The Good Old Days

I am wondering how many times I have heard the phrase: “I just wish we could go back to the good old days.” Someone usually says this when they are thinking of something wonderful that happened in their past. Perhaps it's because things aren't going so well at present. So I decided to compare the good old days with present day and see what I could find.

My dad's family is from northeast Georgia. My mom's family is from the upstate of South Carolina. Both sides were in rural areas and life was very similar for them in many respects. They lived on farms. To put it better, they lived on someone's farm and worked the land for them. The term is “sharecroppers.” Eventually both sides got their own place to work. You wake up early and have to go milk cows to have milk to drink and cook with. You take the milk and churn your own butter. You plant and work a large garden to have vegetables and raise livestock if you want meat. Now all this means you are having to do lots of manual work. Cows have to be milked and beans have to be plowed and picked. Eggs have to be gathered and cooked and animals have to be butchered and preserved. It's not easy work! If you wanted to go to the bathroom...it was about a hundred feet from the back door with a well beaten path leading to it. If you wanted water...you dropped the bucket into the well and pulled it up yourself. If you want it hot...you put it on the stove. You had to chop wood to keep warm and to cook. I did know some who had access to coal for heating. For cooking...it was always wood.

Life got a bit better with houses being wired for electricity. Stoves and refrigerators helped take a lot of the work out of it. Washing machines took over what a wash bucket and washboard once did. Houses were fitted with plumbing for running water and you no longer had to trod that path to the outhouse. It eliminated the need for chamber pots in the bedroom. Most of us would panic if we had to use what they had to use then.

Today we have our TV's and our music players. Cell phones can go anywhere with us and we feel lost without them. We reheat leftovers in the microwave and complain that it takes all minute! We truly live better than royalty did just a couple of hundred years ago. We travel in hours what it used to take days. If you are cold or hot you go to the thermostat on the wall. You turn it up...turn it down...or turn it off. In case you haven't realized it...these are the “good old days!”

The advances in technology have freed us from a lot of time consuming chores and hardships. They make our lives better is someways and worse in others. Too much idle time is not good for anyone. To try and fit everything under the sun in you schedule is just as destructive. Maybe more. It can make us very impatient. Just be thankful for what you have and use it wisely. We all have a lot more than we realize.

The Redneck Geek Recommends...

From time to time, I like to work with computers. I am talking about actually taking them apart, and tweaking them out like some geek hotrod. We have 4 of them at the house right now. Well, actually we have 7 but I don’t count the ones not in use. I have 2 dead blueberry iMacs with OS9. An older Gateway with Windows XP, and 4 Compaqs. I used to really love the Macs. It just got to be too much of a price tag for me. However, Apple has the most intuative and elegant operating system of all. I don't work on computers for money, I do it because I want to. I’ve always tried to keep from turning my hobby into a job because I think that I will begin to dislike doing it. However, I may have to rethink this soon. You would never know it from looking at this page, but I used to use Dreamweaver and hand code html when I used a Mac. I designed quite a few web pages for people and churches. Just not that much into it these days. My daughter has far surpassed my abilities with web design and css.

I recently bought my wife and and my daughter a computer of their own. My daughter is 17 years old and I was hoping that she would be able to use it when she goes to college. My wife’s computer was bought so that she could have a place to keep her documents and recipes while checking her email from time to time. She gets a ponderous amount of email. Enough that it would drive me crazy. I got them a laptop of their own because I love them. Besides, it keeps them off of my computer. :) I have a laptop that I use with Vista on it and I have this “Linux Box” that I had to reformat this week. Cheap computers are the only ones that I buy. You can do what you want here, but I get inside the guts of all makes and models. Some of the hardware is better in some of the premium models, but not always! At this point in time I only require a dual core processor, good power supply (the most important part!), and a gig or two of ram.

Now for software, I do not use Internet Explorer unless some web page makes me. I use Firefox on all of my computers. It is just safer. Firefox is default on any operating system I use. I use Opera as my feed reader, because l think it has an elegant interface. Email clients tend to be too buggy for me so I just stick with web based email. My preference for operating systems is Linux. Linux is a free (most cases, not all) operating system that is really nice. There are several hundred distributions of Linux. It costs nothing except a little learning curve and works very well and fast. I don’t recommend Linux of any kind if you use dial up. It is a lot of aggravation to get working with a dial up modem. The only reason I use Windows at all is that some of my hardware is not compatible with Linux. Now with a broadband connection, Linux is a great OS! Best part of all is that Linux doesn’t need any security software. Companies do make it, but that is to detect Windows malware that may have been picked up. Windows based spyware and viruses do not affect Linux. It has no native viruses that I am aware of and I have been using it for several years now. You can even run it from a live CD to give it a test drive. I know that Ubuntu will send you a CD free for the asking. I will talk more about security software that I use for Windows later.

With the information that I have given here, and a dollar bill, you may be able to get a cup of coffee. If this information is useful to to you...then I think that's great! If not, well, I'll try harder next time around. This may be all you want to know about computers from a redneck with a thick southern drawl. :) Happy computin' y'all!