Weakened mental abilities and easy blogging

Thinking about the first few days of engineering reminds me of a couple of things - starting from the horrible English of some lecturers up to the following thing.

It was one of those days someone said - "Now, you all can do very fast mental arithmetic. But now since you all are starting to use electronic calculators, you are slowly going to lose your ability to do this mental-magic"

Sure thing... some cashier in some local restaurant in India might do a faster job of number crunching than some math professor here. It's all about using that part of the brain. I wonder whether any professor adds any numbers larger than 100 in his mind. (No offense... professors are intelligent, smart people.. but they never need to do such trivial stuff, that's what I meant. They have more important things to think)

Luckily, I didn't lose that speed of mental math. Or perhaps not as much as many others did. Lucky I. :)

Unfortunately, I fell into another trap. And that is mobile phone.

Earlier, any phone-number I dialled was stored in my mind. I had to dial a number _once_ and only _once_ and it was recorded. But now, all that job is done by the small little computer inside the mobile phone. That part of brain which used to do the job is jobless and (to an extent .. useless too :( )

It is like cooking - by looking at a recipe book. The food might turn out to be good, but you never remember the procedure. (credits for idea: AJ - a fan of mine ;) )

But as you can see, it is not a bad thing after all. These new technologies are made for making the life easier and they do make life easier.

Now I shall come to the point which is of more interest to us all. BLOGGING.

I remember a time when I used to use the blogger interface to put a post. For making the post really beautiful .. or say, to fine tune it, I had to edit the HTML itself.

Later came better technologies - starting from scribefire to live-writer. Especially after live-writer came along, I never had to think about the processes in the back-ground. Inserting a picture became so easy that I started having a picture in almost every post. Blogging became so easy. [The minus being - only in Windows is it available]

Integration of RSS-readers with Browsers is another wonderful thing (Mac and Windows). I spend more time with Linux than with MS-Windows - but truly speaking - till date Windows is much better for a blog-life - both for publishing and for reading too. :) [Another nice thing if you are entering the blog-world is Google-Reader]

So what is the downside here? Life became easy at the cost of forgetting all those smart things I knew about fine-tuning a web-page! :(

So much for it. Now, there is something else I wanted to write. Perhaps after a couple of days. :)

Signing off, Sands.

~