Welcome to the YaYa Oracle!

If you are a mature woman trying to get up to speed in these highly technological times, the YaYa Oracle Blog is a safe place to ask all your questions – no matter how simple or silly they seem. We assure you, you are not alone. There are thousands of wonderful, smart, eager women who feel the same kind of intimidation you do. The truth is there are few places to go for respectful, patient, and clear guidance. No mature woman wants to feel brushed off by a “twenty something” computer geek who simply doesn’t know how to truly honor where she has been and where she can go. No offense intended toward the “young”. We love all God’s children, but let’s face it, honoring the soul and work path of aging women is a passion to the YaYa Sister Squad.

Photo Art by Irene Young

In ancient Greek, “Yaya” meant literally “woman.” Today, Greek grandmothers are called “Yaya,” likely because they have acquired wisdom. In an Afro Caribbean religious sect, found in Brazil and the Congo, the word “Yaya” refers to women who have gone through a religious initiation. It means “Mother” or “Mama Priestess.” The word “Yaya” represents a pilgrimage to the highest status of womanhood, achieved only by way of ritual, compassionate intention, and wise resilience, accompanied by the beauty of aging.

Size Does Matter!

Hi! Lo! How Do We Know? by Irene Young

Do you get a foggy feeling in your brain when someone says send a “LO RES image” or “Make sure it is a HI RES image!?” Here is the simple low down on what it all means. A LO RES image (low resolution) is a small image suitable for use on the web. A HI RES image (high resolution) is a large image suitable for “print” or “hard” copies. For those of you who have heard the term “dpi” (dots per inch), lo res for the web is generally 72 dpi, while images for print, such as business cards, flyers, etc., are larger at 300 dpi. (300 is a higher number than 72, thus the term HI and LO res).

Have you ever had someone send you a photo to your email and when it arrives it is so huge that you can’t see the whole image?  That image is a hi res image, larger than necessary for viewing on the web. By the way, all those Hi Res images in both your INBOX and your SENT FILE take up space in your email program. Your email will eventually be too full to receive messages. You can delete these large messages from your inbox and/or sent file. Chances are you don’t even know they are there, so you can live without them. We will write about how to manage your email and your photographs soon. Stay tuned.

Have you ever used a photo on a flyer and it looks all fuzzy and bad? No doubt you used a lo res image that was too small for “print use.” So, what do we do to check or change the size of an image. The average person will not have PHOTOSHOP as an editing program. The average person may not have any editing program at all. So, in an effort to remain simple, I will stress a very important piece of knowledge. We CANNOT convert a small (lo res) image to a large (hi res) image. A baby cannot do the job of an adult. The important thing at this point is to know the difference, so you do not print a flyer or business card with a low resolution image on it.  You may have to go to the original source to get the full sized image, or ask your photographer for the hi-res version.  At this point, I just want to prevent you from wrong usage, and I want to empower you with a clear head when people start throwing these terms around the room. Images that you use professionally should be labeled maryjones_HiRes.jpg or maryjones_LoRes.jpg or if you prefer, maryjones_WebUse. Don’t worry about what JPG means. It’s just a type of image file.

SUMMARY: Remember LOW for PRINT is a big NO. HIGH for WEB is SKY HI, and will take too long to load the web page. Most importantly, the danger zone is asking the baby to drive the car. The baby is too small. If your photographic image is too small, you cannot ask too much of it. However, for use on the web – that same image may represent your true stunning spirit.

Tech Tips From YaYa

Respect Thy Sister’s (and Thy Brother’s) Email Addresses by Laurelin Remington-Wolf

In this day and age, people will really appreciate the fact that you are trying to protect their privacy by not distributing their email address to everyone you choose to contact with your important message. Back in the day of typewriters and carbon paper, the number of people that you could send your letter to was fairly limited unless you typed the letter multiple times. (Remember stacking up piles of paper alternating with carbon paper, hopefully with the carbon paper facing the right direction……?) The number of copies you could make at one time was limited by how many pieces of paper your typewriter could hold and still have the typewriter keys be able to make an impression on the bottom paper in the stack.

We’re talking pre-copy machine here. Ahhhhh, the good old days.) The letter was usually addressed to one person, and anyone that was going to receive one of the “carbon copies” was listed at the bottom of the letter with “cc:” by their name. This ensured that everyone receiving the message knew who else had received it. However, occasionally (and this is the part that always made me feel like a spy), the message was also sent to someone else whose name was not on any of the copies and that none of the other recipients knew about. That copy was called a “blind carbon copy” or “bcc.”These same terms have been kept in our electronic age today when most people alive today don’t even know what carbon paper is. In an email message, the email addresses listed in the “To:” field and the “Cc:” field are visible to everyone that receives the message. Any addresses listed in the “Bcc:” field will not be visible. To take advantage of this, you can put your own email address in the “To:” field (because most email programs will require at least one address in this field), and all of the other email addresses should be put in the “Bcc:” field. They will receive the message, but not be able to see who else has received it. In these days of email spam, your friends will be very grateful that you are not sending their email address to anyone that might be overly concerned about the size of certain things. Unfortunately, these people usually have a strong desire to share that concern with others.

Sometimes you have to hunt around a bit in your particular email program to find out how to make the “Bcc:” field visible so that you can enter email addresses into it. For example, in Yahoo mail you will see “Show BCC” to the right of the “To:” field. If you click on this, it will add a field for the “Bcc:” addresses at the top of your email message below the “Cc:” field. Different email programs have various ways of handling this. The following link will take you to an article that lists some of the major email programs and what you have to do to make the “Bcc:” field visible in those programs.

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