From My Keyboard

From My Keyboard –
Winter’s Bluster

BY BILL CHACHKES

Jan | Feb 2004
Issue No.14

When you will get to read this, it will be the new year, 2004. Right now, though, we are still in the month of December 2003, and dealing with this winter’s first major storm. Other than shoveling snow and spreading rock salt the past two-and-one-half days, Annrose and I managed to get most of our holiday shopping done right from the comfort of our little 3-computer home office. We did it all online of course, through our Macs.

Our first mission was a cool present for her nephew Joey, a too smart for his own good almost ten year old with an advanced quest for learning. He attends a prestigious private catholic school on Long Island’s south shore, and generally pulls down good grades. He has decided, "I want a digital camera like you uncle Bill". My sister-in-law begged us not to spend too much money. 30 minutes after we spoke to Joey and his mom on the phone, Annrose and I had his camera picked out, along with a bag, and a pack of batteries, plus a Portable CD player to replace the one he had just broken, all for just under 200 dollars.

His new camera is a Fuji A-205, a pocket sized lightweight 2 megapixel unit with a 3x optical zoom that better last him until college! A smaller version of my own camera, he will be able to take short movies, and use the camera for Internet Video Chat as well. We even saw a QuickTime movie demo of the camera and its main features!

Now the challenge was finding the vendor with the best price for the items we wanted. The Internet allowed us to do that in 5 minutes flat. When I came back from shoveling some more snow, Annrose was on the computer again, no doubt finishing off her shopping list. I would have to wait for her to Pass into that world of sound sleep before I could shop for her without her snooping around. The point of all this? You don’t need the excuse of a major blizzard to use your computer to do all of your holiday shopping in less then a day.

I recently began working in my afterschool program again. I might have mentioned to some of you (many of you, in fact) that my program trains disabled teens to repair, troubleshoot, and maintain computers. Many of the machines we get are donations from the private sector, but some of our machines are sent to us by Goodwill and the Salvation Army. They are turned around, and sold for more then they would have otherwise if we had not worked on them.

I believe that this is one thing we can all do, give a little bit of our skills to help others less fortunate then us to take advantage of technology.

Until next issue may you all stay warm and bright, and I hope your holidays were as good as mine are going to be.