Everything I needed to know about computers I learned from my Grandmother.

"Home is where the hard-drive is," she used to say, and by golly, she was right. At Gramma's house, it always smelled of cinnamon cookies, lilac air freshener and warm circuitry. Gramma had experienced some major crashes in her time, and I'm not just talking about the stockmarket in 1930. "Back up, back up, back up!" she warned me time and time again, and "If you really want something kept secret, write it down and hide it." That was something Gramma learned the hard way, from the time she sent her secret snickerdoodle recipe in an e- mail to my cousin Jean, only to have Aunt Gladys intercept it because she was house-sitting for Jean! What an uproar that caused, with Granny declaring the recipe was her intellectual property, while Gladys claimed recipes were public domain. Back when I was designing my first website, Gramma cautioned me about browser compatiblity by quoting Abraham Lincoln, "You can please some of the browsers some of the time, but you can't please all of the browsers all of the time." Sometimes her advice took a while to sink in, though, like when she told me that, "One rotten applet spoils the whole bunch." I didn't understand her at the time, yet in hindsight, I can see that once again, Granny, you were right.

Other pearls of Granny's wisdom were sayings like, "A beta in hand is worth two on the shelf," "a hex bin time saves mime" and "Two is company, but 3.0 is an upgrade." Now those are words to live by. True, Granny had her old-fashioned side, and it was not uncommon to hear her mutter that, "In my day, it was DOS prompt, none of this mouse stuff!" But you can't really blame her, people who've lived through two world wars seem to need a little strife. Of course, Granny knew other things, like quilting, baking, family history, gardening, sewing, midwifery, and how to cure common ailments with herbs, but that kind of stuff you can read about in books. If you want some real wisdom, you need to get people where they live, which is, increasingly, in front of their computer monitors. Ain't it great?