Neanderthal vs. Digital Ink

Finally looking forward to a lazy Saturday with very little to do. Fields are planted, hunting grounds scouted and cave maintenance is all done-yay! Settling down to watch the clouds go by when Mrs. Donna Smilo taps me on the shoulder and mentions the cave walls kind of look bare and need sprucing up with artwork. Oh no, there goes my lazy Saturday.

I gather my sticks, brushes, mixing pots and set to work drawing mammoths, deer, hunting scenes, moon, sun, stars and takes me all day.  I step back, admiring my work and then Donna states: “You draw like a toddler, can’t you draw any better?” Crestfallen, I wipe my stained hands on my pelt and proceed to scrub the offending art off the wall.

Teleport into the 21^st Century and if I’d used Digital Ink, maybe Donna Smilo would not have been so critical.  Digital Ink is a great tool that allows users to draw using either the mouse or the touch screen directly onto the slide. Then using conversion tools, convert the hand drawn items into polished items: shapes, text or if I was a mathematician I could write mathematical formulas and convert the chicken scratch into nice, neat formulas. Food for thought.

Playing around with Digital Ink, I lost a whole afternoon in the 21^st century …I wonder what neanderthal Don would’ve thought of my endeavors.

Kiddos, Dino and Spill Functions

As the days get longer so does the task list. Check the hunting grounds, figure out the planting schedule, repair the damage from the winter weather and then into the harvest schedule, followed by the food preservation timetable.

I set out to make lists with dates and organize them with dates and people I’ll need to help me. I grab anything I can write on, and after a while the floor of the cave looks like a mess of scraps of hides, clay tablets and pieces of bark.

I take a short break then start organizing them into piles into various categories. A few hours later, I have neat piles. Agriculture, hunting, repairs and then food preservation and I feel great since the entire year is planned. Then disaster strikes as the “kiddo Neanderthals” playing with “Dino” come careening through the cave and my nice, neat organization explodes in a hail of bark, hide and clay confetti. Uggh! Back to square one.

In the 21^st century, the kids and dogs would not have destroyed my neat piles since I could use Excel to build spreadsheets/workbooks with all the tasks, organized into categories, due dates and then using Spill functions to sort them any way I wanted. Now, I could have a master list of all the tasks sorted by the due dates from Spring through Winter. I could sorted them further if I just wanted the planting dates or when I needed to see hunting grounds date and adjust them if they conflicted. The power of technology.

As the bark, hide and clay confetti settled around him and Don Smilo fumed at the kiddos and Dino, I wonder if he ever thought of the future concept of electronic spreadsheets.

I can't spell!

Standing in front of the class dreading my turn at the mock spelling bee and here it comes.

Teacher: “Little Don, your word is Neanderthal.  Spell Neanderthal.”

Little Don: “N, E, E, A, N, D, E, R, T, H, A, A, L…right?”

Teacher: “No, little Don, it’s spelled N, E, A, N, D, E, R, T, H, A, L.  You had an extra E and A.”

Crestfallen, I return to my seat and dread going home and having my parents drill me on spelling that night. Spelling is my biggest weakness in Ice Age school.

Fast forward to the 21^st Century and Microsoft Word’s built-in spell checking.  Yippee! For me being a horrible speller, I love this, and it really helps me focus on getting my message across.  Funny thing is I really didn’t know how to use it correctly and kept seeing the squiggly red and blue lines and was confused as to what they were telling me until I took the module in class.

Now I know that I can correct the red squiggly (spelling) as type or wait till the end using the Review tab and proofing group. Or the blue squiggly (grammar) using the same method. A word of caution though, I still read though the whole document to make sure the “word processor” caught everything because occasionally, I still find it misses things.

I used to think my documents looked patriotic with the red and blue squiggles against the white background but now know how to clean them up as I move forward my IT journey.