Seniors

AutoCorrect: A View of Your Auditory Future

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AutoCorrect, love it or hate it? This week, the New York Times Magazine had a short feature about it. Me, I mostly love it. I am a lousy, self-taught typist. I went to high school in the “olden days” when men were men and women were girls. Only the students in the secretarial track took typing classes. I wasn’t one of them.

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I truly love AutoCorrect when I am typing something on a full computer keyboard and it fixes all the common typos for me; “teh” automatically becomes “the”, and “studnet” is transformed into “student” before I realize my mistakes. A god-send! On more complicated choices, some programs flag the suspect word and let me choose the correct spelling. Wow, even better!

But when I am texting, this exuberant love diminishes. I make more mistakes texting because the virtual keyboard is small and my fingers often miss the key, and because I text while distracted — cooking, on line in the grocery store, in the car (but only while stopped). I also use acronyms and texting abbreviations, which aren’t always recognized. Unless I intervene, the correction provided in a pop-up balloon is not a suggestion but the actual replacement. I often miss the opportunity to stop it and touch “Send” too soon. The results varies from helpful, to confusing, to hilarious. Sound familiar?
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The Pain of Decumulation

accidental goddess1 Comment

YardSale-300x221Decumulation is a real word and, as expected, it means the opposite of accumulation. I’ve found, in the economic world, it involves the movement of investments from growth to income. The parallel in my non-economic world is the movement of possessions…from more to less. Here, decumulation involves the reduction of what we have amassed to something that approaches what we truly need. Like all diets, decumulation is a difficult, even painful, process. Right now, my mother is struggling with decumulation. Moving from her townhome into a much smaller apartment in a retirement community, she no longer needs or has room for 90% of her possessions, yet it truly grieves her to part with them.
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