Thoughts On Stuff

I’m spending the day working at the 303 Cafe, around the corner from where I live.

The owner asked if I could help another customer with a Mac get her laptop connected to the wireless network here. (It’s all weird for Macs, apparently, and requires manually adding an IP address.)

This other customer is a Canadian journalist who’s in town visiting. She’s probably my dad’s age, and she seemed to have the same approximate reaction that my dad has to my instructions. I suggested she write down the IP on a Stickie, so when she came back, she would definitely have the IP. She hadn’t used Stickies before, so I showed her that.

We began having a conversation about how she feels that she doesn’t have time to sort through all the possible technologies available to her, partly because she’s busy working, but also because she’s older. (I think her work ethic is also from a generation that doesn’t routinely veer to YouTube at the office.)

She asked me some questions about LibraryThing, and telling her about that (she didn’t believe that that many people still read books) lead to questions about other technologies all the way to me opening up SecondLife for her to look at.

(It was like a bizarre version of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.)

By the time we were done, we had agreed that someone needs to start a website for people that separates the technological wheat from the chaff. Basically, I thought of it as a place where I’d write about technology that is either useful or likely to end up needing to know about, like I would explain it to my dad. There are lots of people (not only old people) who are capable of opening up a Word document, but are flabbergasted by the term RSS.

Now, I also assume that someone’s thought of this. I’ve already spent a good hour not working, and so I’ll leave it to someone else to discover it. (Or email me, and we can start a support site for old people.)

UPDATE! LibraryLaura totally had the answer: commoncraft. Laura says “he does videos on lots of different web 2.0 stuff ‘in plain english’ – they’re really cute and clever.”

Laura bonus: VoiceThread – ‘an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways – using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) – and share them with anyone they wish.’ (quote from the website)

Update II: Erin wrote in the comments: “have you seen Eons – the social networking site for seniors??

I posted about this before, but it really requires a full post of its own, especially since I can’t stop talking about it, and today I gave my website addy to the cashier at Old Navy while gushing about how their Sweetheart jeans fit me just perfect, and I know this because of Zafu.

You know how it’s hard to find bras and jeans that fit? And it seems they’re tailored for someone with a body shape very different than your own? Zafu asks you a bunch of questions about your body and how the item usually fits you, then gives you a list of specific items that should fit you better. I needed new jeans, so I tried it out. Lo and behold, I’m sitting at home in my cute new jeans, which don’t gap at the back, or make my thighs look gross. It’s amazing!

This is WAY better than Talk Like a Pirate Day. Well, I think its way better.

When Rob posted a comment featuring Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day, my first thought was the anachronistic/historical setup. I’d be in a Victorian whalebone corset, and occasionally faint on the couch.

Then I went to the website, and realized just how much more the whole thing could be. My favorite suggestion is to hand somebody a trinket and a phone number and say “Call this number in 30 years – you’ll know what to do next.”

And I would of course walk up to a computer and use the mouse as a microphone (my favorite Star Trek movie moment of all time).