Techno-Fitness

Journal

The author hopes to get back in shape in the arena of modern technology

TO MY DELIGHT AND RELIEF, pop culture has dictated that the 40s are the new 20s. Tremendous——now somebody please alert my waistline, metabolism and aching knees. At a chronological 42, I’ve been slowly losing the battle of the bulge. My feet are still in sight, but the ol’ spare tire had been threatening to become Hummer-sized. So I bought a good exercise book and focused on nutrition. No more Cheetos. My new snack buddies are carrots and hummus. My Levis still fit——though I’m suddenly really, really, really craving some Cheetos.

Sleek, spry and full of youthful vigor, I venture into San Diego Magazine’s “intern cave.” The cave is a smallish, busy office in the back of the building. I like to check in with the interns now and then, to see if they’re eating the bread and water we leave them. And besides, rapping with the kids keeps you young, dawg.

This visit, though, grants me a very different self-realization. Turns out while I’d been busy watching my weight, technology——so easily embraced by these actual 20somethings——had silently lapped me.

Intern Tara, a petite senior from Point Loma Nazarene University, shows me a picture in a trade magazine. It’s a series of colorful lines. Artsy and intriguing.

“How do you think somebody did that?” Tara wonders.

“It looks like a photograph of pipe cleaners,” I suggest, to my eventual dismay.

“Those aren’t pipe cleaners.” Tara laughs.

Our 20-year-old office assistant, who unofficially stands about 7-foot-5, lumbers into the cave. He looks at the magazine. “That shot was done in Photoshop,” he says. “And somebody used the ‘smudge’ button on it.”

Intern Tara looks very satisfied. “You’re right!” she squeals.

I slink out of the cave. Three questions now plague me: 1. Why have I never used Photoshop? 2. I’ve smudged a button, but what’s a smudge button? 3. Does anybody still use pipe cleaners?

I’M NO TECHNOPHOBE. I actually helped Al Gore invent the Internet. Well, I at least helped him popularize it. At a former place of employment during the early 1990s, I introduced coworkers to the then-new and novel notion of an industry online chat room.

Younger me: “Seriously, you ‘log on’ to this place in ‘cyberspace’ and type a message. You check back the next day and see if somebody left you a message!”

Former coworkers: “Ooooooh!”

Since then, it appears I’ve let my skills slip. The entire San Diego Magazine design department sighs heavily when I ask what a smudge button does.

“It’s not a ‘button,’ it’s a ‘tool ’——you use it in Adobe Photoshop to spread and mix pixels and blend colors,” barks one designer.

“Do you even know what the ‘dodge-and-burn’ tool does?” asks another, laughing. No, but it sounds like what I’ve been doing regarding tech advances. (After the guffawing dies down, I’m informed dodge-and-burn lets you lighten or darken images.)

In assessing my technabilities, I count the following: I own a cell phone that has a camera function. I conduct a great deal of business via e-mail——and just learned you can flag important messages in color. My home laptop is enabled for wireless Internet. I can sit on the balcony——unconnected to a plug!——and flag messages with childish abandon. Oh, and I’ve mastered buying music for my iPod on iTunes. Embarrassingly, my iPod is a three-year-old Shuffle (with no video) that’s four times the size of the current model.

I have a large technohump to get over. Blackberries? I believe they should be eaten in fruit salad——not glued to your palm and tapped incessantly during Happy Hour. Evites? They’re party invitations from the devil. I won’t open them. Who wants the IRS and/or stalkers knowing what parties you’re committed to attending?

I’ve spaced out regarding MySpace. It’s a social networking Web site——a way to meet/impress/gross out people online. People have been fired/not hired for things they’ve posted on MySpace. When a colleague tells me the best thing about MySpacing is checking out your friends’ new picture collections, I stop him.

Me: “So you have to have a scanner to get your pictures on there, right? I don’t have a scanner.”

Colleague: “No, you upload pictures from your digital camera into your computer.”

Me: “So that’s why my digital camera came with a cord thingy.”

I’ve also never visited YouTube. This is a video-sharing Web site. I’m told you go here to watch videos of car accidents and people spilling drinks, as well as animal attacks, dancing midgets and singing ninjas.

What am I waiting for?

I’M GOING TO BUCKLE DOWN. One thing I decided to accomplish is to pay bills online. The hardest part is getting my 10-year-old daughter off the Club Penguin Web site so I can log on to my bank’s site. Club Penguin? It’s a multi-user environment platform (didja know that?). The site is a whole universe (or metaverse) of games, activities and destinations. My daughter and her friends access the site and get their own interactive penguin personas.

Chatting online with other penguins is definitely not how I spent my youthful free time. I walk into the living room of my home. There’s my daughter in pajamas, clicking the keyboard with one hand and talking to a friend on the phone at the same time.

Daughter: “Are you in Club Penguin, Jean? . . . Oh, I see you . . . I’m pink . . . Let’s go to the coffeehouse . . . Yeah, it’s too crowded . . . Let’s go water-skiing . . . Wait, my dad is here . . . Hi, Daddy! Want me to show you again how to pay bills online?”

Indeed. The second coming of the Internet is upon us. A few years ago the Internet’s sizzle seemed to fizzle. For a while, the only sites making money were those showing the video escapades of Paris Hilton. But in 2007, 20 percent of ad spending in the United States will be online, according to market research company Outsell. In February of this year, Neilsen/NetRatings says, there were nearly 145 million active Internet home users in the United States. That’s a lot of penguins.

San Diego Magazine’s push to bolster its Web presence may have helped alert me to my techno-failings. We have a shiny new site and a new (but kinda rumpled) Web editor. He talks about streaming audio and bonus content that extends the reach of stories that run in San Diego Magazine. For example: Last month we ran a feature on a local female boxing champ. Now you can go to sandiegomagazine.com, click on “The Boxer” under the “Web Exclusives” heading and watch a “Flash” program on the boxer, complete with audio interview tapes and bonus photos.

No, I’m not really sure what a Flash program is. But I’m going to learn. I’ll battle techno-incompetence the same way I fought the battle of the bulge. (Even though tech savvy and fitness go hand-in-hand the same way Rosie O’Donnell and Donald Trump do.) I vow to take some classes and talk to IT experts. Soon enough, I want to be burning disks, creating blogs and designing a Web site using Photoshop——smearing and dodging and burning all over the place——with photos uploaded from my digital camera. A PlayStation will be within arm’s distance——next to my Razr cell phone with a 50 Cent ringtone and the keys to my car with dash-mounted GPS.

It won’t be an easy adjustment——but neither is hummus. I vow to catch back up. Still . . . don’t send me an Evite.

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