How dependent I have grown on my laptop and its portability and its smallness and its convenience. I don’t want to be chained to the same desk in a disordered study. This I have discovered over the last 10 days when my wonderful workhorse died for real on Sunday, May 10 (ironically enough that was also Mother’s Day).

I shlepped along using the desktop at work — a slow, unwieldy beast. Thankfully all the important teaching files were saved in dropbox.

But not so luckily for several months worth of pictures — only a few of which had managed the leap onto google drive in some random fashion.

As of yesterday, I have the workhorse back and spent several hours downloading and installing various programs: evernote, skitch, snagit, picasa, itunes (a really annoying and proprieterial program which reminds me why I despise Apple and its products and software), dropbox, and googledrive. It is remarkable how all of this software is practically free. So much engineering, creativity, technical expertise and collaborative teamwork is required to write each piece of software.

So this will be my 100th post on wordpress if I choose to publish this.

Should I make this my landmark 100th post?

In a major way, how very fitting since WordPress is only possible with the use of a computer and the internet.

I just had a little conversation with a colleague that highlights how technology has permeated every aspect of our lives.

Me: It was so cold this morning.

Her: Yes, it was. I checked my phone and it said 45.

Me: Remember when we had to look out the window at the thermometer?

Her: Yeah, it was not always right. Maybe off by 5 degrees.

Me: But close enough.

My father always made sure to have a large thermometer outside the kitchen window. We would check it each winter morning and summer afternoon to see how cold or how hot it was. Later he would get a weather station which gave readings on not just the temperature but the wind speed and the barometer. Those readings were sent via wire to a series of stacked dials which hung like a picture in the kitchen. But the old thermometer outside the window was always more accurate.