Having managed to earn a degree in computer science, I'm not so old yet that I am averse to learning about and putting technology to use in practical ways. I am so old now that my eyes just aren't what they used to be and reading teeny tiny printed text is beyond my visual sensory capabilities. For instance, today I decided a dead branch of a house circuit was due to a bad breaker switch. So I pulled the breaker from the box at the back of the house and tried to examine the labels on it to find out what kind of breaker to order as its replacement. As this photo illustrates, the text on those labels would have been a cinch to read twenty or thirty years ago but are just a blur to my aged eyes today. The photo accurately depicts what these old eyes are seeing when I look at the breaker switch just pulled from the breaker box.
I could have hunted up a magnifying glass stashed or left laying somewhere around this house but it's easier to put technology to use instead. Technology I depend upon daily for everything from reading ebooks to painting original digital art pieces, my trusty tablet. A quick shot or two at the labels up close and ta da, they're easy reading for my old man eyes.
There's nothing earth shattering about this simple leveraging of technology for my needs, but it still makes me giggle to do it. I still write software (entirely for fun now in my retirement era of life) which takes much more brain power and cleverness, but making easy work of tasks my aging old body parts just aren't up to any more is fun and rewarding, in its own way.
And when I get really really old and am still tricky enough to be leveraging technology to suit my increasingly simple and meager needs, I'll come back to this blog post and giggle about it all over again sometime in the future a few decades from now . . . if I'm fortunate enough to still be alive enough to care about doing such delightful things for myself, that is.
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