Tuesday 1 June 2010

Thing 1: iGoogle


I made iGoogle my home page, both on the home computer and at work. I can't report quite the degree of physical pain that Sarah found from carrying out the same operation, but perhaps that reflects lesser experience and lower expectations on my part. I was unable to add the Uni's front page or the log-in page for my bank. So far as I could tell, I was following the same procedure for those resources as for the ones I did succeed in adding, but maybe I was being hasty or had ignored some important difference between resource and resource.

It's fair to say that iGoogle has not yet given me the sense of liberation, of "Why didn't I do this earlier?", that I've had from other applications. I remember when I first took to using email and MS Word, back in 1991-1992. A couple of years earlier, I had struggled with learning to drive (a renewed attempt this year reminded me how completely I lack any aptitude in that direction); my driving instructor, 8 years my senior, had been amazed to find that I was younger than he was; the experience had left me fearing that premature middle age was making me unteachable. But when the Haddon joined the Union Catalogue, and all the other applications came sweeping in, I found I took to these new skills as a duck to water. The spinning of disks was associated in my mind with the spinning of the wheels on the larger, lighter pushbike I graduated to at the same time.

And I have had other computer liberations since then, such as the discovery of TransportDirect and the late lamented Mosuki calendar in 2006 (thanks to Phil Bradley for those), and last year's discovery of Twitter. iGoogle hasn't done that for me yet. But I was on Twitter for a couple of months before it came to life for me. How was it for you?

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