How’s that for a click-bait post title? A little long maybe… anyway, I say it with tongue in cheek. Obviously you can use your computer however you want. But my point is that people who are excited about the start menu are usually using their computer a little bit inefficiently. Ever since Vista, there has been an awesome keyboard shortcut that obviates the need to use the mouse in the start menu. To start ANY program on your computer, press the Windows key on your keyboard and then start typing. Whether you’re on Windows Vista, 7, 8.1 or 10, the Windows key will bring up a search box and then as you type it will start filtering through the programs you have installed. Once it finds the one you want, just press enter. I do it so quickly that you can’t even really see what’s going on as the screen flashes around. And that’s the point. It’s FAST.
Here’s an example: press the Windows key and then type notepad and press Enter. Don’t worry about what is happening on the screen. When you’re done, Notepad will be open. Do the same thing for Word, Chrome, Excel, Spotify, Solitaire, etc. It’s so much faster than using the mouse to fumble around and navigate to find the program you want to use.
I think this is one main reason why Windows 8 never bothered me. I don’t really care about the start screen because I never click around it and it only flashes on my screen for fractions of a second throughout the day.
Authority
I think back on that regularly and chuckle, but that whole scenario is applicable to what we deal with on the internet every day. Some random person writes an article and bam, it’s fact. We all joke “It must be true, I saw it on the internet”, but then time and time again we get sucked into giving something way too much credit because it’s on a website that looks like it must be legit. Whether it’s diagnosing a disease, predicting earthquakes, or one of millions of other topics, the ability to understand how much authority or credibility the author has is so important. I don’t know how to teach this to my son, but it’s high on my list of things that I want him to learn. How do you pick up a piece of text and decide how much to believe it?
We used to base a lot of decisions and beliefs on common knowledge from our local circles, but now we have access to huge amounts of actual data on a huge range of topics. Seeking out that data is a good step, but you still have to be able to filter out the human interpretation of the data. It’s not like the old days where you had to be a published author to get read. Now any yahoo with a computer can write on the Internet and pretend they know what they are talking about …
* Well… we never pulled it again on her. Back then mail servers were much less secure/complex so somebody sent an email that appeared to be from one of our profs to the entire class saying class was canceled. They were careful to not include the prof on the email.