The New Age Farm Team

My kids' Apple laptop died over the weekend. It had been a trusty little MacBook -- mine for three years before I passed it onto the kids two years ago. When one had a paper due and the other had to jump onto Castle Learning to do, what would be, roughly two hours of quadratic equations, they both immediately vied for their parents' computers -- which were both in use doing bills and an informercial for Nstein -- I knew I had to break down and buy another computer immediately.

And while I am uncertain which Smart Phone to invest in (only because of network), I have no such trepidations about computers. I was upgrading the kids to the MacBook Pro -- the Intel version of the Mac -- precisely because I needed my kids to be on the same OS and applications as I was. It wasn't an issue of technical support so much as literacy. Apple is very good at backward compatibility, but the changeover to Intel a couple years ago did preclude some newer software from being available to the old computer. Which was a pity. I've been dying to create some really terrific videos -- but to sit down and take the time to learn the idiosyncracies of a new program (that wasn't my clients') was impossible. And I am horrible at Illustrator -- and would like to change that. My hope is that my kids can master these programs and get me up to speed. Let them be my R&D team and built in technical support. How full circle that technology actually could bring us back to a time when families worked and survived together.

Of course when it came to teaching me Madden football -- they put me in a punt defense -- when they were on 1st down.