Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Guess What!

I totally forgot to talk about this, and I really should have said something TWO WEEKS AGO when it first happened, but I am one of a bunch of new contributors to the "Tech Talk" daily feature at CatholicMom.com!  (How cool is THAT?) 


I'll be writing every other Tuesday about techie topics that are near and dear to my heart as a Catholic, a mom, a Secular Franciscan, a parent of teenagers...


I never considered myself a "Techie," though I suppose the signs were all there.  My younger brother got a computer when I was in high school (a Radio Shack TRS-80, and if you're old enough to know what that is, you're close to my age).  I used that computer as much as he did, learning to write BASIC programs that would print my name 50 times and other useful things like that.  Senior year, I suffered through a half-year of trigonometry so I could enjoy a half-year computer class.  Never popular, I suddenly found myself in demand as students teamed up to work on projects and I was one of the few who knew how to make a computer print my name 50 times.


There wasn't much wiggle room in college for me to take electives, but I took Intro to BASIC as my math requirement (more making computers print my name 50 times) and found room for a one-credit course on computer applications in education.


After two years of teaching, my career path took a turn for the educational-software industry, where I was paid to break software and tell non-English-speaking programmers what I did to break it so they could make the software student-proof.  (I rocked at that job.)  Eventually I freelanced for that company as a software author, writing lesson "scripts."


Down the road, I learned about Internet message boards, blogging, Facebook, Twitter and more.  My husband (who's been a computer programmer since 1995) has kept me in gadgets starting with my very first Palm PDA up through a Kindle, iPad and iPhone.


I enjoy using technology in a variety of ways and look forward to sharing my favorite apps, websites and more, every other Tuesday at CatholicMom.com.  I also look forward to reading what the rest of the "Tech Talk" team shares, and am extremely grateful for this opportunity.


Today's feature is Digital Prayer, in which I talk about the apps you can use to pray the Liturgy of the Hours.

4 comments:

Bean said...

Congratulations :)

Michelle said...

Congratulations!

Sara said...

I took BASIC in college, and then a more advanced programming class---whose name completely escapes me. I was the one responsible for getting my (future) husband to use the computers for his papers instead of a typewriter. So we're about the same age, aren't we?

Good luck with the new gig! It sounds fun!

Barb Szyszkiewicz said...

It's tons of fun! Tech Talk is now a daily feature with a bunch of contributors, so you never know what topics will come up.

Sara, maybe FORTRAN or COBOL? Those were the next in line for computer students when I was in college (I'll be 47 next month).