No ‘Pyooter = No Fun

Yrs Trly has been without this here laptop almost a day.
I called my friend I used to work with at Transit, who has long been fooling with computers.
Actually I tried to e-mail him at first from my iPhone, but that bombed due to my not having his e-mail address in my iPhone.
“Can you imagine,” I told him; “what it’s like for us computer-junkies to be without a computer?”
“Here it is,” I said to my computer-service shop; “my all-time favorite toy!”
It’s true.
I re-enter my house from errands, and I immediately fire up this laptop.
Often I just let it keep running and sleep while I’m out.
Dishwasher started the other night, I finessed my dog per usual, but no ‘pyooter to fire up.
What to do? I read through blogs I plan to publish, and climbed the walls.
Who would have ever thunk 52 years ago when I graduated high-school my computer would replace television?
My friend has been driving computers since his first Atari.
I came later.
My first ‘pyooter was a Windoze PC with an eight-meg hard-drive. (This here laptop is 500 GIGS, for crying out loud.)
I switched to Apple Macintosh when my newspaper employer computerized with MAC.
I am now on ‘pyooter number four, this here Apple MacBook Pro.
It’s overkill for what I do; my next rig will not be a MacBook Pro.
Or maybe it will be! A friend told me video-files are HUGE, that I’d need a MacBook Pro to process it.
That video is on the back-burner; I’ve never processed it.
But I’ve always wanted to.
When I was in high-school, back in ’62, my 12th-grade English-teacher told me I could write very well.
“But Dr. Zink,” I said — his name was Zink; “all it is is slinging words together.”
“But Hughes,” he said; “you do that very well.”
I thought him joking, but over-the-years I found that true.
I’m not Tolstoy or F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I can sling words together pretty good.
That is, tell a story without mucking it up with grammatical and syntax errors.
I’ve also learned a few tricks over-the-years, like timing and letting your protagonists tell the story with dialog.
Readers prefer that over narration.
I’ve also learned the best writing is reporting some insanity. The best I’ve ever read was a report on skydiving by a girl who tried it herself.
And then there was the story a newspaper-reporter filed about his riding a 100-foot-high waterslide. —He wasn’t a kid.
So when it comes to some insane experience, just do it! Your muse will cook.
Early-on writing was a struggle.
I fell into covering sportscar racing for a small weekly newspaper out of Rochester (NY).
I’d write a report, then saw it needed revision. Insert this, delete that, move this, spelling errors, whatever.
Sooner-or-later so many revisions were needed, about all I could do was type the damn thing again.
But word-processing on computer ended that madness.
Inserts or deletions were easy. Moving text was also easy.
A spellcheck could flag misspellings.
My stroke 20 years ago added a new wrinkle.
Sloppy keyboarding.
But a spellcheck could flag mistypes.
My stroke was fairly serious, but I found I could still sling words together. —What a joy that was!
And my ‘pyooter was helping me do it.
It was like I’d had a stroke, and was severely mucked-up because of it, but the old me was still in there, and my ‘pyooter was making the old me possible.
So now I find myself slinging words together a lot, although not as much since my wife died.
‘Pyooters can also be a technical challenge, which I find interesting.
Post-stroke I would have not done as well at that newspaper were I not so intrigued.
So now my laptop is back; hard-drive defragged, junk removed, everything optimized to enhance speed. I was sick of watching that pinwheel.
Sweetness and light returns!

• “‘Pyooter” is computer.
• “Transit” equals Regional Transit Service, the public transit-bus operator in Rochester, NY, where I drove transit-bus for 16&1/2 years (1977-1993). My stroke October 26, 1993 ended that. I retired on medical-disability.
• RE: “Windoze PC......” —“Windoze” is Microsoft “Windows,” the operating-system used on most-non-Apple personal-computers (“P.C.”) Macintosh users claim Windows is inferior, so call it “Windoze.” Apple-Computer has its own non-Windows operating-system, currently OS-X.
• As I understand it, a gig is 1,000 megs.
• My “newspaper employer” was the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over seven years ago. Best job I ever had — I worked there almost 10 years (over 11 if you count my time as a post-stroke unpaid intern [I had a stroke October 26, 1993, from which I recovered fairly well]). (“Canandaigua” [“cannan-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city nearby where I live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” —It’s about 14 miles away.)
• RE: “Your muse will cook......” —Your “muse” it what slings the words together; your brain. I do my writing on a legal-pad; others just use their ‘pyooter.
• RE: “I was sick of watching that pinwheel......” —Computers display a “please wait” icon while they process. Years ago, on Windows, it was an hourglass. Some applications display a watch. Now Apple computers display a rotating multi-colored pinwheel, before that was a rotating soccer-ball; Windows machines may do the same. —If your ‘pyooter is bog-slow (overloaded with junk), it displays the “please wait” icon a lot.
• My beloved wife of over 44 years died of cancer April 17th, 2012. I miss her dearly.