12.03.10
Posted in Holidays. Internet, Internet at 1:37 am by Administrator
I don’t know about you, but I tried Black Friday once, years ago before the day got so big and crazy with people crowding, pushing and fighting over items. Even before all the bigger hassles, I swore I’d never go again. And I haven’t and I will not ever if I can help it.
What I did instead since then has been to try to find this or that good buy for gifts all along during the year. I get the Christmas shopping done early and when the Christmas shopping rush starts, I stay at home and only go to the drug store or grocery store until the New Year. That plan really worked for me. I saved some money on sales, I didn’t have to cram all the shopping in one day, much less stress involved and I got finished early.
It worked well until this year. For some reason, maybe the economy in general, I didn’t run across as many good sales during the year, so I had more to purchase at the end of the year. I still didn’t attempt Black Friday, but did decide to try Cyber Monday.
This fall, we bought a house and the plan was to be moved well before Thanksgiving. Well, here it is the week after and we are still packing, dodging boxes and wondering if we will ever close on this house. The move has added stress to the holidays. Packing and getting ready to move has taken lots of time which I could have spent shopping earlier in the fall.
So I decided to pack part of the day on Cyber Monday and shop online and hopefully just sit back and wait for the gifts to flow to me through the mail. Well, I did get a good bit more packing done. I gave myself from 8pm until 12 midnight to search for and purchase the last six gifts I needed. Granted these six are the hardest to buy and it does take some time to search. I only went to one department store where I could find it all and they were having a great sale. So, I found four items got the right sizes, colors, etc. then my wireless internet gizmo that is supposed to run five computers at once crashed on me, the only computer in use at the time. So I started all over again, looking up the same four items, only to get to number three and it happened again, only this time it was the browser that stopped working. I got everything going again and by this time it was getting late. I again found the first four and quickly added two more that I wasn’t really satisfied with, but I was running out of time. I had to check out. One price had already changed on me, even before midnight. I had my card ready, putting in all the information for shipping, etc., and you guessed it. It crashed again about three minutes till midnight.
Totally frustrated, I turned everything off and called it a night. Cyber Monday, except for the crowds and travel, was almost as frustrating to me as my Black Friday experience. So today I started early in the day and left the packing until later. I was able to find some of the items I tried to order yesterday, but I paid more. Some of the items were no longer available at all. So I learned a good lesson. Start early on Cyber Monday, just as most people do on Black Friday. My computer problems could have been that I was online when half the country was off work and also online trying to shop as well. I may try it again, but I will keep the lessons from this year in mind. Hopefully, I’ll have more success next time.
Happy Holidays!
Peggy Williams
November 30, 2010
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01.24.10
Posted in Children & Electronics, Electronics, Environment, Internet, Technology at 8:35 pm by Administrator
My three year old grandson was “playing” the piano this morning. He looked up and asked me, “Is it plugged in?” I laughed at first, but then my mind started wondering about how his little mind during all of his three years has been inundated with electronics. He has known little else. Even the guitar he asked for last Christmas when he was two, was electronic. This Christmas Santa brought him his first DS game system. Is this good, o.k., or not so good? What will life be like for his children regarding electronics and technology? I cannot even begin to imagine. Who knows, today’s media electronics may then be a thing of the past and a whole new language and technology may exist.
I am old enough to have witnessed the electronic world when it was an infant and watched it grow into the giant it now is in our society. New gadgets come out so frequently that I don’t have time to learn about one before a new one arrives on the scene. I feel I’m falling behind regarding the knowledge and use of recent technologies, regardless of how good and useful they may be. It’s just hard to keep up. I watch my grandchildren experiencing one of these new gadgets for the first time and it seems to come naturally to them regarding how to use it and I’m there asking, “What is it?” Then, “How do you work it?” And they just look at me weird. They really don’t want me to ask them to teach me and I’m not so sure I want to learn either. It’s according to the gadget and what use I have for it. Although, when my now 18 year old grandson was five or so, he taught me how to use the internet. For that I am grateful. I think the internet, even though there are some not so good things out there in cyberspace, overall is a good tool and has enhanced all kinds of communication and education worldwide. As far as children are concerned the internet has a lot of good things for them as well, but they need supervision as it can be a dangerous place without an adult monitoring their use of it.
My first experience with electronics was in fifth or sixth grade when a school mate got on the school bus complaining that Santa gave her a ‘plug in’ radio rather than the handheld transistor one she asked for. Yes, young people, there was a time when you could not walk around with music plugged in your ears listening from your IPod or whatever gadget. Rather radios were plugged into electric outlets. Everyone in the house listened to the same music at the same time as the radio could be heard throughout the house. Parents made the choice of the type music and to which radio station the family listened. Electricity was still the energy source for everything in the home. Then, as now, I asked, “What is it?” I had not heard of a transistor radio and at that time did not see the need for it. All one had to do was ‘plug in’ the radio and it would work fine. The economics of electronics was the same then as now, which ranks in the not so good category. A new gadget comes to the market, as did the transistor radio, and the cost is very high. After several months or years, the price drops as new technologies come along or improvements are made to the original. My family couldn’t afford a transistor radio for several more years after its first appearance. We’d only had our TV for a few years and our radio was an old ‘plug in’ one but worked fine. And from there my electronic world began. Lucky for me, I got my transistor just as the Beatles were coming on the scene; otherwise I would have been listening to Blue Grass and other types of country music, (which was o.k., just not my favorite). I began to see how the transistor had some advantages over the ‘plug in.’
The point here is that I can remember a time in my life when the pace was slower and life was simpler. Now keeping up with it all gives me the feeling of always being behind and trying to catch up with the latest. It can bring on more stress for people my age of ‘50 something,’ if one is not electronic savvy, yet tries to be. I do like learning about it all, until I get to the frustration and stressed out point. Then I put it down for awhile and try again later. If I’ve tried over and over already and I’m still frustrated with the new gadget or software or whatever, I’ve learned to move on to something less stressful. I don’t just give up. One good thing about electronics these days is that I usually have more than one choice and I keep looking and trying until I find one that is more ‘50 something’ friendly.
There is no easy answer for the question, “Is this good, o.k., or not so good?” Media technology is probably all of it: some good, some o.k. and some not so good. My main concern or more of a question: In the long run, how will our children be affected by so much media technology from birth onward? Will they suffer somehow from technology overload? Already many people across almost all age brackets are addicted to the internet and video games. Many children would rather sit and play video games until their thumbs twitch and go numb rather than join a sports team or go outside to play, take a walk, or just enjoy the sun and fresh air. Research has already determined that media electronics which includes video games, TV, the internet, movies and other varieties, already take up most of a child’s waking hours outside of the classroom and some hours in the classroom. The American Academy of Pediatrics developed a program called Media Matters in 1997 due to their concerns about this issue. The program helps build awareness of the effects on children in the areas of time, nutrition (obesity epidemic in children), increased violence and sexual misbehavior. This program also shares with parents and others, ways to manage children’s time and consumption of media technology. Read more details about this program at http://www.pamf.org/children/common/behavioral/electronics.
How will these younger generations that have only known a world with techy everything be able to cope without stress or addiction eventually taking over? Will they keep winding themselves up until they spin out of control? Or will they just learn to cope with it fine as they grow and technology keeps getting more advanced and complex? I like to think the latter will be the case. Sort of like they never knew of another lifestyle, so they just deal with it. I hope for my grandchildren’s sake that this will be so. For some reason I’m doubtful that will be the case unless the child has consistent parental or other adult intervention and attention given to this potential problem.
I started to answer my grandson’s question by explaining the difference between a “pinano” as he calls it, and an organ that is ‘plugged in,’ but then I remembered how such conversations with three year olds usually go. So I decided a more detailed answer could wait until he is more mature, why overload him with more? Today the answer given with a smile was simply, “No sweety, you don’t plug it in.” He was fine with that and continued his little concert. He was doing something fun that was not electronic. I found that it can still be done!
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