It’s time to log off for good
This is my last Tech Q&A column in The Miami Herald. I’ve accepted a job in suburban New York where my wife’s family lives, and while I’d like to keep writing the column, there are no plans to continue. Meanwhile, stay in touch at my personal Web page, tim.hendo.googlepages.com/home.com, and I’ll keep you abreast.
Together, we transferred cassettes into iPods, tamed digital-photo overload and found the right laptop. We overcame countless error messages, rescued lost favorites, reconnected to recalcitrant e-mail, raged against hapless help lines and machines that spewed nonsense.
I learned as much from you as you did from me — a good part of the time, you solved the problem before I did. There were also those kind experts who let me know when I screwed up, usually in polite terms. It was fun.
Can you get along without me? I’ll miss you, but you’ll be OK. If you have a problem, you can bet a lot of other people do, too. Search the Web to see how others tackled your issue. If you find online answers too hard to follow, go to the bookstore or library and pick up a thin volume about your operating system — Windows XP, for instance, or Mac OSX — and read it. Nothing voluminous, just 100 pages or so on the basics, and you’ll be ahead of the curve.
Keeps coming back
When former Miami Herald business editor George Haj asked me to write the column earlier this century, I wrote up a few common questions as a demonstration. The first one, something like “Why is there no program associated with this file?” continues to come in, in various forms, week after week.
I’ve answered it many times in many ways, but the short answer is another question: What are you doing trying to open a file that your computer doesn’t recognize? Did somebody give it to you? If so, ask that person to give it to you in a form you can use. Is it something you found on your computer that piqued your curiosity? Then leave it alone, it’s not meant to be opened.
A lot of things have changed. When the column went online I started to hear from people as far away as Mexico, Turkey and Canada. Things took off earlier this year when Jim Coates of the Chicago Tribune retired. Suddenly I had readers from Silicon Valley, Las Vegas, Alabama, Washington state, Cleveland and a dozen other places.
Since then, I haven’t been able to respond personally to every e-mail, and for that I apologize. It was a thrill knowing so many people were interested.
What’s next with computers? It’s gotten easier since my first one, a Windows 3.1 model, which required manually setting jumpers and guessing IRQ numbers right to get on a pretty uninformative Internet: a maze of Archie and Veronica and Gopher documents. I bet you had more fun on your first day with a computer than I did ... I just kept turning it on, looking at it, clicking on the Program Manager buttons that appeared to do nothing useful, and turning it off again.
But a computer can never be truly simple, for the very reason that they can do so much. A little guidance goes a long way, especially at the beginning, and I’m happy so many of you asked me for help. I’m looking forward to learning more from you.
XTim Henderson is database editor for the Miami Herald’s computer-assisted reporting team. Send questions to thendersonmiamiherald.com.
© 2007, The Miami Herald