Thread: R U HiTech or LowTech?

One foot planted firmly in both -- low & high tech.

High tech knowledge/experience is increasingly important and necessary to survive in today's "civilization." Low tech is for everything else; it seems, though, that everyday I look for more ways to go "low tech."

i guess for short, you can call me frog. i never really thought about it, but someone called me that before.

this poll is proving to be pretty interesting to me. well, not the poll, actually, but the responses.

i mean, i really enjoy reading about other people's motivations, like quality, skill, nostalgia, the experience of shaving.

i was pretty sure most people here would be somewhat paradoxical, just because this is a webforum, but i'm surprised and think it's pretty cool that many people aren't geeky at all (i don't mean geek to be bad, so no offense--if there's a better word, i'll use it).

i'm pretty impressed by many who are more tech than i am. i have a tablet pc to which i'm attached at the hip. i'm trying to migrate over to linux, using puppylinux, but have to figure out how to load the wacom drivers. i have one half broken sony clie pda (wifi). i love it. it still proves to be useful even though my computer, because it's a tablet, took over a lot of the pda duties.

gnomore -- liquid-cooled computing!?! that's pretty awesome. i don't even know what it could do for me, but i want it.

but like FiReSTaRT, it's pretty cool to be able to do without it. i always ran away from tech stuff until i went to africa. doing without so much convenience made me appreciate what's available here. that got me into computing. i just wish i had learned more back when i had time to learn more.

but straight razor shaving seems so real to me. that's why i like it. so much, even typing in this forum, can be done without full concentration, but when i shave, it's imperative that i shut out everything and devote one hundred percent of my mind to the task. that's why i love it.

and that's why the distinction between hi tech and low tech seems to be a false dichotomy.

I am facinated by hi tech people. I'm lucky to know how to tie my shoes. I'm good making and building things, and I will buy any new tool on the market. I love gadgets. Someone could probably lead me by the hand to do some of the high tech stuff, but it seems my brain is full these days. To top it off, when I blew my nose yesterday, I think the part of my brain that did long division went with it...


Heck, It took me about a year just to figure out how to take pics with a digital camera, process them in an editing program and figure out how Microsoft Front Page worked so I could make my CD book and my web site.

I'd like to have a better web site, but that's the best I can do for now. Wish there was a forum somewhere for web site stupidos like me.

I guess I'm a little of both. I'm very low tech in my outlook, the way I'd like to live my life and in the things that truly matter to me. Yes, my job is high tech (I'm a programmer at eBay) but when I'm home I'm building planter boxes, planting vegetables and flowers, brewing beer (in coolers even though there's high tech fancy gadgets I could use instead), cooking from scratch, laying tile and flooring, etc. I program in a dozen languages, know computers like the back of my hand, but those things don't matter nearly as much to me as the satisfaction I get out of learning a new skill with my hands.

My fiancee keeps bees and I used to keep chickens and goats (will again when we get a bigger place). We can our own vegetables and fruit from our garden and fruit trees. Yeah we could run down to the store and buy them instead of doing the work but we get a lot of satisfaction out of doing it ourselves. In general we try to keep a low footprint.

Yes, we love our high tech gadgets like the big screen TV, the DVD player, the movie jukebox I built out of an old scrap computer, the PS2 with the guitar hero game, but honestly I'd happily live without just about any of them. The things that matter to me are my family and friends... my loved ones, and the things that I can touch with my hands, smell with my nose, taste, hear or see. Many's the winter night we've spent in front of the pellet stove with the house quiet, the dogs asleep at our feet while we worked on a jigsaw puzzle and talked quietly or not at all. You get the idea.

I like to be able to do as many things as I can by hand, not necessarily because it's better (sometimes it is but not always) but because I believe in knowing where the stuff I use comes from and how I fit in to the whole cycle of life thing.

-- Gary F.

Dang Gary...


That was cool...