The Ones I Can Type

We’re going to switch gears a little bit and go back to the late 1990s and early 2000s for an entry. I do not think that anyone has exactly my history on the internet, but it will resonate with you that are the same age. I am 47, which is just the right age to have seen the change from analog to digital. My first technological device was a beeper, and I did not have a cell phone until college.

With a beeper, the best you could do early on was type in your telephone number. You couldn’t even add your name until alphanumeric pagers came out, and those were mostly used in business. For instance, I had one at University of Houston, but I carried a Nokia personal phone.

My first Finnish present was from my dad.

In 2000, I found out that you could buy Red Hat at Best Buy because you could download it for free, but if you bought it you got access to all kinds of support and I was a new learner to Linux. So, I tell my mother this and off she goes to the store. This conversation ensues:

Mom: I need a copy of Red Hat for my daughter for Christmas.
Clerk: Wow, that’s a big operating system for a little girl.
Mom: She’s 20.

My second Finnish present was from my mom.

Through my phone and Linux, I learned what’s called “Netiquette.” This is etiquette for the Internet, and though I have lapsed and been a jackass many times, I’ve somewhat returned to being even keel. But it’s important to talk about because the rules are changing from “when I was a kid.” For instance, when I need a heart emoji, I just type it. < 3 without the space renders as a red heart. Now, that means I’m actively interested in people. I have a few people in my life who I hope don’t “figure out the code,” because I didn’t know it. Awkward. It’s just good that my friends are the same age as me so it’s unlikely that any of them are going to think I’m interested because they type red hearts, too.

I am confused by young people, but I am learning…. except about that. Typing is easy on my computer. I don’t get the addiction to your phone, because typing on it is so inefficient for me. I hated typing on the screen from the moment that “feature” was introduced, and wish I had an old Blackberry with a thumb board. That’s the last time I really thought I had the hang of texting. Lanagan Media Group will tell you that I am also terrible with voice dictation because I don’t see the errors as fast as they do. Nothing is bad, it’s just word salad when Siri is driving the bus. Google Assistant and Alexa aren’t better, but I have had the most luck with Alexa. It’s just too bad that Amazon tried making a phone and it flopped.

Interestingly enough, I have the most luck typing with Amazon, too, because my Kindle is the perfect width. I have no idea how one would approach this, but my perfect machine would be Amazon’s 7-in tablet with the hardware specs on the Max. That’s because I have a Max and a basic Kindle, and typing on the basic Kindle is better than my phone and tablet combined. And yes, I do put emojis in my notes. Tom Clancy has gotten a lot of them lately, because I’m knee-deep in “The Hunt for Red October.” The latest thing that got a smile was “a non-descript building, government layer cake.”

America, we in danger, girl. The Soviets can indeed reach the president from the ocean because Washington is a mere 100 miles from the Atlantic. I assure you that President Trump has been given this information, but Putin would never lie to him, right? They’re friends. So, this book I’m reading has emojis on every note, most of them surprise except that Clancy is so funny that he catches me off guard. He died in 2013, but if he were alive I would certainly have sent him lots of hearts by now….. JUST NOT RED.

So know that all things being equal, I would give up everything except the basic Kindle with e-ink and my laptop. Of course I would need a phone, but many years ago Dana and I had Cricket dumb phones and it was great. No Facebook notifications unless I was sitting at my computer. The Apple trappings are beautiful gifts from my family, but if I hadn’t gotten them, I would not be hurting. I would be strategizing the same way I do now. “How do I fit the technology to work with me rather than having to work with it?”

For instance, I bought a new laptop because I haven’t had one in 10 years, plus an optical drive so I can buy movies at Goodwill and rip them to my computer. Streaming is great until days like yesterday, when a thunderstorm knocked out the power in the middle of my movie (Wizard of Oz…. I jumped 10 feet). I own three movies total:

• Argo
• Mrs. Miniver (great recommendation from my grandfather, Mayo Lanagan)
• The Wizard of Oz

The rest, I pay for all the streaming services and got a DRM notice for downloading Wicked, anyway. So, now I joke that every time I even think about downloading a movie, Tony Mendez cries. I deleted it before I even watched it. Why did I download it in the first place? To see if I’d get a DRM notice. I wanted to see if they could still track you while you were using a VPN, and they can.

Whomever they are.

I finished “whomever they are” and a pop-up came up on my laptop to activate the VPN offer. That’s not creepy at all. I pay for IPVanish, so they might want to know I got one using their service. That was an emoji day where all of them looked like this:

😦

Again, searching through menus looking for the right picture to express my words is a lost cause. It’s why I use Linux, frankly. I get on the console and type one command and the app I want pops up. It’s not dissimilar to the Windows search feature where it narrows down apps as you type, but it’s not as clean. And in fact, I’ve tried using a Windows terminal as well, but there is a flaw in my plan. I have forgotten DOS and mix up commands all the time. My favorite feature in Windows Powershell is that so many people have mistaken ls for DIR that you can use ls in Windows now.

I haven’t installed WSL on my laptop, because there is no unified memory manager. You just have to see how much RAM Windows is using, see how much RAM Linux is using, and do the math. I don’t do math. I bought a separate Linux box instead…. technically the third Finnish present being to myself. I bought a Raspberry Pi for the same reason you’d buy an Android tablet and an iPad…. you have software in both universes because it’s been long enough that you’ve used both. WSL gets in the way when you’re gaming, so I’d want to absolutely max out my computer with RAM before trying to use them concurrently.

I don’t know why I said “gaming.” I’ve played Skyrim for three minutes. I made it out of Helgen alive and exited the program because I just needed to ensure that it would run. It does, and very well. To be fair, I have not installed the 500 mods I normally have, but a 4GB discrete graphics card on a laptop will handle most of them. When I need a few mindless minutes, I generally play on my iPad.

And in fact, my iPad is toast. I either need to get a new to me one, or get this one fixed. It will not charge at all. This is problematic, because now I need two older iPads (I want a headphone jack). Aaron Nemoyer, my graphic designer, deserves to have my iPad more than I do. So, I’ve been shopping for months to get the best deal for both of us and it hasn’t happened yet. What I can do is pack up my old Windows system and mail it to him if it’s not too expensive, because I’ve been very impressed at how he does all of our graphics on a smart phone that also has issues.

My favorite is classified. 😉

He’s going to think I meant something dirty, but it’s dear.

He gets the red hearts for real. Everyone else, I meant yellow until further notice.

But hearts mean the most coming from my friend Michael, who has been a solid source of support while also kicking my ass as a writer. I had to grow into Michael, because he’s not Supergrover and he’s not Janie. He’s Tommy Lee Jones. I imagine that I have told him the equivalent of “I want to go to unicycle college” many times. I have plans with him and I hope he’s down- to transfer from blogging to dialoguing. I’m trying to learn to write scripts, but I don’t have a knack for the way people speak all the time. But I did figure out something.

I told him that Tom Clancy drove me crazy because he sounded like an outsider to the Beltway using articles. You do not work at The State Department, you are “at State, at DoD, at CIA, etc.” So, when Jack says “the CIA” it seriously bothered me at first. Michael said that articles seem to have been dropped around the time The West Wing came out, because when he lived in NoVA as a kid, articles were still in place. I said, “so Washington was changed by neurodivergent patois.” Sorkin hasn’t been officially diagnosed as AuDHD, but he does have ADHD.

Pattern recognition tells me that we are more alike than different, but I’m not an expert. I just look at the lines on people’s faces. ADHD and Autism create different wrinkles due to social masking. That’s why I am not very good at telling if children are neurodivergent or neurotypical, but it gets easier when people are 40 and above.

I told one of my friends that I thought her daughter was autistic, and she thought I did it from a picture alone. No, it’s that she sent me a picture of her daughter when she was 17, and I saw a picture of her currently, which is much older than that. The difference was striking and the wrinkles for autism were beginning to emerge, but that wasn’t the only factor. You don’t go off pictures alone (though I can guess with 75-80% accuracy like all autistic people). My favorite example is this conversation:

Rando on Twitter: So, Neil…. how long have you been diagnosed as autistic?
Neil Gaiman: About seven years.

Neurotypical people are shocked we can do this. For neurodivergents, that’s just Tuesday.

Maybe neurotypical people would have taken it better if he’d put a heart on it.