Today I configured a CNAME record – or alias – for domain mapping at my registrar so that my Typepad blog url resolved correctly to the IP address.
Before your eyes glaze over, let me assure you that I have no idea what that means, technically speaking. All I know is that it took my former clunky blog url, http://www.beelines.typepad.com/that_awkward_age/ and make it cuter and easier to remember, a good thing at this age. Now it’s now simply http://www.thatawkwardage.com (full disclosure – you don’t even have to put in the http://).
This may not be worth a blog post to you, but to me – someone who is so technically challenged that I can sit in a corner and amuse myself for hours with a zipper trying to figure out how it works – this is huge.
I’m the kind of person who is only more confused by directions. When I was a divorced, single mom, I paid the neighbor boy who was just barely past the Santa Claus age to come over and put my son’s toys together on Christmas Eve after my 3-year-old went to bed.
I hate to admit this, but one of my husband’s most attractive assets was knowing that if I married him, I would never have to do that again, because he is the World’s Greatest Geek. He was a geek before they made cell phones, beepers and calculators (and maybe even pocket protectors) so that everyone could peg one across a crowded dance floor from 100 feet away.
There’s a downside to getting tangled up with an engineer -- which goes beyond the scope of this post – but let me tell you, there’s nothing like having a geek in your bed when you can’t sleep at night. Before I ran out of estrogen and starting having to take Ambien and two over-the-counter sleeping-pill rocket-boosters to sleep, all I had to do on those evenings when I’d had coffee too late in the day to drift off was to say those magic words that he longed to hear: “Talk technical to me, Honey.”
He would whisper to me in tantalizing detail the inner workings of a nuclear power plant or how Ohm’s Law defines the relationship between power, voltage, current and resistance. In no time I was in dreamland.
Bob’s the kind of guy who not only tells you how to build a clock when you ask him what time it is, he can troubleshoot the Greenwich Observatory. For many years after computers came along, he would try to tell me why things worked or didn’t work the way I wanted, but I just held up my hand in that “please stop” way, and told him I just didn’t have the memory capacity. Plus, that’s what he was for.
Then a few years ago, it dawned on me. With him being nine years older and the genetically inferior gender of the species, chances were, I would outlive him. OMG! What would I do without him?
“You’ll be fine,’ he said, patting me comfortingly. “There’s the life insurance.”
“Not THAT,” I said. “Who will I call for tech support?”
After he began having Parkinson’s symptoms a few years ago, it gradually became impossible for him to do any computer stuff for me through the week. I tried calling him at work to solve my business-related issues that just couldn’t wait, but he didn’t have time to walk me through the fix. I saved up the optional work for the weekends, but finally it got to the point that he didn’t have time for that either, because of the time it takes for his Saturday routine.
It became increasingly obvious that I was going to have to learn this stuff myself. Believe me when I say this, I would rather pick up doggie doo than have to learn about the guts of a computer or how to communicate in zeros and ones. The computer has absolutely no regard for my screaming, yelling and hand waving when I want it to do something. Not that that tactic has ever worked on anything or anyone else in my household, but it has always made me feel better.
Regardless, in the past three years, I’ve learned to work with designers to build Web sites for myself and my clients; maintained my own business Web site; learned social media and developed significant presences on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Vimeo, Merchant’s Circle and others; and now, I’ve started my second blog.
Heck, I’ve even changed the battery in my computer, and I would have upgraded the memory, but Bob yelled at me to let him do it. I didn’t want him to feel threatened, so I let him.
Last night a friend called me “internet savvy.” Wow. That was never a label I aspired to, much less one that I thought I’d ever hear.
But I must say, it feels like I’ve come a long way since the time Bob asked me how much RAM my new computer at work had, and I replied, “A bunch.”
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