Daniel John Gayle

My dad just got email. Wow.

I’ve been using email since about 8th Grade when I needed an email address to download something to one of my school’s ancient System 7 Macintoshes. My friend Shane Toven and I hunted down the best way for a student to get an email address for free, and unheard of prospect at the time, and I managed to discover Hotmail.

Ah yes, Hotmail.

I’m talking about Hotmail pre-Microsoft. It was fast, it was cool, and most importantly, it was free.

I distinctly remember the day that Microsoft bought it out, because there was an IMMEDIATE slowdown of the system. It almost automatically started sucking the day that the Evil Empire sucked it up.

So I switched to Yahoo! Mail, and I’ve kept that account all the way up until I bought my own domain. I still use that account for registering for crap that I know I’m gonna get junk mail for. Yahoo! has been reliable for nigh on 10 years now, with hardly a complaint.

So my dad just got email.

For me email is just another form of communication that I rely upon every day, but for my dad it is a new and novel enterprise that will take some getting used to. I feel that I can communicate certain things much more clearly via email than I could in person or over the phone, communicate things more fluently and with a greater sense of purpose.

My dad will now have to learn how to type on a keyboard, most likely chicken-peck style. (The most valuable class I ever took in college was my keyboarding class…)

It’ll take a while for my dad to get used to the medium, but for now I’ll just have to be patient. I feel a bit like Darth Vader, “When I left you, I was but a learner; now I am the Master.”

I’ve been using Twitter a bit lately, but I’m still debating on whether or not it is worth the effort. It’s almost more of something that you do for yourself than it is to keep others informed of what you’re doing.

It’s like your saying to yourself, “What I am doing right now is worth my time, or else I wouldn’t bother telling anybody else about it.” A sort of self-affirmation, if you will. If for that reason alone I use it a little, but the jury is still out on how long I’ll keep it up.

But it’s one of those things that is really quite pointless unless you have others checking in on what you’re doing.