Topic: Do you have a life? or, How to determine if Technology has taken over your life

[The Chief]

Do you have a life?
or, How to determine if Technology has taken over your life

   
1. Your stationery is more cluttered than Warren Beatty's address book. The letterhead lists a fax number, e-mail addresses for two on-line services, and your Internet address, which spreads across the breadth of the letterhead and continues to the back. In essence, you have conceded that the first page of any letter you write is letterhead.
   
2. You can no longer sit through an entire movie without having at least one device on your body beep or buzz.
   
3. You need to fill out a form that must be typewritten, but you can't because there isn't one typewriter in your house -- only computers with laser printers.
   
4. You think of the gadgets in your office as "friends," but you forget send your father a birthday card.
   
5. You disdain people who use low Baud rates.
   
6. When you go into a computer store, you eavesdrop on a salesperson talking with customers -- and you butt in to correct him and spend the next twenty minutes answering the customers' questions, while the salesperson stands by silently, nodding his head.
   
7. You use the phrase "digital compression" in a conversation without thinking how strange your mouth feels when you say it.
   
8. You constantly find yourself in groups of people to whom you say the phrase "digital compression." Everyone understands what you mean, and you are not surprised or disappointed that you don't have to explain it.
   
9. You know Bill Gates' e-mail address, but you have to look up your own social security number.
 
10. You stop saying "phone number" and replace it with "voice number," since we all know the majority of phone lines in any house are plugged into contraptions that talk to other contraptions.
 
11. You sign Christmas cards by putting :-) next to your signature.
 
12. Off the top of your head, you can think of nineteen keystroke symbols that are far more clever than :-).
 
13. You back up your data every day.
 
14. Your wife asks you to pick up some minipads for her at the store and you return with a wrist-rest for her mouse.
 
15. You think jokes about being unable to program a VCR are stupid.
 
16. On vacation, you are reading a computer manual and turning the pages faster than everyone else who is reading John Grisham novels.
 
17. The thought that a CD could refer to finance or music rarely enters your mind.
 
18. You are able to argue persuasively that Ross Perot's phrase "electronic town hall" makes more sense than the term "information superhighway," but you don't because, after all, the man still uses hand-drawn pie charts.
 
19. You go to computer trade shows and map out your path of the exhibit hall in advance. But you cannot give someone directions to your house without looking up the street names.
 
20. You would rather get more dots per inch than miles per gallon.
 
21. You become upset when a person calls you on the phone to sell you something, but you think it's okay for a computer to call and demand that you start pushing buttons on your telephone to receive more information about the product it is selling.
 
22. You know without a doubt that disks come in five-and-a-quarter and three-and-a-half-inch sizes.
 
23. Al Gore strikes you as an "intriguing" fellow.
 
24. You own a set of itty-bitty screw-drivers and you actually know where they are.
 
25. While contemporaries swap stories about their recent hernia surgeries, you compare mouse-induced index-finger strain with a nine-year-old.
 
26. You are so knowledgeable about technology that you feel secure enough to say "I don't know" when someone asks you a technology question instead of feeling compelled to make something up.
 
27. You rotate your screen savers more frequently than your automobile tires.
 
28. You have a functioning home copier machine, but every toaster you own turns bread into charcoal.
 
29. You have ended friendships because of irreconcilably different opinions about which is better -- the track ball or the track pad.
 
30. You understand all the jokes in this message. If so, my friend, technology has taken over your life. We suggest, for your own good, that you go lie under a tree and write a haiku. And don't use a laptop.
 
31. You email this message to your friends over the net. You'd never get around to showing it to them in person or reading it to them on the phone. In fact, you have probably never met most of these people face-to-face.

[Ronin RedFox]

Im probably too young to answer most of these questions.. 

[-<WillyP>-]

[DarkWing]

Too many of these hit too close to home.   

[Ronin RedFox]

Ya Rly.

[Scyphi]

I can relate with the emoticon related ones. I really have to struggle sometimes to not put a smilie at the end of the sentences I write.

[PyroJockey]

It's amazing how soon these jokes (like the technology) become outdated, for example:

Fax number? Who uses a fax machine anymore, it's like so 20th century.
  
Typewritten?, the last forms I've seen (10 years ago) that would need to be typewritten were self carboning forms. (Self what?) These would be done on a daisy wheel (WTF? ) or dot matrix printer (if you can find one ).

I find the term "phone number" has been replaced with "cell number" or "mobile".
 
Nobody I know programs a VCR anymore, now the jokes are about programming a DVR or TIVO
 
You no longer turn the pages of a computer manual, you scroll through the PDF. Print is dead
 
If you think that CD's are just for storing data (what about DVD's? ) you probably never used or maybe even have ever seen a 5 1/4" or 3 1/2" floppy. (Or how about an 8" floppy? )

How many of you even know who Ross Perot is? (Or EDS for that matter? )

[-<WillyP>-]

Ok, let's re-write these for 2010.

[TechPro]

I should point out that even though the average person has hardly any contact with "Fax technology" these days... it's still very much in use in the business and education fields.  I know, I work for a University servicing the "MFP" devices (multi-function printers, printers that also scan, email, fax, copy) and there is a LOT of Fax activity still.  However, I agree.  It's very "20th century" and totally needless if organizations would get more modernized in their methods.
 
You'd be surprised how many typewriters are kept around by secretarys only to do multi-part forms.

I also know of (off hand) three places there dot matrix printers are still used because multi-part print outs are still needed (yeah, the technology being used needs updating).

At my work, they are migrating the office phones to a Cisco IP Phone system (many more features and you can control the phone from your computer's desktop and keep/store/playback the messages just a click away).  Fairly cool.
 

You no longer turn the pages of a computer manual, you scroll through the PDF. Print is dead.

   Hey!  Our campus goes through at least 10 to 15 cases of paper (that's 10 reams in a case, 500 sheets per ream) each day ... and we don't use nearly as much as many other smaller schools.
 

How many of you even know who Ross Perot is? (Or EDS for that matter? Huh)

I did not vote for Ross (but I could have).  Had to look up EDS.  It had been too long.

[D2Disciple]

Lol. These were great, and agreed with Darkwing: a bit close to home. 

And yes, I actually have a stack of 3 1/2" floppies and I used to have a few 5 1/4" floppies. But unfortunately my beloved "B" drive and subsequently all my text-and-image-based games went out the door with the 386 when we chunked it. 

I used to have a dot-matrix printer. According to a recent article I found on MSN.com (from one of the major electronic news publications, but I cannot remember which), Office Depot still stocks dot-matrix printers. Interesting.

I guess the reason I know all about these things is because I got my hands on our old 486SX2 when I was a kid. So thus, I'm 19, and know quite a bit about outdated technology. I even installed a SoundBlaster AWE32 in that computer in a 16-bit ISA slot.

One of the more intriguing things that happened to that computer was during an upgrade to Windows 95 using the floppy disk version (and yes, that was quite a few floppy disks). Anyway, the installation had gotten corrupted; and since I had no copy of 3.1, I really wasn't sure what I would do. Anyway, I restarted, and oddly enough, it installed all the core components of 95 (drivers and all) but only about half of the graphical elements. Therefore, I had window title bars lined up in the program manager, and double-clicking them would bring up the folder. You could actually go to the file manager and surf the non-existent start menu. I don't know why I ever fixed it up with a proper installation of 95... I should have kept it like that for it's uniqueness (I seriously doubt that would EVER happen again if I tried). 

[Scyphi]

Ha-ha, that's funny. Wish I could've seen that.

I remember having to use a floppy disk to transfer files from computer to computer years back. Then the floppy died. Then I got a better computer, and started using a thumb drive. Then Dad (TechPro) networked all of the computers in the house so I could just talk to them directly without needing a thumb drive.

I think I still have that floppy disk lying around somewhere, even though it is useless.

[PyroJockey]

Since we’ve started this stroll down memory lane… before floppy disks I stored programs and data on audio cassettes (UGH!).

On the other hand, just because something is outdated, that does not mean it’s obsolete (i.e. Descent). I’m quite a pack-rat when it comes to acquiring outdated pieces of technology, (usually at a discount or better yet, for FREE) and finding ways to use them.
 
I still have my first laptop, a Tandy TRS-80 model 102, that I bought new in the late ‘80’s (for half price at $500).
It runs at a screaming 2.4 MHz and I maxed it out to a full 32K of RAM. It has a built in 300 baud modem (pulse dialing only) that I used for connecting to CompuServe and has several built in applications, including BASIC to write my own. It has no disk drives, but does have a cassette port.

 
Twenty years later it still works and I still use it as a portable serial communications tester. For that task it has features that no contemporary laptop has including a 20 hour running time on a set of 4 AA batteries. The only thing that doesn’t work correctly anymore is the date, it is not Y2K compliant.

My current big score was 6 SGI workstations that I got for free. They may be outdated, (look, no Windows key) but run Descent 3 just fine.


It was these machines that brought me back to the Descent community. I have 3 of them configured so far with D1, D2 and D3, networked and on line. Now my kids can kick my butt in a LAN game, or help others kick my butt on line.

Life is good.

[Scyphi]

Hey, cool! Your post has a scroll bar!

[PyroJockey]

Yes, it surprised me. Apparently this is to accommodate the width of the images. Once I know the width restriction I’ll resize any images used in future posts.

[The Chief]

The width of the image to show without scroll bars depends on the theme the viewer is using, whether or not the right column is hidden, and monitor resolution.