I, Retropunk

Filed under: Musings, Typecast — olivander April 25, 2008 @ 8:53 am

Typecast 4/24/2008

8 Comments »

  1. “Fedora-wearing”

    Oh dear. Guilty as charged.

    Comment by mpclemens — April 25, 2008 @ 7:53 pm

  2. You need to check out The Fedora Chronicles Electric Speakeasy.

    Comment by olivander — April 28, 2008 @ 11:59 pm

  3. I fit this description but kind of by accident, I was an english major kind of person who somehow ended up on the periphery of the technical world as a tech writer.

    I am not so much burned out on technology per se as the technically-dominated way people communicate now. I of course love internets and blogs and e-mail, and am even guilty of sending the occasional text message, but the new paradigm of real-time living online with social networking just makes me tired. So much is getting lost in this obsession with screen time.

    Comment by cheryl — April 29, 2008 @ 12:02 am

  4. It makes sense, since a main goal of the makers of electronic gadgets is to make them as intuitive as possible, and to use a mechanism you will at least see the complexity if not be forced to understand it. With electronic gadgets, you are invited to pretend it’s all magic and you don’t have to worry about it (which makes it even more infuriating when something goes wrong).

    I’ve also noticed a correlation between technical/technological aptitude and a liking for fantasy fiction and gaming, etc. I’d like to make a survey of SCA’ers and see how many of them are into computers or other technologies. At least a whole lot of them post photos on Flickr! I suspect a survey like that would bear your observation out.

    Comment by CStanford — April 29, 2008 @ 11:51 am

  5. Cheryl, I have to say that I for one welcome our social networking overlords. I’m one who constantly craves new experiences and viewpoints, and through these social networking sites, I’ve met an amazing variety of people from across the globe who have given me insights into cultures I otherwise would never have gotten.

    Also, I tend to be not very good at socializing and making new friends. I’ve always been a bit of an oddball, and wherever I’ve lived there have been very few people who have “clicked” with me. But through the Internet, I’ve made many friends who share my oddball interests that I doubt I ever would have encountered offline.

    Like all things, social networking is good unless it’s taken to an extreme. I’ve known people who never leave the house–who are in fact practically agoraphobic–and are uninterested in anything that can’t take place inside their computer.

    CStanford, funny you should mention SCA. Though she’s not a technical person, per se (unless you count that she uses Photoshop at work), she’s a former SCA member and Civil War re-enactor. And I used to work with a dba who was heavily into SCA, to the point where he spent months handcrafting a chain-mail shirt for himself. I knew another person who designs computer chips who was SCA as well.

    Comment by olivander — May 1, 2008 @ 10:57 pm

  6. Hrm. But in what percentage are we the tech-curmudgeons? As a programmer, I get funny looks from all in the IT department for my cell-phone resistance and acoustic-couple modem by the side of my desk.

    OTOH, another colleague is starting up a business placing old videogames into… places (as a way of providing a tax-deduction for his hobby of buying old videogames, primarily. But who knows where something like that leads).

    I love my old typewriters, and I miss the dial tone. Heck, I miss the dial. My 2 bakelite phones have naught to plug into now. Maybe I should look into Skype, or something….

    —

    On a related note, how are you planning on handling the inability-to-textually-search these type-casts?

    That’s a pain. Will you OCR them and drop it in invisibly, somehow?

    I do like the semantic search aspects of the web. find this, find that. Everything is miscellaneous, and infinitively abstrusely organizable.

    Comment by OtherMichael — May 2, 2008 @ 11:02 am

  7. I’ve thought of OCRing the text and maybe dropping it in as a comment, or as alternate image text (not sure what the word limit is there). OTOH, I’m not sure I want to be searchable. I’ve noticed since I began typecasting that I get hit much less by the spambots. I suspect it’s because I have Google periodically spider-crawling my site and their cached text is what the spambots target.

    Comment by Oliver — May 2, 2008 @ 3:05 pm

  8. I guess it depends on how you look at things. I am a tech (tech support, although I’ve worked in IT before and was once a Help Desk supervisor). So it doesn’t surprise me to find the anti-geeks here. On the other hand, I also find them out in the fiber world, where I’ve spent a lot of my time the last few years. Lots of geeks also like things like spinning their own yarn or knitting. I love my Palm but hate cell phones. I’ve adopted the Amish method of dealing with technology the last couple of years. I don’t have internet at home. (Hey, I don’t have electricity or a phone there either!) I live out of cell phone range. And that seems to free up a lot of time to do other things. When I’m at work, I can still immerse myself in the web and multi-task.I think that we do better as humans, if we have that time away from all things geekish.

    Comment by terip — May 22, 2008 @ 5:21 pm

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