I am still dealing with a sore muscle in my back. It is the same situation I have dealt with many times before. It limits my ability to extend my right arm so the idea of writing with my left hand arises. So does the idea of sending a sound file or a link to one.
My friend, an accomplished professor, traveler and published poet, wrote that yesterday's post on writing by hand or hands tended to ignore that keyboards are used more often than pens or pencils these days. That is true and one sign of it is the number of school districts in the US that have abandoned teaching "cursive" handwriting, in favor of printing out block letters, often called "manuscript" but I learned to call the making of separate letters shaped much like these here, "printing".
As you may realize, I use Google products. They are cheap and available on all "platforms" and operating systems so long as they relate to and use connections to the Internet and web pages. One of the results is getting a newsletter called "Think with Google". I have lots of respect for modern electronics and computers and other smart communication devices. I have lots of respect and admiration for Google and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon and Facebook and Twitter (@olderkirby). I have and use products and procedures from all of those organizations. My respect brought me a puzzled feeling with the Think with Google kept on harping about smartphones. So, big deal, I thought. Smartphones can do what computers can do but in a smaller, cramped space. Why not use a computer, a touchpad and the occasional mouse?
I am getting the point from Google, which has gone to the effort of informing web sites that they are ok for computers but poorly designed for phones. Google refers to the new traffic as the mobile revolution. You won't see a shopper erect a table in an aisle of a big store and place his laptop on it. You won't see one of the guys having a beer with his fellows go to his car for his computer. You will see girls and boys, women and men, pull out their smarty-pants phone and search by thumb or voice for alternative products and answers to bar questions. Having your laptop shrunk down to the size of a note pad, having it connected to trillions of web pages is a new deal, worldwide, not just in the US.
I know you just got adjusted to the last new thing and now another new thing is hanging over you. I feel your pain. Well, a little bit I can imagine it.
