I considered setting it up to be my desktop, but I decided that I prefer to just set it as the home page on my browser so that whenever I open my browser it is the first thing I see. That way I can leave the desktop area on my work computer for stuff sort of like those inspirational posters you see around regular offices.

How do you organize your work to-do lists?

There was another place that he took me once with a series of walls in it that were filled with reel to reel tapes that seemed almost as big as I was.

In the 1980′s we bought the Vic-20 and my father taught me how to create programs in BASIC. I remember my older brother programming the computer so that it was talking. I was one of the first to buy the Commodore 64, which I first saw in a store on a military base in Washington. I stood back and watched as two GIs fiddled with the display model for several moments then wandered off. It had a blinking little line on the screen with a bunch of things they had obviously tried to type into the poor computer without knowing how to talk to it. After they moved away, obviously thinking it not worth their attention, I stepped up and typed in the first thing I had been taught by my dad. The BASIC code to have the computer say “Hello World! My name is Commodore 64, what is your name?” Which would be followed by a personal “Hello, ____, how are you today?” after the person entered their name. I was, admittedly, rather proud of the impressed looks the soldiers got when they investigated what the kid had been doing with the computer.

Later on in the 80′s, around 1986, I went to Job Corps to take secretarial training because secretarial school was the only thing they had that dealt at all with computers. Even then, they did not consider the computer to be as important to the secretary as learning to use a typewriter. I would spend my days in a chair typing forms out on an electric typewriter, a wall between me and the computer room where during breaks we could go over and work on speed building programs on the Apple IIe’s they had. There were I think about eight of them in the room, and the only use that the center seemed to have for them were the programs on them that let the secretarial students practice typing.

There were a few other basic programs, but it was all about learning other things with no focus on the computers. One day after I completed my work in secretarial class for the day I asked the teacher if I could spend my time in the computer lab while the others finished up? With permission to leave and go see the computers whenever I finished early I started to spend more time in the computer lab and was soon allowed even more freedom to be over there rather than in what I felt was the wrong room.

Yes, typewriters were kewl and all, but I knew that if anyone wanted to do anything they needed to be where the computers were.

I think my teachers sorted that out too when I hacked into the program of a basic little game that would guess what you were thinking of and rewrote it to be even better.

By the time I graduated, 11 months after entering Job Corps, my secretarial instructor had no idea what to put on my diploma. She had me sit at her desk with her and go through a huge three ring binder to look up what someone that programmed computers would be called. The closest we were able to find was “Terminal Systems Operator.” There just was no classification in the secretarial world for someone with any level of computer skill.

I knew then that I really was not cut out to be a secretary if they did not even have a classification for what I was.

In the early 90′s (1993-1994) I went back to school, college this time, to learn to be a Small Business Administrator. I majored for a few semesters in Small Business Administration with a minor in writing, both of which placed me in the computer lab a good percent of the time. It was in the fall semester of 1993 that I was in a class on computers and created a website where I built a “What’s happening in my life” diary. Something that today would be considered a blog. As the other students clustered around their computers and giggled at the conversations they had with the giggling mob on the other side of the room, and the guy beside me played a online adventure game that was similar to choose your own adventure books of a few years before, worked on creating programs and assisting the lab techs by answering what were to me fairly easy questions about how to get the computers to do what the users wanted them to. It was not long before I was known as the one to be asked if anyone had any issues in the computer lab. It lead to the guy that ran the lab asking me to work as a lab assistant the next semester, but I was unfortunately not able to due to a planned move that later on fell through.

Today, as I write this, I sit in front of three computer screens. To my left is a screen that holds my work, the things I need to write if I want to pay the bills in the months to come. Directly in front of me is another screen, where I am writing this and where I do most of my writing. Then to my right is a third screen, which is hooked up to a second computer. The second computer is either off or in hibernation mode a lot, it is dedicated to e-mail and being a secondary research screen for when I am looking up information for articles and ad copy.

It feels natural to be sitting in front of three screens, someday I want to add more screens to the collection. Spread things out a little more and make my work more streamlined. Computers are going to be here for the rest of my life and beyond. They were office monsters that took up entire walls when I was a child, and now the most powerful computer I have fits easily into my purse. What will they be like when I am 80?

And yet, for all of their ability to draw me to them, for all of the desire to sit at a computer and feel comfortable, I still reach for a sharpened number 2 pencil to write out my notes and work on pages for novels. I bought a LiveScribe as soon as I could afford one, because I prefer to write longhand at times and yet… it is still not used nearly as much as my cup of sharpened number two pencils.

The computer is here to stay, and it will only get better, but I don’t the pencil manufacturers ever need to worry it will make them obsolete. Some of us, even the most computer loving of us, will always turn to the number 2 pencil for the feel of actual connection with our writing that only it can provide.

I have about half the programs reloaded, but am hitting the annoying block of the new version of AIM won’t work with the comptuer.  I got an older version to work on it, so I will try agian to get the new one to work and if that fails I am just going to load the older version up and forget their new one.  They usually mess up their new versions anyway.  Last time they updated it I lost the ability to directly connect with my writing buddies, removing the ability to pass our novel-length writing back and fort, which made AIM all but useless to us.

Other than AIM I have my writing program back on the computer, still need to move the novel from the laptop back to the desktop though, and I have to get my image program (GIMP) back up and working on here.  I know there are more programs I need to get up and going, but I’ll be happy with them between now and the weekend – oh, and iTunes and Audacity, I need to catch up on the writing podcasts I have missed.

I spent most of the night last night looking up designs and plans for built-in desks and cabinets online, now I am sketching out plans for the way I want to have the office look and matching those to the plans that I have printed out from the built-in cabinets to see what I can come up with for building the office that I need to suit my needs.