getting e-smart - introduction

well, it comes on request of few people who always ask me about computers. mostly, they are elders; you know kids these days think they are too smart for us. kids don’t ask us questions, they google it until they can’t find something on net easily. i really appreciate our elders, they keep their egos on one side and ask us. truly, blessed is the man who dares to say “i don’t know”.  they are really blessed.

i have been thinking about the difference among the way we learned things, our parents learned things and the kids these days are learning. our parents (the papa generation) were equipped with versatile qualities and skills. i am pretty sure that everyone’s parents did know a lot of things and they learned it hard way. the species found in almost all households, papa knew everything from repairing bike, sewing machine, electrification, mechanical equipments; they knew about medicine, general knowledge, geography,  and almost anything you could think of.

then came us, the fast learning, shortcut generation (always in search of shortcuts). all we learned post year 2000 has been about computers, nothing else. i see it as we acquired a new skill; an important one in today’s era. we missed out on everything else to be an e-lofer.  and the coming generation, oh, they are born on shortcuts.

<elders(above 40) : what is up?> <us(age group 20-35): what’s up> <youngsters (below 20) : ‘sup>

you see, youngistan advertisement on television. they ask puzzles, by looking at the level of puzzles one would observe that youngistan generation is totally idiot’s.

anyways, our elders have started to take interest in computers lately and i have been told by many of them that they don’t find it easy to understand and incorporate in their daily life. there is too much to learn. well, i think they are too modest to tell us that we kids are lazy enough to learn everything, or may be they don’t realize that it’s so big ocean of knowledge that no one can learn everything.

so what one can do – to pick up things quickly and selectively to be e-smart. that is what we have done and we still follow the same practice even today. we try to learn what is needed, everything else is just looked upon once and ignored for the time being, while our younger generation doesn’t even look on it once and our elders want to learn everything : hence they are slow and struggling.

i have decided to dedicate this post to them : i have around half a dozen of such readers; which i believe only grow in numbers if i can provide them a simple, evolving, logically elaborate series of computer education. so under the name “getting e-smart” i will keep writing about it, step-by-step.

there are some prerequisites though. please get yourself a google mail account. though, there are other email service providers as well but google mail or gmail as it’s known as gives us a feature to integrate other services together. to create a google account click on “create an account” option. fill up details and it would done in a minute.

in the next post in this series i will discuss various aspects of email and web-accounts. which will include security aspects and email-etiquette. i also request my friends who could spare some time to write in this series. it will surely help someone.