I’m not sure if it qualifies as a “guest” blogger when it’s the company I work for, but my boss has a very well read blog at flyte new media, I was extremely pleased that a couple of my posts were accepted to be published there.

Today’s post:
Do Baby Boomers Need Social Media?

Read previous post:
3 Reasons for Baby Boomers to Jump Into Blogging and Social Media?

A while back I posted instructions on how to take a snapshot of your monitor screen and turn it into a photo.  I was quite surprised when I used it today and was no longer able to create a screenshot.  After a bit of searching and finding similar instructions to my previous post, I found instructions on the NEW way to take a screenshot (PC):

Hold down the Shift and Fn keys and click the Print Scrn key – on my laptop computer it’s F11 key in the top row – yours may be a different F key on your computer or on a full keyboard it may be a separate key, but it will have some abbreviation of Print Screen written on the key and be in the upper right quadrant.  The Fn key will likely be near the Shift key in the lower left quadrant.

From there, open your favorite image program (I use Photoshop, but most PCs come with Paint – look under Start – All Programs – Accessories – Paint. You can use Control + V to paste the screenshot into program.

A simple thing to do once you know the right key combination!

Earlier this week I saw a twitter post with picture of old fashioned elevator buttons with a giant sign above them saying don’t push, they were decorative only from the days of manual operation.  Suddenly my memory flashed back to Freese’s Dept. store in Bangor where the elevator buttons looked just like this “relic”, but in my early childhood they were still working, along with the uniformed elevator man.  Other technological feats of the time were the pneumatic tubes used by the clerks to send cash payment up to the accounting office and get change by return.  I also remember (very young) when my brother read aloud from the newspaper that Freese’s was getting the first escalator in town.  I asked what it was and he told me the tall tale that it was a moving stairway – that you just stood on it and the stairs would move.  (I of course knew he was trying to pull one over on me – whoever heard of such a thing.)

My early work days were as a secretary (before it was known as the more accurate term of administrative assistant). Some of the technological wonders were:

• Moving from manual typewriter to IBM selectric. Moving from carbon paper to photocopiers. Moving from eraser, to white out, to strikeover tape.
• Moving from IBM selectric to a model that would hold one line of type in memory before it shot it out like a machine gun attack.
• Moving from one line of memory to a Wang word processor, where you could cut a whole section of text and paste it in another location (Beam me up Scotty).

Why the trip down memory lane?  In the last 9 years I’ve moved from developing websites with Dreamweaver with templates and library items on local computer, to using includes to change all pages with one small move, to developing websites on WordPress, where after it’s built even the non-techie customer can take over the majority of their changes without advanced knowledge.

The job I do now has changed since one year ago, changed drastically since 5 years ago, and is almost unrecognizable to the job I entered 9 years ago.  In a few years from now it will change again.  No matter what your age or experience, if you are working for a living it is imperative to not only stay on top of the newest technology in your job, but also in the newest technology period.  The manual elevator operator is long gone, out of most people’s memory, and eventually that will happen to most of us no matter what job we are currently doing.  Look around the corner, down the long mile, and learn for the future to prepare for the job resurgence that WILL come, but might not look the same as the job we’ve done in the past.  Good luck to all the job seekers out there!