I Did It!

Anyone who knows me is probably aware that I'm a techno-idiot. While I can do things that seemed impossible 10 years ago and wouldn't even have imagined twenty years ago, I'm far behind a lot of other people.

But last week I did something that makes me feel good.

I wanted to look at an old manuscript I'd worked on about ten years ago, but it was an obsolete Claris Works document. (I use a Mac.) I tried changing the name to something newer and the whole thing turned into a list of tech stuff I couldn't understand. All I'd written was gone!

But then I got an idea.

I pulled out the old computer I'd used back then and found the document. Then I changed it to .txt and it opened. I had to erase many pages of gibberish before and after what I'd written, and remove a lot of strange symbols that had been inserted randomly into words throughout the document. That took some time, but wasn't difficult. Spell check helped a lot.

Since the old computer no longer has internet access I put the document on a memory stick, brought it to my current computer, and was able to copy and paste the whole thing (about 40,000 words) into a new document.

I don't know if changing documents in outdated software to .txt would work on a PC, but it certainly does on Macs.

Most of the people reading this probably think what I did was obvious but, as an official techno-idiot, it made me proud.