another blog? what? but, there's a good reason for this, and it's conceptually reasonable, as well.
i've never been an early adopter of new technology, but rather the type that waits until the bugs are worked out, and looks for a fully realized product that can actually do something i actually need. i don't have the interest in wasting money on toys or gadgets with little clear functionality; i want something that works and something that is going to last for a long time. it took me some time to articulate this as that i approach a product for it's use value, but i always i did, even as a young child. so, i wasn't ever the kid with the newest cell phone; i was the kid that claimed i'd never get a cell phone, ever, because it's business normative and bourgeois.
"just send me an email or a message over icq or something."
i eventually relented in early 2007 when i moved into a new apartment, but it was out of functionality - it cost less than a landline. so, i got a shiny new flip phone from rogers. i still have this phone, but i stopped paying for it in 2010. i might have made 100 calls on it, total. there was little thought put into models or functions. i just picked the cheapest one in the list because i needed a phone, right? we all need phones....at least sometimes....
i haven't had a working phone since i stopped making payments on that one in 2010.
it was around this time that i picked up my first mp3 player with a best buy gift card from extended family. i got a nice ipod mini, right? nope - i didn't want itunes on my system, to deal with drm or to have issues with proprietary file formats. geeky issues, to be sure, but determined solely from a distance, with careful study and not by trial and error or early adoption. i opted for a flash-based sandisk mini, instead; no software, no drm. still works. sadly, the sennheisers i got for them do not. by mid-2007, this was a mature market that had already discarded it's kinks, so i knew exactly what i wanted and exactly what i didn't. so, i don't have pictures of myself holding an ipod in 2002, but how many of those devices are still useful? i still use my mp3 player on a monthly basis, because it still works exactly as it did when i bought it.
it would have also been in 2007 that i finally ended up with a laptop, but there wasn't any intent around it. my dad had an old laptop that he was on the brink of trashing; i took it to keep it out of the landfill. this was a compaq evo from the late 90s, and i still use it on a daily basis as a youtube controller when i eat, although i don't bother to send it out through s-video to a crt television, like i did at first. this old compaq evo has a custom nlited version of windows xp on it. youtube will eventually stop serving to it; for now, it works fine, although i have to run chrome to get a lightweight enough browser with html5. maybe there's a better fork out there, or maybe it's long tern future is with linux. this machine has never been used as a mobile device; it doesn't even have a wireless card in it.
i briefly did a network admin job in mid-2010 that lent me out a nice newish laptop, and while i didn't care much for the job, losing the laptop was somewhat of a downer. so, i took my last pay check with them and used it to get a refurbished compaq with vista on it. this machine was a few years old, even at the time. it cost me around $300, with shipping, which i considered a steal. i just wanted something i could take out of the house; i figured 2010 was about time. while the machine is pretty beaten up at this point - the lamp on the screen has burned out, the hard drive has crashed and the sd reader is unresponsive - i am actually still using it as my general gateway. again: i wanted something cheap that would last, not something shiny and new, and it's worked out pretty well, i think.
life moved in a weird direction for me in late 2011, and that laptop become my primary computer, as i found myself traveling through some weird experiences and living in some unusual circumstances. so, i all of a sudden found myself typing in coffee shops and libraries, something i'd never done before. i also found myself going to more concerts, and traveling further to get to them.
but, when i moved to windsor in 2013, i no longer found myself in need of a mobile option. further, my main laptop became kind of glued to my bed; i didn't really want to take it out of the house. slowly, my laptops fell apart, with shorts in boards and burnt lamps, to the point that i no longer had a mobile option. this became a serious problem in late 2017, when i found myself unable to contact my isp from home (after a move), and without a device to contact them with remotely.
i bought a smart phone in the summer of 2017, but i hadn't used it much and hadn't bought a sim card. it's a waterproof chinese phone with 4 gb of ram - again, i did the research from a distance, knowing what i want and don't want. it was around $130, and i expect it to be the only phone in the house for the next 20 years. but, i found the thing to be frustrating to type on, and i didn't like exposing my passwords in a tim horton's, regardless of the time of day. it worked in a pinch, but it wasn't acceptable in the long run.
i had to move again in the fall of 2018 and this time i decided i needed a netbook. so, i picked up an out-of-service ibm chromebook for $200 at the factory direct. again: cheap because it's at the end of it's life cycle, but a high quality machine that will last for years. the purpose of this netbook is solely for remote use, so i shouldn't be using any of my accounts on it - and i especially shouldn't be using my gmail password. this is somewhat of a contradiction, as the chromebook is of course designed for precisely that reason. i initially thought that just signing is as guest would be good enough, but it cuts the functionality of the machine down; you can't even install ad block. what to do?
i decided that the answer would be to create a fake account and use it solely for connecting remotely with. but, then, how do i post to my blogs, if i'm using a fake account? isn't that the whole point?
i tried the post-over-email option, and while you can expect me to post that way sometimes, the limitations were too great for it to be feasible; i decided i'd need to set up a fake blog, instead, for explicitly posting to remotely. and, here it is.
but, then, why not extend it backwards? i've been on some adventures, right?
indeed, i have, and i'm going to give myself a little bit of artistic license on this. certainly, moving forwards, this blog will only contain entries that are written remotely - from a place that is not my bedroom. further, i have plenty of posts post-2010 that were written in places that were not my bedroom, so i have material to plug in. but, what about adventures before 2010, as i run through the alter-reality? and, what about adventures i've told once i've returned home? do those count? i think they should.
so, some of this will be narrated in real time from some coffee shop somewhere, while some of it will be told from my memory, and may only be somewhat reliable. i think it is nonetheless interesting to isolate this into it's own place, even outside of it's clear functionality.
so, here we have the travel blog, which will be built up the same way as the others, starting in mid-2013 and building in parallel through the alter-reality.