my gift
or my talent?
Since I was young, I’ve had a knack for figuring out how electronics worked. I would memorize remote controls (and still do) pretty easily and quickly–and interfaces too. Menu > left > down > down > right > down > enter (how to turn on closed captions on my current tv).
One time Tino and I took the car to get looked at and the mechanic attached a small machine to the car’s computer and hit a couple buttons. He left to check something quickly and I went up to the machine and fiddled with it. Tino got so upset thinking I’m going to somehow fuck up the car (highly unlikely). I put the machine back to the menu location where it was originally and put it down. The mechanic didn’t notice a thing. I was just curious, really curious.
Earlier this summer we went to a barbecue and I used almost everyone’s phone to take pictures and then sent them to my email account. Everyone had a different phone with different menus. But it was ridiculously easy for me to: find out how to take a picture; save the picture; find the e-mail fuction; enter my e-mail address; attach the picture; and hit send. I don’t even have a camera phone so the whole process was new to me, but I figured it out really quickly.
Yesterday I was reading a blog entry on how to Make Your PC Work (not look) More Like a Mac and then read the comments. In the comments was the beginning of a flame-war on why PC is better than a Mac or vice-versa. I’m thinking, ‘what’s the big deal?’ At work, I use both a Mac and a PC and, while I prefer the PC, I can work just as easily on either one.
‘Gasp!’ you say? Yes, I can work just as easily on one or the other–especially if the same applications are installed on both machines. The major differences I notice are: the shortcuts are different; application windows work differently. Everything else just comes with the territory and I’ve looked over the differences to get the job done.
Now, how can I make money off this talent? I should be an electronics-and-interace-tester. Nope, they’d prolly want an average user not a slightly-above-average user. 
