Frankly speaking, I am not big on change. Oh yeah, the Obama business was pretty good, and I recognize that change is necessary for progress, blah blah blah, but man, it doesn’t come easy for me.
I was made excruciatingly aware of this by my stubborn refusal to log into CV’s back end at our new home. Why? Because it was going to be <cringe>different</cringe>.
I actually can’t make any sense of this behavior on my part, because science is all about change. I have no problem changing topics and points of view in a scientific context. Want to know what I’ll be working on in 5 years? It’ll probably be found in the set of things on which I am currently not working, nor have ever worked on before.
But technologically-driven changes in my day-to-day behavior? Scaaaaaary. One of my students mistakenly assumed that I was a bleeding edge of technology sort of person, based on my spiffy new MacBook Air. However, the only reason I have a new laptop is because after six and a half years, my old one was sufficiently dented that I couldn’t close it anymore, and it made ominous noises when writing to disk. Oh, I could have afforded a new laptop at many points in the intervening years, but then I’d have to install software or learn to use Leopard, and that, my friends, is not change I can believe in.
So, this post is my attempt to get past the queasiness and start defining this as the new normal.
And hey! Did you see the new images of extrasolar planets?!
Ok. That didn’t hurt a bit.
November 14th, 2008 at 2:34 am
Welcome to the club.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:15 am
I still have windows 98 on some of my computers around here…
November 14th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Late adopters, you will all love reading this:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000606.html
November 14th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Yup Luis, that just about sums it up.
The one limitation though, is that if you try to hold on to your stable system, you’re eventually screwed by everyone else upgrading theirs. With the old laptop, more and more things started breaking because no-one else cared about making things compatible with the dusty old OS I was using.
November 14th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
I’m wired the other way around. I like small changes in my life: little tech changes, occasionally walking to work on a slightly different route, etc, but I am not at all adventurous when it comes to larger things. The idea of a new job scares the crap out of me, and I can’t even contemplate switch hair dressers.
November 14th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
NO!
CHANGE IS BAD!
Do not want!
November 14th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Lenz’s Law.