About Our Neural Synapses

It was in 1979 I bought my first computer - an Osborne. Some of you chronologically qualified may remember this smallish, portable, DOS based machine. I ended up taking it to work, and writing and producing my own correspondence. I learned typing at the age of 13 and had spent much of my life since in front of a typewriter (a wonderful Olympia still here in the house), so I could print out my first draft, do the edit, print the final version and get the letter out the door.

Turned out this upset the higher ups in my work place...after all, I had a secretary. True enough, but she was wonderfully bright and capable, and I figured that I might lose a few minutes and give her more and more interesting things to do.

I then progressed to an Osborne 2...it's still in the basement and runs, the last time I checked. Don't know where I'd find those floppy disks, though.

In 1985 I acquired a Mac Classic, and it changed my life. With that 64k of RAM, why there was no world I could not conquer. Since then, I don't know how many Macs have run through my life - a bunch, that's for sure. Nowadays I have a computer at home, one in the office, an iPhone, and a first generation iPad.

I can run the office computer from any computer in the world, so I can be somewhat untethered when I travel, and I spend hours doing what I like to call "research," and what "she who would command" labels "playing around."

True enough. But play, in its highest form can be the most exhilarating kind of learning anywhere around.

Whether I'm spending time in The National Gallery in London via Google's Art Project, or reading the downmarket Daily Mail in London, some kind of learning is going on.

And then there are the problems, some of which I can solve myself. Last night I had to reformat an external hard drive for the Mac, and the instructions from the manufacturer were created by the writing team of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie (you have to be a certain age to understand that). I struggled for a bit, found some help elsewhere on the web), solved the problem and got the hard drive formatted and the computer's hard drive backed up.

So the neural synapses have gotten a bit of a work out - and that beats the hell out of an evening of solitaire or high school reminiscences....

Art Museums You Can Visit In Your Pajamas

Those clever scamps at Google have done it again, especially for those of us whose age and diminished physical capacities have crimped our travels but not our imaginations. Google has worked out relationships with seventeen of the world's museums - from the Hermitage in St Petersburg to the Museum of Modern Art in New York - that allow you to walk the galleries and study selected paintings close up, and I do mean "close up."

The first time I looked at Van Gogh's "Starry Night," I was impressed; as I was able to "move closer" to the painting, I was amazed because I could see the individual brush strokes more clearly than I ever could in the museum.

I was gobsmacked (one of my favorite English slang words) and - dare I say it? - moved by this experience, remembering those years in my life when my hip was going downhill and visiting a museum, any museum, was like climbing a mountain. And if I could get to one of my favorite Vermeers at The National Gallery in London, I needed to sit down a lot.

The museums are producing videos to increase your appreciation of the experience, and over time, no doubt more tantalizing goodies will arrive on the site.

If you're about to travel to one of the cities where Google's Art Project has a museum or two, this program is ideal for having a quick look to see how you might want to spend your time in the collection.

You can even create your own gallery of favorites, and as arrangements are made with other museums, your experience is likely to broaden and your appreciation to deepen.

Yes, I know it's not the same as really being there, but with this approach, there's no searching for a viewing spot in a crowded gallery, no need to suss out where the bathroom is, no need to purchase a guide, no need to hunt for a place to sit.

Just click here to start your art adventure.

Our National Debating Society

On a recent "Real Time," HBO's show starring Bill Maher, Carl Bernstein was a member of the panel.

Yup, that Carl Bernstein. You know, Nixon, Watergate, I am not a crook, that reporter.

He said something that stopped me cold, and here is my paraphrase:

For the last thirty years Congress has been nothing more than a debating society.

All that money spent to elect debaters, and so little to show for it.

As the world we know appears to be crumbling, increasingly conflicted, rife with poverty, the politicians have excelled at one thing - that is, opening their pie holes and filling our ears with codswallop (look it up...it's one of my favorite English words).

Our complex world becomes black and white; the poor are completely responsible for their own circumstances; the rich are overtaxed, and our revolution began in New Hampshire and not Vermont, according to one of our Minnesota representatives; and politicians talk about the needs of the body politic, but basically they're just running for re-election.

My nature suggests that I find a cave, fill it with whisky and books (the three dimensional kind) and try to hold on, but my mind says it's time to start holding these master debaters' feet to the fire to encourage them to solve a problem or two...and sooner rather than later.

Good luck to us all.