My Own Devices

 

Today's post is of the genre of documenting daily minutiae for posterity.  Which is about what tech I and my family use.  Amongst the five of us, we have:

 

 

1. Three smart phones (me, Amy, Jada) and one flip phone (Aaron), that are anywhere from a year to three years old;

2. A four-year-old iPad 2 (Amy's, but Asher uses it the most) and a two-year-old iPod (Aaron);

3. Three laptops for the three kids' schooling, one of which I bought 18 months ago and two of which are District-issued this year; and

4. A home desktop that is about seven years old that sits on Amy's desk (but I use it too).

As for me, I use:

1. A work-issued laptop that sits at my desk at work and that is about 2-3 years old.

2. A work-issued laptop that sits at my desk at home and that is about 6-7 years old.

3. A Chromebook that I had bought for Jada two years ago, that got handed down to Asher at the beginning of the school year and that then got handed down to me when the headphone jack broke and he had to get a replacement from school.  This tiny thing I carry with me back and forth from work and home.

While we're on the subject of my three laptops, the topic of "how many tabs do you have open" comes up now and again, so I'll bite:

1. On my work laptop, I usually only have LinkedIn open, and while it's because I use it a fair amount it's also just to keep my browser open so I don't have to open it when I need to go somewhere.  Meaning that I usually close a tab down after I've used it, and I don't like to leave a tab open just to have it there to read later.

2. On my home laptop, I usually have Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter open, and same thing as with my work laptop in terms of closing anything that I've opened after I'm done and being very judicious with leaving a tab open for a long time.  (One exception is if I'm online shopping and I want to keep the page open while I have items in my cart.)

3. On the Chromebook, I usually have Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter open, although more often than not the entire work day can go by without me looking at any of those pages.  I also have Slack open for when I want to correspond with co-workers.  I also usually have YouTube open to play some sort of background music (classical, instrumental worship).  

I share all this so that my future self can read it, although maybe contemporary readers will benefit from these descriptions (I suspect there are more "you're weird" responses than "same here" responses).  I also wonder if, in a few decades, the methods and terms that make up my tech life will be quaintly humorous to imagine.