Technology Detox

This past weekend I did something I haven't done in years; I spent four days completely unplugged and disconnected from technology.  No Facebook, no television, no surfing the web, no blogging, no Pinterest, and no email--well, I did glance at my work issued Blackberry once before returning it to the deep abyss that is my purse.  And funny enough, I didn't miss any of it. In fact, the whole experience felt refreshing.

So what caused my detox you ask?  Taking advantage of a long weekend, we headed out of town to spend a few nights north of the border in Montenegro.  As is the case more often than not, my Blackberry didn't transmit emails consistently so I regulated it to the bottom of my bag.  Besides, we were on a mini-vacation and the last time I checked there really aren't any work related emergencies for me.  Our hotel was beautiful but didn't offer free Internet and  we refused to pay their high asking price for a weak Wi-Fi signal.  At first I thought this would bother me but I actually found myself enjoying being disconnected.  Montenegro (along with Albania) is a big black hole on our GPS system so without our Tom Tom or access to Google Maps we allowed our Lonely Plant paperback to serve as our guide.  We didn't get lost and in fact discovered places we might never have otherwise seen if we had been focusing on a computer generated, pre-planned route.  If a road looked interesting, we followed it.  Instead of scanning the web, posting updates on Facebook, and scoping out our next vacation location (a task that has become a regular part of every trip), we enjoyed just being together as a family without the usual technological disruptions.  In the evenings we read books or sat on our balcony drinking rather decent Montenegrian wine and listening to the sound of the crashing surf below us.  Never one to be truly idle, I did a lot of thinking about everything from future dinner menus to what I really want to do "when I grow up" but didn't jump on the computer to further my research.  (I even jotted notes to myself using the paper and pencil provided by the hotel.  I don't even remember the last time I did this). Without the interruption of ringing phones or news broadcasts we were blissfully unaware of the outside world and it was wonderful.  And for the first time in what feels like ages, I relaxed.  Instead of the initial angst I had anticipated over being disconnected I found myself wishing our four days away wouldn't end.  But sadly enough the weekend came to an end and we returned to our (temporary) Albanian reality.

Yes, I'm now back and reconnected; I have uploaded pictures from the weekend to Facebook and have sent a few emails.  As this post attests to, I'm blogging again.  But my brief time away did me good.  For Americans, Memorial Day weekend is the traditional start of summer which is supposed to mean long lazy days spending time with family and friends, enjoying the weather, and relaxing as much as possible.  And after this weekend I realize that for me, this also means disconnecting from the rapid paced world that is driven by technology.  It really is unavoidable and I'll admit, I do enjoy aspects of being connected.  It allows me to keep in touch with friends and family all over the world and not feel completely isolated while living in a geographically and socially isolated country.  However, I'm determined to no longer be ruled by technology.  So this summer I'm going to disconnect a bit. I'll still blog--daily for the most part since it is my creative outlet-- but I'm going to spend less time in front of the computer.  This means fewer hours on Facebook and the Internet as a whole and I'm going to start picking up the phone rather than using email as my main form of communication.  Maybe I'll even buy a few stamps and hand write a letter or two.  I'm going to pull out my stash of books and read for pleasure rather than wasting hours doing nothing in front of the computer.  I'm going to spend more time just hanging out with Sidney and seeing the world through his three and a half year old perspective.  He is turning into both a thoughtful and pretty funny little boy and I don't want to miss a moment of it.  I feel more relaxed just thinking about my technology diet.
So here's to an unplugged summer; I can't wait.  Enjoy!

Platform Hopping

My college computer

I am the least technology savvy person I know.  This is despite the fact I essentially grew up around computers (mind you that early on they were very large), have spent most of my professional life sitting in front of a monitor, and I have not one but two personal blogs.  Yes, despite all of this I am hopeless around computers.  My lack of technological expertise has come to a peak over the past two weeks as I attempted to move my food blog from its old home here on blogger.com and to its new one on wordpress.com.  Oh the frustrations of it all!

I'm dating myself here but during my senior year in high school one of our graduation requirements included passing a "computer proficiency test."  This test consisted of turning the computer on, opening a word processing document, saving it, then properly shutting down the computer.  Yup, that was it.  Not everyone in my class passed on the first attempt but I did and soon moved onto college where the facilities included two large, centralized computer labs and small individual computer labs complete with dot matrix printers in each dorm.  This was high tech stuff for my liberal arts college.  By my sophomore year I had upgraded from my electric typewriter and bought my very own Apple computer.  This was long before ready Internet access, when Pine was the college email system (and even then only in my senior year), and having a fancy ink jet printer made me the envy of my entire dorm floor.

My entry into the professional world moved me away from user friendly Apple computers and into the world of PCs.  Always a creature of habit I struggled to adjust but eventually found my comfort zone on both my own personal computer and my work based one.  And of course, just as I was getting the hang of things Microsoft would come out with a new version of their operating system and I would have to start all over again.  Sure some of the changes were minor, but they were just enough to throw me for a loop.  And then we switched from a PC back to a Mac at home and it didn't even resemble my old college desk top computer.  It was back to the technology drawing board for me.  (Again).  Over time I've learned that while I am proficient in many things, computer technology is not and never will be one of them.  Instead, I just make sure I always befriend the IT people at work......

So here I am in 2013 and I have two active blogs.  The first one (this one) started on a whim as a way of keeping family and friends updated on our adventures as we packed up our family and moved overseas.  The second blog capitalized on my love of food and cooking and was a spin off of the original blog.  Neither is fancy but they serve their purpose and much to my surprise, have taken on lives of their own.  Three months into writing my food blog, however,  I began to regret my choice of blog name since it would die a natural death once we depart from Albania. I decided it needed a name change.  And along with the name change its own domain name.  So never to do anything half heartily, I decided that if I was going to make a change or two, I was going to change a few more things as well including its publishing platform.  Out with blogger and in with wordpress for the new and improved zosiacooks.com.  But remember, I'm not technologically savvy and am at heart, a creature of habit.

I've spent the past two weeks struggling to learn the intricacies of my new blogging platform. I know it isn't difficult but it sure has been frustrating just the same.  With the click of a button old posts quickly transferred from one platform to the next but the resulting layout didn't even begin to resemble its original form.  No matter what I tried, margins wouldn't align, bullets were off, and page previews looked nothing like I had hoped they would.  I spent hours reading and listening to online tutorials to no avail.  At one point I even had two laptops operating at the same time; the first displayed what was to become my new blog while the second had a step-by-step, complete with pictures, tutorial on how to find the perfect layout for my blog.  But success (or even acceptable) still eluded me.  And then I submitted a request for assistance to the online support team at wordpress.  Within a day I received a response from Allen, a wordpress "happiness engineer".  For the past week he has been patiently engaging me in an email conversation that is finally helping my blog resemble something I am comfortable sharing in cyber space.   Once again IT support is helping this creature of habit adjust to my new surroundings.  I had heard (and seen) good things about wordpress and can now attest to it.  This is just one of the reasons I switched.  So as of today my new and improved blog has gone live.  It isn't perfect and will probably always be a work in progress.  Knowing myself, however, I will eventually get the knack of the program.  Let's just hope that wordpress doesn't go and change everything the minute I catch up.