October 7, 2003
Girl guidance.
Once every year or so, I get asked by one of the local Girl Guide units to come in and talk shop. More specifically, I chat about computers, how they work, and what they get used for. My techno-blabbering in meant to help fulfill part of the requirements for their Computer Skills badge. Out of the group of twenty odd girls at the meeting, only one didn’t have a computer at home, and two more were not connected to the internet. That was a much higher percentage than the last time I had given a similar presentation a couple years ago, but I suppose not that surprising. The entire group, including the leaders, were savvy enough for me to skip over a lot of really basic introductory stuff. That was pretty refreshing, actually. I like to think that I can come away from this type of experience having learned a little bit of something or other. In fact, there were a couple of incidental morsels that stuck between my synapses after saying my good-byes. Filed under ‘computer care and maintenance’, I learned that you should never throw your computer out the window, put your cat on top of the monitor, or try to eat the keyboard. Sage advice, my friends. Secondly, if part of the computer hardware containing stuff is called the hard drive, why isn’t the disc containing the software called a soft drive? Honestly, I couldn’t come up with a reasonable answer for that one. [ Update ] Gentle reader Don Jennings let me know that he just happened to stumble across a definition for ‘soft drive’ over at Low End Mac. It’s not quite the same animal, but the coincidental timing of my post and this new article is uncanny.
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