During the week that I arrived in the United States, I saw an airport, used a telephone, used a library, talked with a scientist, and was shown a computer for the first time in my life.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I knew from the first moment I picked up a camera, on my first school assignment, what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was going to find a way to travel the world and tell the stories of the people I met through photographs.
I used to work at NASA in Virginia. It was nothing glamorous; I was just tasked with making code compile for obscure projects, and I wasn't very good at it. Now I spend most of my time drawing pictures and looking at funny things on the Internet, which in retrospect is largely what I did at my old job, too.
To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working; I fire up my laptop, and I'm in exactly the same place I was when I left home - that, to me, is a miracle.
Seven years ago, in my first semester at college, the professors handed out MacBook Pros. With mine, I filmed a seven-minute tutorial on 'natural makeup' - just me, my laptop, and a cup of coffee. When, a week later, it clocked 40,000 Web views, I knew people were connecting with it, so I kept going. That moment changed my life.
When I began writing that I was able and did travel and met some fascinating people and also uncovered some history, which has not been discovered before.
I graduated from high school in 1963. There were no computers, cell phones, Internet, credit cards, cassette tapes or cable TV.
I realised I was living in my own universe with lots of assistants. I didn't have a cell phone; I didn't know how to use a computer. Everybody was doing everything for me. So I left and moved to New York. It was the end of an era, and I must say I found myself a bit lost. I wasn't in the protected Mugler universe any more.
To make a computer do something that would take a human a long period of time was always interesting.
I went on to Harvard and got very interested in computers and studying the earth's landscape.
Most of my work may happen at a computer, but it's still a new and very exciting frontier.
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