Technologically-challenged, indeed

I need to spend a solid year just trying to keep up and catch up to technology.

Although the 21st century has not totally passed me by--witness this very blog, written on one of them computer thingies--I constantly feel as if I'm behind the curve. And I'm not keeping up, plain and simple.

• I want to be able to send text messages on our cell phone with ease, and to be able to take photos off the phone and then upload (or download?) them somewhere. And I'd like to be able to send photos on the cell to someone else.

• I want to know how to make my iPod Shuffle work as well as it's supposed to. Although I have 163 songs loaded on it, only the same 30 or 40 seem to play when I go running.

• I'd like to know how to sell stuff on-line, on either eBay or Craig's List. I've got some old baseball cards that I think could fetch a pretty penny.

• I need to be able to take my new video camera--a digital job given to me by my son for my last birthday--and convert those images to DVDs, or put them on our PC, or whatever the hell you do with them.

• I have a digital camera--also a present from son Tony--that mostly sits around. I don't have a clue about how to transport those images to other places.

• I should try to find out what this "4G" phones are all about. I've never used a Blackberry or an iPhone, and I have no idea how.

• I'd like to master the many fine points of Moodle, the platform used at the school where I work, for use in classes. I just stick to the basics.

• I've never tried to edit someone else's writing electronically, with those little windows that pop out when you want to make responses or comments.

• I've never Skyped anyone. I've never used an iPad. And I've never Kindled.

• When all is said and done, I'm Twitter-challenged and have no idea how I would or could use it.

Damn--when you start making this into a list, it really looks pretty pathetic. But I will, slowly but surely (or, "slowly but Shirley," as one of my students once wrote) try to make it into the year 2010. Right now, charitably, it's about 2001 for me, and these days, missing nine years of technology feels like I'm missing a century.