Not Very Tech Savvy

For someone who works in IT, I am not a very tech savvy individual. I like tech, don’t get me wrong, but when it comes to troubleshooting, or coding, or hacking, or modding, or anything like that which many of my friends and peers do, I will normally look at it for a few minutes, then curl up in the corner in the fetal position and whimper softly.

All right, I might not be THAT bad, but I’m definitely on the lower end of the curve when it comes to many people I know. However, let’s be honest here. I’ve never been around that much tech. When I was growing up, I was doing a lot outdoors, even up through my teen years with the Boy Scouts. When it came to gaming, I did a lot in the Pen and Paper category, with some dabbling in the Collectible Card Game category. I had a grand total of 3 video game systems between when I was born and I was 20: my father’s Magnavox Odyssey 2 which we were rarely allowed to play unless we were VERY good and were supervised, a Nintendo Entertainment System which we got when we were older that came with the gun AND the robot, and a Game Boy.  I didn’t get anything new until I picked up a Playstation from a co-worker in 1997. So, seven years without a game console, without any gaming that didn’t involve pumping quarters into a machine. Since then, however, I have had a work history that is heavy on console gaming, so I’ve had to catch up with the Nintendo 64, Sega Dreamcast, Playstation 2, Nintendo Gamecube, Nintendo DS, Playstation Portable, Microsoft X-Box 360, and the Nintendo Wii, along with a couple Game Boy Color systems. However, I’ll never be labeled as a “hard-core” gamer. I’m not much into online shooters. Massively Multiplayer Online Games aren’t my cup of tea, either. Plus, I have NEVER cracked open a game system to mod it. I like my things to continue working.

Computers are sort of the same way. Most of the computers in our house growing up were my father’s, which was to be used for work. We really didn’t do much on them except type up the occasional paper on them. Even as the computers got better, and were able to play games like Ultima or Doom, we didn’t clutter the hard drive up much. Additionally, since my parents lived, and still live, out in the boonies, and almost every call they made was long distance, connecting to the internet was out of the question without a STEEP phone bill. Because of this, I didn’t get much hands-on computer experience until my freshman year of college in 1995.

College gave me my first taste of the Internet and Social Networking, in this case in the form of Bulletin Board Systems. ISCA and Monolith were ones I used to frequent, and it’s also where I started using the tokar_rai, Tokar Rai, or tokarrai handle on the internet.

This is what happens when all user names you wanted were taken, and you decide to use your D&D character’s name. And then you keep using it, for 12 years.

When I left college, then I was without a computer again for quite some time, so I lost many of my contacts until I bought my first computer in 1999. I actually purchased this computer to run Baldur’s Gate, and then I figured out how to get online with it, since I was in an area that I COULD get online.

With this computer, I started figuring out a little bit about how to tear it apart and replace parts and upgrade, mainly replacing the CD-Rom with a CD-Burner and adding more RAM. However, I never really learned much with it in terms of how it actually RUNS.

When I started building websites on Geocities, I started with HTML for Dummies and Notepad. After a while, I moved to Dreamweaver and used that for quite some time. When Geocities went the way of the dodo, I moved over to wordpress.com, then what is currently being rebuilt using software from wordpress.org and here.

However, I do believe my failure lies in my desire just to do something, get something up and done instead of learning precisely how to do it. It’s not that I don’t want to learn, it’s that I’m impatient. However, this bites me in the bum a bit, since when something comes down, I can’t get it to come back up. This is what stung me on my Geeking blogs last year.

However, I will get better, I will learn from my mistakes, and I will get everything back up. Savviness or not, things will run again.

Just don’t ask me how I did it.