Blog 7 - Technology taught to me by someone else

Technology Taught To Me By Another 

Right, so as a little kid, I'll be honest. I pretty much taught myself everything basic when it came to technology. We didn't have much money at the time (as you can see by this pretty basic setup in the "computer room".) I remember we had Windows 95 at first, as I remember the starting sound distinctly. My parents didn't know much about technology back in the day, and apparently, I figured out how to lock them out of the computer, and I would do it repeatedly. I was such a devious child.

 However, what we had for a lot of my early childhood was Windows XP. Being a little kid, I basically taught myself how to animate PowerPoint, how to download and play games, and even MS Paint. I was a huge player of MMOs until my favorite one shut down.

I even taught myself how to do art. MS Paint can produce good art, but it's hard to. It's extremely basic and your tool options are limited. The site I use is a free one called Pixlr. It's a lot like Adobe Photoshop except it's free. It's hard to get inspiration to draw these days because of my declining mental health, but here is an OC I drew to the right named Talia. My friend who graduated from college with an art degree said I'm good, so I guess I am? 

But this blog is supposed to be about things others taught me with technology. I have no idea if this is supposed to be about communication or just general technology. So I'll just do general tech. 

In high school, I took a class called music tech where I could make music electronically. I absolutely loved it. I worked with Ableton Live 9 and 10 when it came out. I used a little mixing thing called a Push. It was my first time working with macOS. It was amazing. I have ADHD and because my grades were so stellar, and I was able to mask really well, I was undiagnosed until early this year. This class was the only class where I could actually focus for the entire class. I had gone through a lot of trauma early on in high school, and this was at the point where I had still not told anyone, and it was hard going through that stuff completely alone and scared, but this class was something I looked forward to as an outlet. I could be creative. I could make music. I could learn and felt like I was actually achieving something, as opposed to my other classes where I would get excellent grades but barely remember the material down the line. In my other classes, I'd not be able to pay attention but I'd understand the material when I'd do homework, do well on the tests, make good grades in the class, and then forget everything I learned. I felt like an impostor, but here, I was actually learning by doing the thing and I could be creative as well. Unfortunately, all the stuff I made is saved on a hard drive at home and home is 8 hours away for me. I miss this class so much

Something else that helped me with technology, or more specifically, someone else is my partner. I'm generally attracted to girls, but sometimes, on the rare chance, I'll think of a guy as attractive, and now I'm dating one. This is his setup on the picture to the right. (Yes I bought him the neon lights hehehehehehe)

 Growing up, I was friends with the weird people and not generally the people who were good at technology, because the technology wizards were generally rude and had a lot of prejudice. Windows has come a long way from Windows XP and I hadn't realized how much it had. My partner, who is a computer science student showed me a lot. On top of gaming stuff looking cool, he educated me on the basic concepts of what a CPU (or processor) is, or a GPU, or RAM, and what it all means. I really don't have extensive knowledge of technology by any means, but think I know more than the average person. I know how to research better and not just buy the first thing I see because it's the cheapest, because cheap doesn't always mean a good deal for what you get. There are a lot of components that go into each thing, and it sometimes depends on the thing. I usually will still go to him just to check that I'm right, or about stuff that I don't know. The complexity of technology in computers has grown exponentially over the last 20 years, and much quicker in the last 10.