Memories of an Old Tech Man
## Latest Blog Posts
24.05.05 : Plotters and printing
24.05.04 : Happy Star Wars Day!
24.04.30 : Past couple of months
24.02.18 : Writing is hard
24.02.03 : So about these subscriptions
I was remembering how printers were crucial in my career. I've worked in the building/construction industry for almost 30 years. (I still get goosebumps about how much time has passed.) In the 90's plotters were very important. These huge printers would output large format sheets of drawings. I never worked anywhere that had the blueprint machines like I used in school. We needed it because they were teaching us drafting both ways still, with a pencil and computer!
These plotters were mainly built by HP in the offices I worked at. The ink cartridges were expensive and we always needed to call the printer guy because these printers failed often or needed tuning. Eventually these large plotters would slowly die off when CAD software begun implementing PDF technology. As the industry started accepting PDF files, they would send these off to professional printers instead. Cost was less and no more maintenance headaches having a plotter in the office. Now today, most of the industry won't print and instead view the PDF on a tablet. The space used up by a plotter can now be another workstation for a future employee.
We needed to be patient with print jobs. Printing a full set could take hours depending what model of plotter you had. I tried to manage the printing process, giving myself time to complete a job but it rarely worked out. My other coworkers would work until the last minute and I would need to stay after hours to print the job. It was very annoying and disrespectful when this happened. Especially when a sheet had a printing error, or ink ran out or paper ran out. That was another thing, I had to stay on top of ordering large rolls of sheets and keep a good supply. Something younger drafters will never experience.
I'm happy that we don't need to deal with these large plotters any longer. PDF technology has saved so many trees and me from stressful days.
I've been a big fan as far as I can remember when the first movie came out in 1977. I was still a baby so never experienced it in the theatre but eventually in the 80's when my family got our first Betamax VCR, they rented it for us to watch at home. This was a huge event for many households to watch a big name movie and free to watch it several times before bringing it back.
I continued collecting figurines, wore clothes with images of the movies, played the video games and build lego collections still to this day. I've had some food delivery driver's comment on my cool shirts which is pretty nice. I don't see it too often people wearing fan shirts of their favorite hobbies and interests these days. We need to bring this back into acceptable fashion at our workplaces!
Share your stories with me on Mastodon. Have a great day and may the force be with you!
It's been a busy time for me and I haven't blogged much here. As I wrote in my last post, writing is hard. I believe having a static blog does contribute to it but on the other hand I do love the simplicity of it. The past couple of months I've been busy with work and taxes since it is that time of year. I've caught up on some anime shows, regular shows and movies. I've done a great job handling streaming service subscriptions by canceling them once I have nothing to watch. It feels great saving money. We recently reduced Netflix to the subscription with ads because the savings was ridiculously good. From $17 down to $6! I would love to get back into reading and reducing subscriptions is one way to curb watching TV.
I didn't start my OBTF project which I'm disappointed. I believe it would reduce my distractions with various programs and keep me organized. Every time I want to create this one big text file, I lose myself on the formatting and it looks like a big pile of disorganized text. I haven't found the right format. I did start using VSCODE at work to organize my notes and learned markdown instead of writing regular text. My question is why? I mean it looks nice in the preview window but I'm never opening that window to read my notes. When I'm creating a webpage, I understand, but where else would I open a MD file? I'm still learning.
I was hoping that setting up reminders each weekend would help to write about my experiences of the past week. Write about new things I've learned or are interesting to talk about. Lately I've been trying to distract myself by watching TV. It's been a hard start to the year, some weeks are good and some not good.
A favorite TV show came back for a second season, called Tokyo Vice. This show is set in the 90's about an American journalist living in Tokyo writing about the Yakuza. The story and characters are so mesmerizing that I get lost in that world. The old cars for example, one of the main characters drives a Nissan Fairlady Z (Datsun 280ZX outside of Japan), reminds me of when these cars were so popular when I was a kid. Hagerty's has an article about the cars from the show here.
I believe I've found a distraction to help me with anxiety and stress, with older Japanese culture through tv, movies, manga and music that I am surprised to feel nostalgic for. It's like I've lived through those times in a different life. Perhaps it is part of the 90's nostalgic I feel as it was the last decade before tech truly took off in everyone's homes. My entire life I've tried many things to deal with anxiety and stress but not until last year I learned how much all of this would calm me and help me focus in my personal life and work life.
I'm hoping a focused mindset will help me write and read more and stop my mind to be easily distracted with too many retro projects and social media.
I started a few months ago canceling subscriptions when prices were going up. It seemed every service last year was updating their prices instead of keeping them the same or lowering during this economy in order to keep subscribers. As we know, the shareholders are the group to keep happy every quarter, not us.
I've been using Ring cameras for several years and the subscription plan was about to renew. When I bought these, the options for local recording was slim and I continued to pay the annual fee. Today there are many options including Apple Homekit cameras that use iCloud for storage. Canceling the Ring plan made my experience very limited including not saving, reviewing or sharing the security videos. I still get a notification but need my phone to quickly react to the notification or it's gone. The good thing is the hardware still works.
I'm hoping to test out some brands with Apple Homekit Secure Video mostly for the family to have easy access without another app. The AppleTV is our main entertainment device and having the notification pop up on the TV screen will be a game changer from Ring. The money I save from Ring plans can go directly to iCloud+ (which we already pay) to save the camera videos.
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