dashboard widgets: Blog Challenge: Describe Your Computer Setup

Blog Challenge: Describe Your Computer Setup - Then and Now
This week’s blog challenge is to blog about your computer setup as it was “then” in the early days of your computer life, and how it is now, in your modern technology life. What computer tools are you dependent upon for your blog that surround you on your desk? Do you podcast? What do you [...]

This week’s blog challenge is to blog about your computer setup as it was “then” in the early days of your computer life, and how it is now, in your modern technology life.

What computer tools are you dependent upon for your blog that surround you on your desk? Do you podcast? What do you use? Video? Video streaming? What did you start with in the early days of podcasting and video, and now, what do you use for multimedia creation?

Over the years, my desk’s setup has changed, moving from huge desktop computers to smaller laptops, handheld computers, cell phones, and - well, smaller everything.

And I mean small. A friend just emailed me that she found a small SD digital card on the floor of her car. Thinking it was hers, she checked it out and found it had some of my video files. Don’t remember losing it, but how would I know? They weigh nothing and there is no room to put my name and email address on the card label, so they could be lost forever and never come back to me.

My desk was custom built for me by my husband and in the monitor base are two drawers, one for 3.5 disks and the other for CDs, perfectly sized. I still have a few CDs in there, but I haven’t seen a 3.5 disk in years. Instead, I have a ton of digital media cards in several shapes and sizes of various data storage sizes stacked like thin blue chicklets amid the colorful sticky note pads, stacks of business cards, tape, stamps, and junk I stuff in this open drawers.

Gone are the hundreds of meters of phone cord and the acoustic coupler we used to strap onto telephones and payphones to connect to the Internet, replaced by WIFI hi-gain and boosting PC cards and antennas. My huge and heavy desktop monitor that measured 32 inches (81 cm) deep is now replaced by a 1.5 inch (4 cm) thick large monitor.

Some things remain the same. My desk has stayed the same through more than fifteen years on the road in our trailer. While I don’t use a big desktop computer, the space is now taken up with a stack of portable hard drives - at least ten of them are currently hooked up with tons of USB connectors. Until a couple months ago, I was still using the small but very powerful Altec Lansing computer speakers and woofer, but it finally gave up after 16 years of hard life on the road. I replaced it with something only slightly smaller, but much more powerful.

Who lied to us about the magic of easier connections and wirelessness? I have a black snake jungle of wires under my feet and two more USB/Firewire snake infestations on either side of my desk connecting all the parts and pieces together. My mouse and keyboard are wireless, but everything still needs a cord! It’s a power brick building along the power strip.

Recently, I replaced 18 lbs (8 kg) of laptop and power brick with a little over 5 lbs (2.26 kg), lighting much of my travel load due to increased weight restrictions on US domestic air carriers. But I still carry too much computer crap with me, as I haul around portable hard drives, USB hubs, digital microphones and recorders, WIFI boosters, digital camera crap, and all their cords and connectors.

Don’t even get me started talking about the tangled black snake jungle I have to take with me every time I travel. Power bricks, USB cords, Firewire cords, custom cords, s-video cords, USB hubs, power strips…I keep trying to reduce it, in weight, number, and size, but I swear those black snakes are breeding in my travel bags!

I have two digital recorders, digital cameras, MP3 players, four printers, several USB hubs…I have more computer crap now than I did when everything was 10 times bigger.

Next week, I’ll challenge you about software, but this week, I want you to blog about the hardware that controls your life, what it looked like when you started, and how it has improved - or not - over the years.

As usual, send a pingback or trackback to this post, or put the link to your blog challenge post in the comments, so we can all see how you’ve done with your blog challenge.

Did you know that you don’t have to write these blog challenges? You can also use audio with podcasts or make a video in response to the blog challenge and publish it on your blog. There are a lot of ways you can have fun with these weekly blog challenges. Use your imagination and see how far you can take the challenge into territories you haven’t explored before.

These blogging challenges are published weekly and are an attempt to kick your blogging ass. They serve to challenge your thinking and efforts in blogging and blog writing. To participate, start challenging yourself now. Today. Go for it.