Monday photo feature

This photograph is a symbol to me.  A symbol of my technological ineptitude.

You see, my intention was to set my Go Pro camera to take a picture every ten seconds during my paddle on Lake Tahoe last Monday.  This is the first photo it took, as I was getting in my boat.  It's also the only photo it took.  I paddled my boat on the beautiful lake for an hour, thinking the camera was capturing all kinds of lovely scenes, only to get back and discover that I'd actually set it to take one photo on a ten-second timer.  And so here's the only photo of Lake Tahoe I can offer you.

Some paddlers never go anywhere without their Go Pro cameras, but I'm not an avid user of mine.  To me it seems like kind of a nuisance that distracts me from what's important (paddling).  I only break it out when I'm paddling someplace unusual like Lake Tahoe, or maybe when there's interesting weather or high water or something on the Mississippi at home.  Because I don't use it often, I'm perpetually out of practice and make dumb mistakes like I did at Tahoe.

I don't know if I'd describe myself as tech-phobic, but technology does have a way of passing me by.  To become proficient at using any sort of device or software you have to spend time playing around with it, and I never seem to have the patience for that.  I don't sit still well, and if the thing I'm trying to learn is not exceptionally user-friendly, my eyes quickly glaze over and I throw up my hands and quit.  I'm also sort of a tightwad and wait as long as possible to upgrade my hardware.

As a result, I have a phone that is at least a decade out of date.  I tend to miss deadlines for certain taxes and fees I owe because I'm now expected to pay them online rather than fill out the forms that I used to get in the mail.  I don't know the results of some lab tests I had at my doctor's office recently because instead of sending them to me in the mail like they used to, they want me to use their decidedly user-unfriendly "patient portal" now.  I've been putting off forming an LLC for my rental property concern because it's an online process that looks scary and boring.  I'm perfectly awful at promoting my woodworking business on social media.

It's not New Year's Day, but I'm thinking a resolution is in order.  I need to get myself up to speed.  The video I posted the other day is a part of the resolution, and I plan to spend this week taking some more such baby steps.  Of course, I've still got a boat that needs paddling and a lot of work to do on my rental properties and so on, so this is going to take some discipline on my part.