About
Mission (About This Website)
The Technical Geekery is a collection of ideas about our relationship with technology and how we can improve our lives with it. To me, technology is about:
EFFICIENCY has always been an interest of mine. I firmly believe that attempting to use all of one’s time in the most “efficient” manner possible is not intelligent (for instance, there is real value in sitting on a bus “doing nothing”: using the time for something else isn’t always bad, but resting and thinking can be one of the best uses of your time). However, I also believe that one should not spend more time than necessary or useful on tasks. For instance, I’m a big stickler for using keyboard shortcuts: there is no value whatsoever in choosing “Edit -> Copy” from a menu every time you need to copy something rather than pressing Ctrl-C and losing yourself several seconds.
SECURITY / SAFETY (Security) while computing is something I’ve always been interested in. When I was about four years old, I discovered the “set password” function in Microsoft Word and was unreasonably excited about it (I was protecting gibberish text that I typed by mashing the keyboard with those passwords). These days, I’m a big advocate for using good passwords, two-factor authentication, and being on the lookout for phishing attempts, even if I don’t feel the need to encrypt everything I possibly can.
COOL SOFTWARE / TECHNOLOGY (Cool Stuff) is what I live on on the computer, being the geek that I am. The stuff that I find the most useful or that has changed the way I work or my life the most (hopefully) makes its way onto this site.
RECORD / INFORMATION-KEEPING (Records) is something I am somewhat obsessed with. I have tried all sorts of methods for wrangling my thoughts, ideas, to-do items, appointments, journal entries, and everything else you can think of. In the process, I’ve had some interesting revelations—and found some methods that work really, really well for me.
BALANCING TECHNOLOGY (Balance) is about when you should not use high-tech methods. It’s about when I shut down my computer and write in a notebook or stop using the fancy software I started using some time ago because it just wasn’t useful enough. In a world increasingly dominated by technology, I feel thinking about this is just as important as thinking about the ways to use more technology to improve our lives.
CONTROLLING YOURSELF (Yourself), while it may sound like it belongs on a therapy website, is about the ultimate in low-tech methods, using only your brain and body. In an odd way, however, this is also the ultimate in high technology: if you can calculate in your head, you’ve transcended the need for even the best calculator you can imagine. Of course, there are also times when the costs exceed the benefits, so it’s about those times as well.
CREATIONS / UNIQUELY ME (Creations) covers things like board games, funky poems, and recordings and things I wrote when I was younger. This has only an indirect relationship to the rest of the website, but it’s one way that I make my website mine, and I post things that I hope other people will enjoy.
OTHER (More) includes things that I wrote before having a clear purpose for my website (and don’t want to delete), as well as anything else that I want to publish somewhere but doesn’t really fit. Proceed into disorganization at your own risk.
(The bolded parentheticals are the abbreviated names I've adopted for the menu bar.)