Mr. Dickie, the Thumbdrive, and the Library

Photo: Corel

Life is too short to always try to be right, or, to put everything into the category of right or wrong.

(Mind, Body, Spirit, 31 May)

• I received a very nice Father's Day gift from my daughter. She gave me an HP PhotoSmart M737 digital camera that she bought in a silent charity auction at work. There can't be any more excuses for not joining the era of digital photography.
• There's just one problem. Nowadays the products we buy no longer come with a User's Manual. There's no way I can learn to use all of the features of the camera without a manual. I quickly found a copy of the manual, in PDF format, on the HP website.
• Once I located the manual I thought it would be easy to download a copy to my computer. I didn't think about my Internet connection. I'm still dragging my feet. I still access the Internet using a phone connection. I tried to download the file a couple of times and each time the process failed without even giving me a message about the failure.
• A while back when my laptop stopped working when the clock battery failed I paid a repair shop to copy the files to a thumbdrive. That's more new technology that I knew nothing about. Once I realized how convenient a thumbdrive could be I bought myself another one to use with current projects. I bought a 4GB device that ought to take me quite a while to fill up.
• Getting back to the User's Manual problem. Yesterday I decided to take the thumbdrive over to the county library where I quickly obtained a reservation on computer #21. The library computers have high speed Internet connections. I plugged the thumbdrive into the side of the monitor, signed on to the HP website and clicked on the button to download the file. Much to my surprise the file was downloaded to the thumbdrive so fast I thought this way of getting the file wasn't going to work either. I just couldn't believe what had happened. I had to open the User's Manual file on the thumbdrive to convince myself that I really got it.
• I left the library relieved to have my own copy of the 50-page User's Manual. Now I can read the instructions whenever I need to. I haven't decided yet whether I want to print out the pages or not.
• I'm thankful for a generous daughter, the digital photography revolution, the invention of the thumbdrive, and fact that my public library offers free access to the Internet. It doesn't get any better that this.

Mr. Dickie