===== 2025-04-21 =====
===== Four Questions: Tech =====
These four questions seem to be making their way around the local
gem/phlog space, so I figure I'll take a crack at them as well.
People have answered different ways - for me I'm going to assume
"technology" means relatively modern computing/electronics tech,
including software.
1. When did you first get interested in technology?
Might have been when my dad had my brother and I tagged along with
him one day, and he showed us a program he wrote that made an
ASCII rocket fly up the screen. I was really young at that point
and thought it was super cool. Thinking back now, it's kind of
weird that he never really talked about what he did for work
(programmer), but he was your typical Radio Shack tinkerer and all
that. Loved playing with tech.
If not the ASCII rocket moment, then definitely the Christmas we
got a Macintosh Plus, our first home computer, so we didn't have
to go to dad's office to play with computers anymore. The Mac had
that fancy GUI on it that felt like such a huge leap forward (even
though I'm a terminal enthusiast these days), and I got to feel
cool being the kid at school that already knew how to use the Mac
computers in the computer lab, and I got to help teach other
people - even the teachers. I miss loving Mac, honestly. I hopped
off that train right around the start of the "new MacOS" days (OS
X and all that). Mac peaked at System 9! (Or maybe 7. There was
something so magical about 7.)
2. What's your favorite technology?
(Assuming this is "generally/overall".) Linux. I've been into it
for many years now, but I'm not one of the people who got in on it
before it was cool. I'm pretty sure my first distro was Ubuntu
8.10 (Hardy Heron) in 2008. I had seen the logo for it when a
coworker was booting up a server and I asked what it was. He told
me it was a Linux distribution called Ubuntu, and that it was a
completely free operating system. I thought that sounded
interesting and decided to give it a try myself. In addition to
the technology itself, I've since fallen in love with the
philosophy surrounding both it and many of its users. Freedom for
the users, let people choose what they want, allow and even
encourage people to tinker, that kind of thing. Big difference
from the extremely safe and guarded Mac environment I grew up in.
3. What's your current favorite?
I'm going to be a little goofy and say my oldschool digital
wristwatch. It doesn't even have a brand or a logo on it that I
can see. I got it from my firstborn when they decided they didn't
like the feeling of something on their wrist all the time. If I
recall correctly, it was a random impulse buy at a Walmart or
something for them.
I got my wife a Garmin smartwatch a while back because she likes
that kind of stuff, and at one point she got one for me as well,
presumably to try and return the favor. I feel bad, but it was
just too much. I already get annoyed by my phone trying to get my
attention all the time - the watch was just extending the phone's
influence over my attention span even further. And it was one more
thing to have to plug in and recharge every night. So I swapped it
for this dinky little oldschool digital one with a little solar
thing on it to help me feel extra confident that it's
low-maintenance and doesn't need to be recharged or anything. No
bells or whistles - tells the time, the date, has an alarm and a
stopwatch. And the cool turquoise backlight when necessary. I need
to know the time, I glance at my wrist. Just like in the good old
days. It only annoys me when I tell it to by setting an alarm,
otherwise it stays out of my way.
4. Name cool tech we'll have in 25 years!
The way I've been going lately, I'll probably still be using stuff
that's considered old even by today's standards. But I can hope
for significant increases in clean and efficient energy
technology. Giving in to my more pessimistic worries, I could see
some kind of scrappy new independent/"underground" networking tech
springing up that doesn't rely on our current Internet
infrastructure which I imagine in 25 years will be even more
tightly controlled, monopolized, and utilized to push propaganda
and manipulate and extract any and all value out of people.
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