<p>My kids couldn’t believe the process of route mapping in the olden days. </p>
<p>Get out the county map book. Look up the street name in the index - make sure it was the right city because more than one city in the county might have the same street name. Go to the page with your destination and read the map to figure out the best route. Get a piece of paper and write down the directions. Don’t forget to bring the piece of paper. </p>
<p>In the 80s, I had a job that involved frequent travel to unfamiliar locations all around California. I had two entire file cabinet drawers devoted to my map books - lol. </p>
<p>My students have no idea where one geographical place is in relation to any other. The world is one big mystery–they just follow the line on the little box.</p>
<p>I read a thing several years ago that made me laugh. Someone’s young kid was tired of always losing the (cordless) phone and told Mom it would be great if someone invented a phone attached to the base by a cord.</p>
<p>Haven’t read the whole thread but, remember the days before PCs? Write out a form, send it to the punch card department, they punched the cards and sent it to the HUGE main frame in the room we weren’t allowed into. Next day get reams of green and white paper to check over. Do corrections and repeat…</p>
<p>Now I’m about to throw the PC out the window if if takes 20 seconds to open a program I need at work.</p>
<p>One word against high tech- power. You need to remember to charge and take the power cord with you for laptops, tablets, cell phones, cameras, camcorders… We recently did a long car trip with several stops- sometimes the gps gave longer routes than necessary by an old fashioned map. I, too, like looking at a whole map instead of changing screens to get the route. Our son (who joined us in one city for a family wedding) was using his phone while I was calling out the same info from my having looked at a map- I was actually had a better route, but wasn’t listened to.</p>
<p>I do appreciate having phones- landline or cell (although we switched to pay per minute ones since we don’t use them as much)- that have no long distance or roaming charges plus unlimited talk times. I love having a gps system with points of interest available for finding restaurants et al. </p>
<p>It is hard to believe that with Skype, Facebook and other internet tools it is so easy for H and M-in-law to keep up with relatives while in the US. I still remember when she had no phone service and would call us from India at around 3 in the morning- when she could use the public one close by. Now she reads her local news in her home language daily and can watch movies, listen to her music easily. Meanwhile my EE degreed father has nothing to do with computers, sigh.</p>
<p>My dad (age 87) gave me an angry lecture last week about how dangerous the world is without phone books, and how we were all going to pay for it and they will be COMING BACK! I think his point was something about how if you need to find someone you can’t look up their number any more… </p>
<p>When my kids were born I couldn’t have imagined some of the things we have now. I’m trying now to imagine some of the things that will be available to my grandchildren when they reach college age. How much more advanced can we get? :)</p>
<p>I was shocked that my 20-year-old bought himself a watch with hands this summer!! I didn’t think people used watches anymore. I don’t. I use my phone or the computer screen or the one on my car (remember when those were the first thing to break in cars and be useless back when they had hands?)</p>
<p>Does anyone even have a landline anymore? And what a memory - mimeographs - early school days I remember them bring our math problem sheets into class fresh off the “press”. Will never, ever forget the smell of those sheets - oddly pleasing smell.</p>
<p>“My kids are coming to visit today. So I pulled up the email with their flight information, and went to the airline site to see if the flight is on time. Yes, there are more advanced methods like having flight updates sent to my phone, but I was being old fashioned for today. So the second I clicked on the airline site, the information for the flight I was looking for appeared under the search choices. I was so impressed.”</p>
<p>Even easier way - just google “united flight 268” or whatever, and the status, arrival time and gate show up in google. No need to even go to the airline website at all. </p>
<p>You can do the same with fedex - just google fedex and the tracking number. </p>
<p>Mimeos are alive and well in my workroom, because per-page costs are much cheaper than photocopies, the quality is excellent for text (though not for images), and if you want to run off several hundred, the machine is fast.</p>
<p><<<
My D had a flight this week for business. She emailed me her itinerary to my gmail account. I wanted to check her status so I put “Delta” in my google search on my iPad - automatically her flight info popped up on my page - google apparently recognized my gmail email about a flight and automatically pulled her entire Itinerary up. Pretty cool.
<<<</p>
<p>When I got my first iPad, I was starting to think it had ESP…lol. I would be reading something and then I would go to google and I would type the first letter and the word would pop up as a choice. I’m not sure if it is Google or Apple or both that make the magic happen.</p>
<p>All this talk about cell phones and technology makes me want to share this tip.</p>
<p>If your “contacts” in your cell phone has your old land-line number in it with “home”, change that. I left my cell phone in a Home Depot cart last week and the person who found it tried to call my (old) landline because it said, “home”. Luckily, since I have two cell phones, I was able to call my lost phone and the person answered…and I got my phone back.</p>
<p>Then I changed my “home” number to my H’s cell number on both of my phones. I could have put my other phone’s number in as home but was worried that if I left my entire purse somewhere, that wouldn’t do me any good. </p>
<p>Think about someone like Laura Ingalls Wilder. When she was a child, her family traveled by covered wagon or horse and buggy. In many ways, her early life was rather primitive. By the time she died, one could travel by airplane. Think of all of the technological advances in between covered wagons and airplanes she witnessed. I wonder if we live to be 90 we will have seen the same amount of change in our world.</p>
<p>The example of the replacement of the map by GPS, as well as the use of the calculator, shows a potential pitfall of technology, which is that we can now do a lot of things without really understanding them. This has always been true, I guess, but now it’s true for relatively simple things like knowing how to get to an address in a nearby town.</p>
<p>^^ that’s what I’m saying: Not only could Laura not imagine airplane, but cell phones and computers. What will my grandchildren not be able to imagine? Those things seemed impossible to her.</p>
<p>I still have my landline. 1. My phone is in my purse and I don’t want to have to be taking it in and out. 2. I’m hearing impaired and can hear the landline phone much better when in other places in the house…plus I have a phone upstairs and I don’t have to carry the cell with me all the time. 3. I think it’s more comfortable on my ear. 4. I like the sound better. I truly enjoy talking on landlines much more than cell phones.</p>