Keeping up with the ‘Tronics’

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I heard a presentation several years ago about the need for those of us beyond the twenty-something years to stay current with modern innovations – something that our house calls Tronics – short for Electronics. These include software upgrades, trendy devices, the latest electronic social interaction platforms, or the never ending birth of the latest “app.” If not, we risk looking like dinosaurs unearthed from the La Brea tar pits and displayed in museums.

Imagine the last days of your life, living in “the home” where some wiseacre youth, with peach fuzz disguising a weak upper lip, struts into your room and unplugs your trusty, although slightly clunky telephone, replacing it with a miniature square box the size of your thumb nail that doesn’t even need a connection to the wall. Now you want to call your best friend but first you have to figure out this new gizmo. Your choices are either learn to use it or forever be stuck incommunicado.

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The world of creative writing should be immune to this craziness – but it’s not. One would think there isn’t much one can do to upgrade the writing pen. Welcome to the digital pen that you can connect to your phone, tablet, or laptop and write anywhere sans a keyboard when inspiration strikes. The moleskin notebook is now electronic. You can use it to snap a pic of your notes and save them “to the cloud” – that murky being out there hovering over us waiting to protect our latest brilliant words. And are you stuck to find the best word to liven your work? How about using a visual word map that looks like a spider web and shows how words relate to each other rather than paging through that Thesaurus perched on your desk?

So how about starting each day with a clean mental slate? Whatever happened yesterday is done, over, outdated. Today you reside on this giant piece of rock flying through space as one of millions of minor talking dots. Who knows – today we may all be sucked into some giant black hole, shooting out the other end in a whole new life? This day is filled with learning possibilities.

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