In my daily life, I am all about shortcuts. If there is a way to perform a task more efficiently, or more quickly, without sacrificing the end-result, I am totally open to checking it out. My little home library of how-to books contain plenty of suggestions for useful short-cuts that will make life a little bit easier... how to be more organized; how to remove a stubborn stain; how to fix this or fix that; how to get dinner on the table in 30 minutes or less; how to clean my house from top to bottom in one morning...you get the drill.
With regards to short-cuts, however, one area where I know I fall down miserably is in my computer use. I hold hard and fast to the processes I know well and that I know work for me. Call me mule-headed, but I tend to be one of those who doesn't like to stray too far out of my comfort zone with this technology stuff. (If you have been following my blog posts, you have already figured this out about me!) Accepting that this is just part of my personality, I have been perfectly content to complete 10 steps in a process where 2 different ones might work just as well, simply because I trust that the way I learned it originally will continue to work every time. Understanding that this manifests from my irrational fear that any piece of technology under my control is just a single key-stroke away from certain annihilation, I truly am trying to be less fossil-like and to maybe learn a few things here. It is not always easy, and is certainly humbling.
If I had to pick the most personally useful information from Chapter 3 of Shelly, Napier, and Rivers' Discovering the Internet, I think it would definitely have to be the section on Boolean operators. Besides the fact that learning about them had me humming the theme song from School House Rock's "Conjunction Junction" in my head all day, it made me realize that had I known about them when my earlier classes were heavily research and writing based, I could have saved myself loads of time and probably netted better results. Going forward, I know that I will be using this short-cut a lot.
As I've said before, I am primarily a visual learner. I am also a big YouTube fan. Check out this funny little explanation of Boolean Searching. It gave me a real chuckle, and made me homesick for my two sweet southern girl friends. I do love their accents! Did any single topic in Chapter Three stand out for you?
AWESOME title for your entry!
ReplyDeleteThe entire posting was a job very well done, BRAVO!