There’s a – yes – letter on one of my Mac’s screens – a project I’ve been pecking away at for most of the afternoon. It’s a message to the head of my old school in Hudson, Ohio.
A letter, I should explain, is a printed document that is also sometimes written out – a process of putting pigments on a thin sheet of fiber called paper with a manual instrument, sort of like putting paint on a wall with a brush.
Said letters are packaged, mainly for in-transit security purposes, then shipped, for a fee, to a recipient by a third-party logistics management service. Letters are, of course, largely deprecated, being the forerunner of another medium, itself rapidly nearing extinction, called email. Some gulker.com readers are old enough to remember, and even use email (your author certainly is and does.)
Younger readers of this site (there are a few) are largely eclectic adventurers who have peeled themselves away from their preferred social medium and cell phone to go slumming in the dim, mist-shrouded back alleys of archaic tech, where a few wizened characters still hunch over gigantic machines called computers – loud, hot, furniture-sized devices that contain mechanical components, like magnetic (!) storage devices.
These living relics (the authors, as well as the machines) produce blogs and web pages, recording information in the cloud much the same way that medieval monks copied out manuscripts (see written out, above) for monastic libraries, thus preserving a great deal of information for posterity, most of which is useless, though a tiny percentage has been found to be interesting, and even important, by certain modern scholars.
But I digress, and have to admit that we’re cheating a bit… our recipient has an administrative assistant (from the old English form secretary) who will print out PDF attachments – a PDF being a digital representation of a printed document that can be attached to email. We are avoiding the logistics service, but, nevertheless, recording the process, for posterity, in this post (see blog above)…
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What a hoot!! I love it! David writes things like this once in a while and they are hilarious. Good job!!
Not hit old coot (cootess) is going to check FaceBook.
Very, very funny, my friend! Good thing the recipient has an administrative assistant or they may not be able to figure out what the attachment was or how to print it
Twitter is so old school. Too bad medical technology can’t have monthly evolutions like dot coms, but then we’d have a lot of placebo effect.
Marianne,
I think we both know that it’s admins and not CEOs and political leaders who actually run the world… (and my best to all in SJ)
I believe that tech revolutions are indeed rising and falling on ever shorter time spans. Is twitter outa here already?
Huh? I thought I was pretty high tech, dancing over these laptop keys. But now, horrors of horrors, I’m outed as a wizened character. Well, never tweeted, and quite possibly never will. Anyone know where I can get some typewriter ribbons
Lieb,J.”Defeating cancer with antidepressants.” ecancermedicalscience DOI.10.3332/eCMS.2008.88. The fourth of five reviews I have published since 2001. Verify by accessing Medline or Pubmed, and entering “cancer” and “antidepressants.” Probably effective for all neoplasms, definitely for gliomas. Trial and error may be needed to match antdepressant to individual.