More 'this & that' from 'Oldest Living Blogger'

I got an email yesterday from a nice young lady at the CBC, asking if I might be interested in helping her project of researching people who have done extraordinary things in their golden years, or if I might know some other Canadian extraordinary seniors who have done unusual/brave/inspirational things in their senior years. Those are mostly her words, not mine.

She is looking for a senior "who is savvy with social media" and somehow decided to include me in her search, having seen my blog here. I replied that I'm flattered that she should consider me worth her attention, but that I don't consider myself to be really very 'savvy with social media' because blogging is about all I do in that area. I've always avoided Facebook and Twitter because those have rather 'iffy' security procedures for safeguarding your personal data from the identity thieves we hear about regularly.

And as I also explained to her, bloggers are usually rather lonely and self-important people who often-mistakenly assume that they've got something to say to the world at large that the world actually gives a damn about hearing. In most cases, we're wrong about the world giving a damn - it usually doesn't - but this is still a useful pastime, because it keeps us off the streets, and out of bars, and sometimes even learning something useful while we do our research for the next rant - in case we aren't just 'winging it' as I usually prefer to do. There's no fool like an Old Fool, because you just can't beat experience! And I am nothing, if not opinionated.... as you know by now if you've been reading much of this stuff.

I started blogging because there was a community blogging site downtown here which encouraged us to sign on for our own blog page, and the bright young people who were running that were actually using the blogging site as a proving ground for a new open-source program they were working on which they hoped to sell commercially if they got the bugs all out of it. So we bloggers were in a sense the guinea pigs helping them find those bugs and get them fixed. Eventually, they accomplished whatever they had set out to do, and were bought out by others who rather quickly put most of the originals out on the street, and ignored the routine maintenance required by the once popular community blogging site, on which I was by then one of its more popular contributors.

So I said, "The hell with this nonsense - I'll find a blogging site that isn't about to get trashed by lack of interest." And I signed onto Google's 'Blogger' - which turned out to be a mixed blessing. Google, as some of us know from experience, likes to leave its projects in an almost continuous state of beta, or 'half-baked' or unfinished, and this can frustrate the hell out of guys like me, who like things that work properly and work reliably and work consistently and aren't unfriendly to their users. Google, please take notes here. You've got some good ideas, but your theories don't always work out worth a damn in actual practice. For example: why do I have to re-select my chosen font every time I pause to add a picture or link, or look up information before continuing? Why can't the coders write that program so that it stays on the same font the user selected until the user changes that selection to another? What is there about that concept that you find so incomprehensible? And don't tell me - just fix the damned thing, will you? Doesn't anybody in California know how to play this game?  Sally at Microsoft or even I could probably give you some suggestions, and you might even be wise to listen to them. It works for Microsoft.....