Old Dogs and New Tricks

I’m going to be 41 years old in less than one month. I graduated from high school in 1992. We had a computer at home the entire time I was growing up since my dad worked as an aerospace engineer. My elementary school had a computer lab filled with Apple IIe computers. I took a class in computer programming while I was in junior high (yes, this was before it was called middle school). Yet despite all of this, I still learned how to type on a typewriter at the same school where I learned computer programming.

All of this is to set up the background for what I’m about to say. I’ve been typing incorrectly since I learned how to type back when I was 12 or 13. Remember how I said I learned to type on a typewriter? Well the convention then was to double space at the end of a sentence. So that is how I learned it, and that is how I’ve been doing it out of habit for about 28 years. I’ve read the articles that say it’s important to teach oneself to stop double-spacing because it can lead to age discrimination. But I just thought, meh, it just doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me. Plus, I’ve got a fairly full schedule and being able to type quickly helps. I would actually have to slow down my typing in order to retrain myself to use a single space. Then I read this article: If you type two spaces after a period, you're doing it wrong.

I tend to want to follow style manuals because they provide consistency. So if most style guides today recommend a single space following a period, then I guess it’s time to slow myself down and type properly. In typing this, I’ve realized that it’s actually not too hard and doesn’t slow me down too much if I just pay attention. Hopefully it will quickly become a new habit and I can stop thinking about it though, because I definitely feel myself wanting to hit that space bar a second time. Now we'll have to see how many times I have to use the find and replace function to fix a period with 2 spaces (or a question mark or exclamation mark.)

When I was a teenager I used to think that older adults were so whiny and melodramatic about how much things had changed since they were young. Now I understand that when you’ve spent most of your life doing something a certain way, it really is difficult to change it. It’s official now; I’ve become just like my mother and her friends!

I had to share some photos of the winter clouds this morning as they were simply beautiful.

Just before sunrise

Just after sunrise