Hi Steemit,
My name’s Chris Johnson, and I’ve been the in-house and outsourced IT guy for small to medium businesses for over 20 years. I’ve also been doing the social media thing since well before it was called that. I was a community leader at GeoCities. I've had a Blogspot blog and a LiveJournal blog. A MySpace account. Facebook since before it was technically available in Australia. I was using hashtags before they were cool. Flickr before it was bought by Yahoo.
And yet, I find myself to be a bit of a digital refugee. I’m slowly removing myself from the “big 5”; Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. And Twitter. I closed down my Twitter accounts last year and haven’t missed them a bit. Facebook is harder, but I have at least unwound all the app permissions and 3rd party sites that use Facebook to log me in and I’m slowly getting email addresses for all my friends and family. Fortunately, I never got deeply embedded in Amazon. Closing my Twitch account was easy, and I didn't buy into Prime because it’s not been available long in Australia. (Is it even now?). I’m slowly moving my email from Gmail back to my ISP’s basic account with a backed-up archive on my home network. I have a couple of Android devices that still work, but I’m unlikely to replace them when they finally give up. YouTube gives me the sh!ts, and that’s part of the reason why I’ve set up a Steemit account; for D.Tube. Microsoft will probably be impossible at a personal level and is impossible in a work context, but I can avoid Office 365, Skype and eventually transition out of LinkedIn. I use Linux a lot, but will probably retain a few old Windows machines for some stuff. I don’t actually mind Windows, just everything else Microsoft does. And Apple, well, I suspect that my wife will always want an iPhone, so I’m stuck there, but my last working Mac computer still running OSX is over 10 years old (,and one running Ubuntu Mate is around 13 years old). Our newest iPad is the iPad 3 that pre-dates the lightning connector. I still play Ticket to Ride on my iPad, so Apple and Microsoft will probably hang around forever, but not iCloud and Office 365 (I’d rather use LibreOffice anyway).
Meanwhile, I ran a podcast in 2015/2016 relating to the Australian startup scene. After my time commitments changed, I started doing a morning live stream to YouTube. Initially, it’s these old archives that I’m moving to D.Tube. If, by the time I’ve finished loading the files and filling in the metadata, I’m still interested in producing more content then I’m going to try to find room in my life to record some new stuff. I have a blog at krisjohn.net, and I’ve been using dictation software to write the first draft of most of that, but I think it’s time to get back into more than just words on a screen.
It’s the editing time that I struggle to find. It may not look like it, but this post took days. Written in multiple locations and eventually run through WhiteSmoke for one last grammar check. Audio and video editing I don’t do much faster. I know I need to reduce the number of passes I do, but it’s hard not to want to listen to something a couple of times after the last edits just to be sure.
My politics are left-leaning, which my blog posts will make obvious. I’ll cross-post some of my old stuff here, depending on what I’m able to dig up that I still agree with. Employment has been rough, not only in respect to periods of unemployment, but each time I go back and examine how I’ve been treated by employers it’s not looked great. I still remember a lot of the process of transitioning from education to the work force, which I think a lot of people forget, or politicians never really did the same as most people. I remember the bad advice, and my bad choices that the system was happy to enable. I’ve had a taste of the entrepreneurial scene, and I’ve worked in a dysfunctional corporation. My wife and I are exactly placed in that middle class that’s being squashed into low income by increasing income inequality. We’re the ones shouldering a tax burden that increasingly we can’t afford while massive multinational corporations pay a fraction of the tax rate we do. You’ll see posts along those lines, as well as critiques of the state of our educational system, in the posts I’ll occasionally make.
You’ll also see stuff to do with health, diet and fitness as we struggle to maintain a work/life balance. Probiotic stuff will feature, as will the logistics of preparing as much fresh food as possible.
