It happened by accident, my becoming a geek. I didn't know it happened until people began asking me questions about memory cards and USB cables.

One of our reporters recently asked me if "smart phones" is a common enough term to use in a story.

The question took me by surprise. My initial reaction was, "Of course, duh." My second thought was that I had no right to be uppity because this reporter knows more about patching a hole in drywall and other handyman magic than I ever will.

We all have our areas of expertise. The greater crime, really, is if we stop learning and slip into sleep mode.

Technology can be daunting but it is increasingly important to survive and advance in the workplace. But some of the smartest people I know approach their computers thinking if they touch the wrong button, it will blow up.

Fear not. The process of attaining geekdomhood is simple: get over the initial hump of understanding any software or piece of hardware, then practice, practice, practice.

The best tech classes are hands-on. Community colleges hold beginner-level classes that range from how to use a computer to spreadsheets. Pacific New Media at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa offers courses year-round in such subjects as Flash, Web design, photography and video editing. These courses can run into the hundreds of dollars, but the instructors are frequently national experts in their disciplines.

If you are challenged by time and money in learning about technology, take a look at lynda.com. The site allows you to pick up hundreds of software programs at your own pace. For about a half-hour each night for a week, I watched a lynda.com video tutorial on using GarageBand to create a podcast. Now, I am happy to say that if you ever want a podcast on scrapbooking or mini daschunds, I'm your gal.

For those with grander ambitions, lynda.com also offers courses on JavaScript, php, Cold Fusion, AJAX, Ruby on Rails and other cutting-edge digital tools.

You can try out lynda.com tutorials for free. A subscription will run $25 for a month's worth of training to $375 for a year, including exercise files.

After a little while absorbing this stuff, you'll be fielding questions about whatnots and dodads and will never be lonely.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 2:36 am and is filed under Hawaii Hacks, Technology, Web sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.