Giving You The Techplanations So You Can Understand Them: Welcome to a New Weekly Column

How many of you have computers and use technology on a pretty regular basis? I hesitate to say "everyday" because I hear that some people manage to stay away from computers for hours even days at a time. I don't know who those people are, but I hear that they also have "a life". Anyway, this is the inaugural post for a new tech column here on the Vancouver Observer: Techplanations.

Huh?

Yes, Techplanations, I'm going to give you explanations about technology … so these are techplanations. Stop shaking your head, it's at least sorta funny.

This column isn't going to be all about cutting edge tech that no one can figure out or get outside of Tokyo, this column is about learning, understanding, and using technology written for regular people. Can't figure out whether you need to defrag your BIOS to upgrade your HD-RAM? Don't worry, I'd explain it to you, if you could do that (I made that all up), in easy to understand steps with screenshots and maybe even a video thrown in for extra fun.

I've been a geek since birth. Supposedly as an infant I would wake up early and my dad would read medical journals out loud to me. He had to read them anyway, so he figured they might bore me back to sleep. No dice. In 1984 my family got its first computer, an Apple IIe. Oh those were great days. Floppy disks that were actually floppy. When having a monitor that could show 16 colors was cutting edge. This is also when I learned that if I wanted to learn something on the computer I asked dad. That was great for about four years, when I finished high school and started my undergrad degree I got my first Mac. This is when my dad gave me the one piece of advice that has shaped my life and career more than any other: "I'm not going to be there to figure stuff out for you, you're going to have to read the manuals…"

So I did.

It didn't take long for me to not only read the manuals, but figure out who I could learn from in the dorm and the computer lab. Which then led to me being one of those guys who could rescue lost term papers, fix computers gone bad, and all sorts of other problems. I eventually got a job as one of the tech support people at the main computer lab. So you can imagine all the problems that could crop up. And no, I didn't ever get a date by saving a cute damsel's term paper or econ project from the depths of a technological abyss.

Since then, I've run research labs, been a tech support person at a government research facility, launched probably at least as many websites as I am old (probably more, I've long lost count), and became a professional blogger. Today I teach classes at UBC and BCIT on various techie fun internet things like WordPress, podcasting, blogging, and social media. I consider myself a writer, teacher, photographer, and all around Internet Rogue. Well someone has to be.

I maintain a personal blog at TrisHussey.com and have a blog for my upcoming book at SixBloggingProjects.com. You can find me on Twitter as trishussey, and on Flickr as tris. And if you poke around on the Internet enough I'm sure you'll find lots of other stuff too.

So, this column. I'll answer questions that you send in (email to tris@techplanations.com), and try to give you at least a couple good tips a week that will make your computing life easier. Jargon is going to be kept to the bare minimum. I'm writing this for the person who is using tech, but feels more like a novice than anything else. If you ever wanted straight answers to your computer questions, this is the place.

For my tip of the week: Back up your computers! You can buy an external hard drive that holds 1 terabyte of information (thats 1,000 gigabytes or 1,000,000 megabytes. A typical computer hard drive today is about 250-500 gigabytes.) for less than $200 and most of the drives come with backup software on the drive already. If you have a Mac running Leopard (10.5) or Snow Leopard (10.6) really, just use TimeMachine. It's there and it works. Don't wait for "oops" to back up your stuff.