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See you in the future.

I finally learned how to do blogs on the Internet. I am the last person in America to do this.

Four-year-old children have their own blogs now. So do poodles. Teens have 14 blogs and seven MySpace pages and nine Facebook thingies and six Web sites. Each.

But I am a caveman to the end. I like seeing my name in actual print. I even take pleasure in seeing my tiny mug shot there on the page — and the resulting occasions when people recognize me in the supermarket after I've run to the store before my morning coffee and my hair looks like a rooster's butt.

During the 10 years I've written the Home Front, I have learned to get similar enjoyment out of seeing my words pop up on the Internet through the Web site of The Tribune and other newspapers around the country.

All my appearances on the Internet were someone else's doing. The good folks at The Trib passed my columns along to the Internet-surfing public. Newspapers, news services, radio stations and assorted friends put them on their own Web sites or put up links, but I had nothing to do with it. I was always pleasantly surprised to stumble across myself on the Internet.

My book publisher built me a Web site, but company headquarters maintains it because I don't have the first clue, and I didn't want to learn. I was busy writing columns for "real" newspapers and books printed on real paper.

I'm an old-school newspaperman, even if the magic of e-mail has allowed me to work from home in my pajamas for the past decade. When I got my first newspaper job in 1975, they gave me a cigarette-scarred desk and a manual typewriter. At every technological advance since then, I've been a foot-dragging late adopter. I still own vinyl records. My first VCR was a Betamax. My first computer was powered by a bellows. I remember when I didn't want to use a mouse because it seemed wimpy compared to typing.

I use the Internet all the time now, of course, prowling the shoulders of the information superhighway like a deer at the edge of the headlight beams. But I was hesitant to venture out onto the superhighway myself. We all know what happens to brave deer.

Tech-savvy people have known for years that the grass is greener on the other side of that highway. Jump out on the Internet and reach audiences and sell ads! Make money! The future lies over there! You can do it yourself!

But I didn't want to learn how. My brain feels full to overflowing. Every tidbit of information my brain absorbs pushes out something else. I make room for a new computer skill, and I'll forget where I keep my socks.

Eventually, I caved in and started a blog recycling my columns and building my own archive. As is so often the case when I struggle at a technological hurdle, my wife pushed me over. She set everything up and taught me the bare minimum about how to post to the blog. Once I got comfortable with that (a mere six months), I let her teach me how to set up ads and analytics and other stuff I can't remember the name of right now.

Now I'm a full-fledged blogger, reaching the reading public direct from the privacy of my own home. And the advertising on my blog could generate pennies every year!

The future. It tastes just like green grass.