The Tech Quiz
Jun. 30th, 2018 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraDid not make it out the door until 8:30 this morning, so the first onslaught of heat was well upon us by the time I finished up my run around 9:30.
See that brown smudge along the southern horizon? That, my friends, is smog floating 100 miles up the Hudson River Valley from New York City.
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A Tech Quiz gacked frommelissa_maples. (If you don’t follow melissa_maples's LJ, you should. She lives the most extraordinarily interesting life, and takes the most extraordinarily engaging photos of it.)
1. Do you consider yourself technology-friendly? For my age, yes.
2. Did you have cable television when you were a little kid? When I was a little kid, all TV programming was provided by the big three networks: CBS, NBC, and ABC. Wait! There was public television too, but it was boring.
3. Do you know what 8-track tapes are and did you ever own an 8-track tape player? Yes and no. Mark Conly and his entourage had fronted some elaborate 8-track scam, in fact. They had scads of seedy adventures! I forget the details now, but they were like something straight out of a T Coraghessan Boyle novel. I should ask Eleanor about them before they fade away from collective memory.
4. Did you own cassette tapes and a Walkman when you were younger? Of course!
5. When did you get your first DVD player? Gotta say I was very reluctant to upgrade from VHS despite the numerous advantages the new technology had over the old technology (like the machine doesn’t eat your tapes!) I always resent being pushed by manufacturers to go with the latest shiny new technology. I hate planned obsolescence. I hardly ever upgrade the operating systems on any of my electronic devices for precisely that reason.
6. Did you learn how to type on a typewriter? Did you own a typewriter growing up? No. My mother was a secretary; I swore I’d never be a secretary, so I wasn’t at all interested in learning how to type. I didn’t learn to type until 1987 when I started graduate school. That was the dawn of the age of personal computers.
7. What was the first computer you owned? Amiga 1000. I acquired it in 1986 because I was interested in animation.
8. When did you first get an email address? Can’t remember the exact date. Some time in the late 80s. pdil@pacbell.net.
9. When did you first encounter the internet? Was it around when you were a kid? Define “the Internet.” I started hanging out on Usenet in 1987 and joined the Well in 1988, so I was what you call an “early adopter.” The Internet was definitely not around – at least not in any recognizable form – when I was a kid.
10. When did you start using LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter? I made my very first LJ post on July 27, 2001, but I think I experimented with posting my diary online in other places many times before then. For the first few years I was on LJ, I didn’t realize it was an interactive forum at all, and I was shocked/shocked/shocked when people began to leave comments on stuff I wrote.
I joined Facebook pretty close to the time it first opened to the general public. I wanted to stalk my son, Max, so I sent him a friend request.
What do you hope to accomplish by this? he wrote back.
But eventually maternal guilt wore him down. He deleted his Facebook account several years ago, but I remain. I can still stalk my other son, Robin, plus numerous of my pals are on FB with whom it might otherwise be difficult to sustain contact.
Basically, the only things I post on FB besides photographs of baby turkeys are Today’s Exciting Memes – my list of the day’s top three news stories – and Today’s Exciting Cat News. Today’s Exciting Memes has quite a following, and I wouldn’t like giving it up.
I think Twitter is evil.
11. What was your first mobile phone? How did you communicate on-the-go before that? Well, first of all, I hate talking to people on the phone. Just hate it. What does “communicating on the go” mean anyway? In emergencies, there were pay phones; if I needed to check in on my household at the end of the day on business trips, I used hotel phones.
People Magazine got me my first mobile phone in 1994. So they could communicate with me whenever.
12. At what point did you get a smartphone? 2010. I was very resistant to getting a smartphone because as an observer, I hated the degree to which people get absorbed in their smartphones to the exclusion of every real thing in real life going on around them. Humans do not need a technology that makes them even more solipsistic, I reasoned.
But at the time, I was carrying a family plan that paid for phone usage for me and my two sons, and they really, really wanted iPhones. So I bit the bullet.
I was shocked by how much I loved my iPhone from practically the first minute I clutched it in my hot little hands.
13. What was your first printer like? What sort of paper did it use? Could it print photos? Who can remember? I think it must have used one of those paper feeds with the serrated edges, and no, it definitely did not print photos.
14. When you were in university, did you type on a computer or typewriter? As an undergraduate (1968-1972), I wrote – and submitted! – handwritten papers, and for those few pissy profs who insisted on typed drafts, I guess I borrowed friends’ typewriters and painfully hunted and pecked with my index fingers.
In grad school (1987 – 1991), I was doing so much quantitative and statistical analysis that I simply had to own a computer. And once you own a computer, you get a word-processing program.
Then I decided I needed to train myself to type my diary. From the age of 12, I’d been hand-writing that diary in a seemingly endless series of black vellum sketch books with narrow-point Rapidograph pens! My hands were always black because my Rapidographs always leaked.
Transitioning from penmanship to typing was tough, since the way you write actually determines what you write to a large degree. The transition took about four months. My style actually changed; I think for the better. Now, I can’t hand-write anything! My brain is used to having thoughts as quickly as I can record them.
16. What was your first experience with digital file-sharing? Limewire.
17. When did you get your first mp3 player? I don’t think I’ve ever owned an electronic device solely dedicated to music files.
18. Did you own a record player, cassette player, CD player or MP3 player as a kid? My mother had a fairly sophisticated stereo system when I was growing up. I know I owned several cassette players and CD players.
19. When did you start blogging? I don’t blog. I keep a diary.
20. What is your history with e-book readers? B gave me a Kindle for Christmas several years ago. I use it a lot when I travel. I’m a big, big, big reader: I typically zoom through three to five books a week, so making sure I’ll have enough to read is a large part of my travel planning. Probably more important than clothes!
At home, I tend to take print books out from the library. When I lost my house in Monterey, one of the hardest things was having to deal with my library of 3,000 or so print books. I mean – nobody really wanted them. Except me. And I couldn’t keep them. So, I swore I’d never buy a book again – only, of course, I have bought books plus people give me books plus I rescued a complete collection of John LeCarre titles from the Staatsburg library when I was doing taxes there because otherwise, they were gonna throw them away, and how can you throw away John LeCarre? So I have once again worked my way up to owning a print library.
I need to do something about that.
21. How do you currently listen to music? On what devices? Oh, I have the usual six months supply of dehydrated music stored in iTunes. And cunning little Bluetooth-enabled speakers throughout my space. I sometimes listen to customized Pandora stations. (Don Byron radio. John Coltrane radio. Wild Tchoupitoulas radio. Bob Fosse radio.) I loathe Spotify and don’t know why anyone listens to it.
I should note here that I have a peculiar relationship with music: I love music, but I can’t listen to it casually. If I hear music, I absolutely have to listen to it interactively as in What is that instrument making that sound? How do you finger that instrument? etc etc, which means I can never listen to music as background noise. Music always commands my entire attention.
Also – and for all I know, this is very common – I remember music very vividly. So it works just as well for me to say, Patrizia-Brain: Play “Matador” by the Cadillacs Fabulosos as it does to play that song on an electronic device.
See that brown smudge along the southern horizon? That, my friends, is smog floating 100 miles up the Hudson River Valley from New York City.
###
A Tech Quiz gacked from
melissa_maples. (If you don’t follow melissa_maples's LJ, you should. She lives the most extraordinarily interesting life, and takes the most extraordinarily engaging photos of it.)1. Do you consider yourself technology-friendly? For my age, yes.
2. Did you have cable television when you were a little kid? When I was a little kid, all TV programming was provided by the big three networks: CBS, NBC, and ABC. Wait! There was public television too, but it was boring.
3. Do you know what 8-track tapes are and did you ever own an 8-track tape player? Yes and no. Mark Conly and his entourage had fronted some elaborate 8-track scam, in fact. They had scads of seedy adventures! I forget the details now, but they were like something straight out of a T Coraghessan Boyle novel. I should ask Eleanor about them before they fade away from collective memory.
4. Did you own cassette tapes and a Walkman when you were younger? Of course!
5. When did you get your first DVD player? Gotta say I was very reluctant to upgrade from VHS despite the numerous advantages the new technology had over the old technology (like the machine doesn’t eat your tapes!) I always resent being pushed by manufacturers to go with the latest shiny new technology. I hate planned obsolescence. I hardly ever upgrade the operating systems on any of my electronic devices for precisely that reason.
6. Did you learn how to type on a typewriter? Did you own a typewriter growing up? No. My mother was a secretary; I swore I’d never be a secretary, so I wasn’t at all interested in learning how to type. I didn’t learn to type until 1987 when I started graduate school. That was the dawn of the age of personal computers.
7. What was the first computer you owned? Amiga 1000. I acquired it in 1986 because I was interested in animation.
8. When did you first get an email address? Can’t remember the exact date. Some time in the late 80s. pdil@pacbell.net.
9. When did you first encounter the internet? Was it around when you were a kid? Define “the Internet.” I started hanging out on Usenet in 1987 and joined the Well in 1988, so I was what you call an “early adopter.” The Internet was definitely not around – at least not in any recognizable form – when I was a kid.
10. When did you start using LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter? I made my very first LJ post on July 27, 2001, but I think I experimented with posting my diary online in other places many times before then. For the first few years I was on LJ, I didn’t realize it was an interactive forum at all, and I was shocked/shocked/shocked when people began to leave comments on stuff I wrote.
I joined Facebook pretty close to the time it first opened to the general public. I wanted to stalk my son, Max, so I sent him a friend request.
What do you hope to accomplish by this? he wrote back.
But eventually maternal guilt wore him down. He deleted his Facebook account several years ago, but I remain. I can still stalk my other son, Robin, plus numerous of my pals are on FB with whom it might otherwise be difficult to sustain contact.
Basically, the only things I post on FB besides photographs of baby turkeys are Today’s Exciting Memes – my list of the day’s top three news stories – and Today’s Exciting Cat News. Today’s Exciting Memes has quite a following, and I wouldn’t like giving it up.
I think Twitter is evil.
11. What was your first mobile phone? How did you communicate on-the-go before that? Well, first of all, I hate talking to people on the phone. Just hate it. What does “communicating on the go” mean anyway? In emergencies, there were pay phones; if I needed to check in on my household at the end of the day on business trips, I used hotel phones.
People Magazine got me my first mobile phone in 1994. So they could communicate with me whenever.
12. At what point did you get a smartphone? 2010. I was very resistant to getting a smartphone because as an observer, I hated the degree to which people get absorbed in their smartphones to the exclusion of every real thing in real life going on around them. Humans do not need a technology that makes them even more solipsistic, I reasoned.
But at the time, I was carrying a family plan that paid for phone usage for me and my two sons, and they really, really wanted iPhones. So I bit the bullet.
I was shocked by how much I loved my iPhone from practically the first minute I clutched it in my hot little hands.
13. What was your first printer like? What sort of paper did it use? Could it print photos? Who can remember? I think it must have used one of those paper feeds with the serrated edges, and no, it definitely did not print photos.
14. When you were in university, did you type on a computer or typewriter? As an undergraduate (1968-1972), I wrote – and submitted! – handwritten papers, and for those few pissy profs who insisted on typed drafts, I guess I borrowed friends’ typewriters and painfully hunted and pecked with my index fingers.
In grad school (1987 – 1991), I was doing so much quantitative and statistical analysis that I simply had to own a computer. And once you own a computer, you get a word-processing program.
Then I decided I needed to train myself to type my diary. From the age of 12, I’d been hand-writing that diary in a seemingly endless series of black vellum sketch books with narrow-point Rapidograph pens! My hands were always black because my Rapidographs always leaked.
Transitioning from penmanship to typing was tough, since the way you write actually determines what you write to a large degree. The transition took about four months. My style actually changed; I think for the better. Now, I can’t hand-write anything! My brain is used to having thoughts as quickly as I can record them.
16. What was your first experience with digital file-sharing? Limewire.
17. When did you get your first mp3 player? I don’t think I’ve ever owned an electronic device solely dedicated to music files.
18. Did you own a record player, cassette player, CD player or MP3 player as a kid? My mother had a fairly sophisticated stereo system when I was growing up. I know I owned several cassette players and CD players.
19. When did you start blogging? I don’t blog. I keep a diary.
20. What is your history with e-book readers? B gave me a Kindle for Christmas several years ago. I use it a lot when I travel. I’m a big, big, big reader: I typically zoom through three to five books a week, so making sure I’ll have enough to read is a large part of my travel planning. Probably more important than clothes!
At home, I tend to take print books out from the library. When I lost my house in Monterey, one of the hardest things was having to deal with my library of 3,000 or so print books. I mean – nobody really wanted them. Except me. And I couldn’t keep them. So, I swore I’d never buy a book again – only, of course, I have bought books plus people give me books plus I rescued a complete collection of John LeCarre titles from the Staatsburg library when I was doing taxes there because otherwise, they were gonna throw them away, and how can you throw away John LeCarre? So I have once again worked my way up to owning a print library.
I need to do something about that.
21. How do you currently listen to music? On what devices? Oh, I have the usual six months supply of dehydrated music stored in iTunes. And cunning little Bluetooth-enabled speakers throughout my space. I sometimes listen to customized Pandora stations. (Don Byron radio. John Coltrane radio. Wild Tchoupitoulas radio. Bob Fosse radio.) I loathe Spotify and don’t know why anyone listens to it.
I should note here that I have a peculiar relationship with music: I love music, but I can’t listen to it casually. If I hear music, I absolutely have to listen to it interactively as in What is that instrument making that sound? How do you finger that instrument? etc etc, which means I can never listen to music as background noise. Music always commands my entire attention.
Also – and for all I know, this is very common – I remember music very vividly. So it works just as well for me to say, Patrizia-Brain: Play “Matador” by the Cadillacs Fabulosos as it does to play that song on an electronic device.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-30 05:11 pm (UTC)And so, because it feels so powerful, I tend to stay away from it, even though I'm continuing to rebuild my scant CD/DVD collection. As a result, quite a few remain on the shelf, unopened. And the house, well, it's quiet. Which makes it possible to sometimes hear remembered passages, echoing from somewhere...
no subject
Date: 2018-07-01 08:32 pm (UTC)Some time within the last year or so - I wrote it about it on my LJ even though I can't remember too much about the experience now - I happened to hear a song that was popular when I was in my late teens, and I was shocked at the way it flew me right back to that time in my life.
My brain is so different now that I experienced that 18-year-old me brain as kinda alien, too.
Really an odd experience.