Family, Media, Technology

Too Much Tech

41 Comments

I realized the other day that between the two of us,  Husband and I have five computers we use on a regular basis. I think that is kind of excessive.

We have a desktop computer at home that we both use.  I have a personal laptop that I use for my regulatory board work,  when I travel , or I need one when I am out and about.  (I  also use it at work to live stream MPR  since  I am not allowed to use my work computer for that.)   I have a  work laptop supplied by the State  that I use in my office and that I  can also  bring home to  access my work email as well as the Electronic Health Care Record system. That means I can do paperwork anywhere.  I used it at home yesterday just for that purpose when I was ill and at home with a fever and a cough. Husband uses a personal laptop for his private practice,  as well as a work laptop supplied by the Tribe for his work on the Rez.

I suppose that is how it goes when one has work and personal business to take care of, but it seems like too much tech in our lives. Thank goodness we don’t have work cell phones. It is hard enough to keep track of the two we have.

When have you had too much of a good thing?  How many computers in your life?

41 thoughts on “Too Much Tech”

  1. If you count our iPads, we have five computers here at home. Besides the two iPads, Robin has a laptop in her office space that she uses for her work. I have two computers, one old and one older in my office. Those computers were the basis of my work, which was data heavy in the form of graphics. That work has essentially gone away and so I haven’t upgraded. The oldest of the two computers is a workhorse that I replaced the hard drive on when the original failed. I keep it mainly to control a slide scanner and a printer and so I don’t use it much. Because of its age, the processor won’t allow me to upgrade the operating system to anything near the current standard, so I don’t use it for the internet. My main desktop computer, while still old by computer standards, is at least still capable of being reasonably current in terms of its OS. At one time, I had four auxiliary hard drives, two printers and a flatbed scanner attached to it. I have since consolidated that to two auxiliary hard drives.

    Whether or not it’s a good thing is an open question, but what I have too much of is data that needs sorting. I still keep archives, in one form or another, for over twenty years of freelance work. There was a time when my archives were more complete than those of my clients and they relied on me when they wanted to reprint something. That’s part of the reason I had four hard drives. The prospect of going through all that stuff, much of it nested in folders, and clearing out the inessential is daunting.

    On top of that I have tons of genealogical stuff I’ve never been able to get myself to organize and I’ve recently begun the project of cataloging all my books. Too much data.

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    1. One of my auxiliary hard drives is just for photos. The ease of taking and saving photos is the epitome of too much of a good thing. The idea of sorting and culling all those images is overwhelming.

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      1. That is true for me as well. I take pictures of lots of stuff for the moment(where I park my car in a ramp, price tags of products I am researching, receipts, and on and on), then I do not delete them due to, well, I don’t know. I just don’t. So then I end up with all these useless images.

        I have found that time on an airplane is a great time to cull these.

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  2. I bought too much glaceed orange peel and lemon peel for my Christmas baking this year. There is only so much Stollen and julekage that a person can bake and eat. I made 8 loaves of stollen and 2 julekage thus far, and I still have lots of peel left. I will need to get creative.

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  3. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    The number of tech devices is truly overwhelming at times. When I think about everyone in my small town trekking to the local college to see the first computer in town, it is surreal. Then I compare that to the daily sight of devices everywhere, I feel a sense of time whooshing by, and tech whiplash.

    Last night our granddaughter came over for supper (taco salad). She is 19, almost 20 years old. She wants to move to Iowa, so we turned on the Iowa Caucus coverage to get a glimpse of Iowa culture. We found No Results of course. We laughed at the poor, stranded journalists with lots of on-camera time and no data to report. They were blabbing away about nothing. Too much air-time, not enough news. I rarely watch cable news channels, anyway, but I was thinking that this was an example of way too much coverage of a bunch Iowans making up their minds about candidates in the glare of lights and cameras.

    Sometimes cable news makes their own problems, which is why I rarely watch them.

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        1. what kind of job is there in iowa that’s not available in mn?
          housing is a tough nut in minneapolis but can be done with a plan
          university of iowa is good for writers and beer drinkers , what else?

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  4. I live in two rooms, my bedroom and living room. Each has a computer with email and an internet connection. That means my good friend Renee and my good friend Barbara are close to me at all times. As are all my other good friends.

    That, undeniably, is a Good Thing.

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  5. Morning-
    Computer at work, plus work iPad that only use occasionally. Lightboard is a computer too I guess.
    Home is the big Mac we use for photo editing and random stuff. I have an older PC that’s only for financial bookwork. And I have the MacBook I use 90% of the time. I have an iPad at home too but it seems the battery is dead whenever I want to use it. It too is really just for show things; it has light board remote, sound board remote, Other theater related things. And of course my phone too.
    That counts up to 7 or 8 depending how you count them…
    Technology is great when it works!

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  6. i had a new one enter my life yesterday.
    last week i had a heart thing pop up again and my daughter lent me her iwatch to keep track of my i fo and some eye opening data has got me maybe avoiding some heavy duty medical this week.
    in order to confirm it i needed to get the more recent version with all the bells and whistles that provide analytics as good as he hospital has.

    i have a real computer in my car that i brought home to plug in as a every day mule but so far i havnt had an occasion when inwould use it if it were ther somit remains in my trunk.
    i had my laptop stolen out of my car a month ago and rather than get another i am using my wifes spare. she had hers go down 2 years ago and we bought her another. mine went down 3 weeks later andbecause of money issues then i got a lesser model and saved $100 bucks. so now that mine was stolen i am getting an upgrade to the one she never used because the school she works at gave her a really nice touch screen fancy pants model she uses all day. she cant do personal on it but she must get personal done on the phone so its no big deal. so i have laptop ipad phine and now watch, she has phone and school laptop. so 6
    if cloud drives were to count i have a couple of those with icloud and dropbox to be able to share with people i work with that its easier to acces from the cloud than sending images
    a couple of multi tig hard drives full of stuff and sorting is my retirement project so still a couple years away. i amy add an item or two before i get to it though

    too much other stuff… ha come on out to my warehouse.
    im ready to clean up but where to start…

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  7. OT – This coming Sunday, February 9th, The Danish American Center is hosting a Valentine’s Day brunch from 9:30 AM to 12:30 PM. Any and all baboons that are fond of æbleskiver are invited.

    Cost for brunch is $11 per adult and $5 for children ages 5-12. Younger children are free. The menu includes æbleskiver, egg bake, ham, juice and coffee. No reservations are required (note that there is limited space for groups). The DAC is located at 3030 W River Pkw., just south of the west end of the Lake Street Bridge.

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  8. Too much of a good thing? Probably magazines – some from memberships to things like AARP, AAA, UU… then the voluntary ones like Big River and Minn. Conservation Volunteer, and we’ve recently subscribed to a news digest called The Week, which might be worth its own post some day.

    Tech: We’ve got the desktop I’m typing on now, and a tablet that was a freebie when Husband signed up for something-or-other. And one flip phone between us. I guess we’re relatively low tech dinosaurs!

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    1. vanity fair esquire mother jones and smith so ian are my current magazines
      i love magazines
      e reading has killed most of them but i still love shines paper
      playboy really had good articles

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  9. Current computers in my life include my MacBook Air laptop, an older iMac desktop that I rarely use, and my latest acquisition, an iPhone 5 that I inherited from our friend Jon when he passed away in September. Husband has a HP chromebook, a tablet of some kind, and a desktop iMac that he uses extensively for photo work. He also has inherited my old MacBook Air, why he wants to keep it I don’t know, and he also has a newer model of the iPhone 5.

    So far I have made exactly two call on my iPhone, and sent maybe a handful of extremely short texts. I receive mostly calls intended for someone else, and repeated texts from Costco’s pharmacy reminding me to pick up medication. I have tried repeatedly to tell them I don’t use Costco’s pharmacy and that they are notifying the wrong number, to no avail.

    I have to admit, I do love my laptop. Don’t know how we managed without computers, but I wish people would be more mindful of what kind of information they are passing around on the internet. So much false information gets passed around as fact by intelligent people who just don’t stop to think before they share. Drives me nuts.

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      1. I know it’s not my laptop, Bill, and it’s also not Facebook. It’s the people who use the internet to spread false information, some deliberately, others just mindlessly passing it on. Twitter, Facebook, and all social platforms are susceptible to this if people don’t stop to think and check on the “facts” they are sharing.

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  10. I’m feeling tech deficient compared to the rest of the baboons. I have a laptop at home, the new one I bought a couple of weeks ago. And I have a computer at work, another laptop but it stays at work, locked in a drawer when I’m not there. YA has a computer as well. But that’s it, no other pads or laptops or desktops or anything else. Unless you count these magnificent phones.

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  11. As to the other question, I am not in Bill’s league, but I am often scooting down rabbit holes following my curiosity. This happens a lot with books. I’ll see some title out and about in the world and think that sounds interesting; I’ll request it from the library but then by the time it comes I forgot why I requested it. Or as happens occasionally I’m just not interested anymore.

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      1. Oh yes. In fact it is already in transit from the library to me. By the way, I finished The 19th Wife. Did you want that back? I can bring it to the next Blevins.

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  12. I rely mostly on a Mac desktop, but I do have a Nook with an Android operating system that runs a lot of apps and functions sort of like a smartphone, as long as I am within range of a WiFi connection. Sadly, I dropped the Nook last weekend and cracked its screen. I haven’t yet figured out what it will take to nurse it back to health.

    I have a lot of old Macs. I’d like to establish my own little Macintosh museum.

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    1. Hans had been saving three really old Macs, too, thinking they’d eventually become collectors’ items. A few months ago he decided to try to sell them. Turns out they were worthless, but he did find a guy to take them.

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  13. Recently I bought myself a little gift. It was terribly self-indulgent. I saw it at the megamall when I was there in December Christmas shopping and thought about it long and hard before spending the money on it. It’s a wireless keyboard called a qwerkywriter, which looks and feels sort of like a manual typewriter. I just adore it.

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        1. If I’m going to provide all the sound effects in my head, rest assured I’m not going to invest in the keyboard.

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      2. It has a little lever like a carriage return on a manual typewriter It would be so neat if it made the little “ting” sound when you employed the lever, but, alas, they didn’t figure out a way to do that. The keys make a soft clacking sound when you type, though.

        The carriage return doesn’t actually function as a return or enter key. What it does is paste a programmed scrap of text of your choosing. Mine is currently set up to paste my address. And yes, you do hear a little “ting” in your head.

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