara said...

"Yes, I have computers older than some of the some employees at my company."

That can be easily remedied. : )