Tl;dr - Dear god, I can talk a lot about nothing.
Yesterday I posted about a colleague who is completely computer illiterate, and I can't help but respect that in this day and age, living in a hyper-modern Asian city while simultaneously not knowing how to copy-paste, is somehow so wholesome, albeit surely inconvenient in daily life.
I consider myself fairly tech savvy at a casual level; I can type at like 120wmp with 100% accuracy, I'm using my computer daily for work and home, I know all the windows shortcuts, that kinda thing. I'm not tech savvy in the real sense of the word, mind. Anything under the hood just zooms over my head purely because it's simply too dull to look at.
I had my time being fascinated with AI and was one of the first to sign up on the waiting lists, just because I like to keep up, even though none of it is really useful for me other than making awesome generated images for these here blogs.
But there's been other developments out there that have completely slipped by me, and two I discovered this week have just blown my mind. I had no idea how far this technology pushed forward over the years, quietly under the table. Everybody just kinda moved on without really noticing, but since I'm too cheap to update and pay for things, In more ways than I realise I've been trapped in 1990.
The last vacuum cleaner I owned was... well, never.
The last time one was in my home was when I was still living with my dad. I've since always had either a tiny apartment or tile floors so a simple dustpan and brush sufficed, with a mop for extreme occasions.
But my home is bigger now and we have a big-ass rug, my fiancé is allergic to my cats, and a vacuum was necessary. Naturally, I bought the cheapest possible no-brand piece of shit. In hindsight, it was just abysmal. Its suckability was about a 2/10 tbh.
But I thought this was just how technology progressed these days. It was WIRELESS. Incredible. So it made sense to get a wireless one with shittier power if 90% of my floor is tile.
Anyway, our cleaner dropped and broke it months ago, and I still insisted on using it, duct-taped up to hell where I'd have to peel the tape off every time it needed emptying, before sealing it up again.
Eventually the ghost was given up and it couldn't even suck up a single hair. So after a lot of deliberating, I eventually bit the bullet and bought the cheapest possible Dyson-brand vacuum and oh dear lord I've never seen anything like it.
It's got this super flexible head, a gun-like trigger, a shotgun-like reload method, wireless with a battery that I haven't even charged yet after forcing myself to use the thing every day because it's so fun. And best of all it has this allergy filter at the top.
So my first usage of this was just a few seconds on our rug, and I looked down in shock to see it was completely full already from the disgraceful rug condition after weeks of using a broken toy vacuum.
This thing just removed every non-carpet atom from the floor. It has 3 power modes and the most powerful mode is so strong that I feel like I'm being physically dragged down to the ground with the suction. You can just feel yourself gain weight as it superglues itself to the carpet.
I just had no idea these machines could be so insane, given my last experience was with a 90's Henry Hoover.
Call me old, call me a prostitute, but I'm finding myself at work just waiting for the moment I can clock out and rush home so I can suck random stuff. I honestly feel like I could suck up the entire city if it did anything to annoy me.
This blew me away just as much. I noticed a student annotate a PDF file casually with little blue circles that could seamlessly be moved around. I was jealous, having used the same Free version of adobe or something that asked me to subscribe in order to do anything beyond highlighting.
So I torrented a couple to see what's what and landed on supposedly the best one, Foxit.
Jesus Christ. I thought PDF's were un-editable with a certain limit so they could be all vector-ey and zoom in infinitely with high quality. Turns out you can actually edit pretty much everything.
I opened a music file for my guitar class:
And this software can actually analyse the layers of features and allow me to effortlessly separate them, even from behind other layers:
You can scan to recognise text and separate, delete, replace, add interactive buttons, sanitize hidden data and god knows what else.
Unbelievable how I've been struggling for so many years without these crazy tools I don't need and will probably never use.
I guess this is how things sneak up on old people and make them old. As a teacher, my opinion has largely been that your every day student is actually less tech-literate than the previous generation. They mostly know how to swipe a screen up and down but most their lives call for little else.
But on the other hand, the smart minority working in secret laboratories are just moving so far ahead of me with all this blockchain and AI and things that just seem stupid to me in every capacity. Suddenly I realise I'm on the outskirts of civilisation with grey hair and no clue what's going on. Damn...
