Good day. My name, as you may have guessed, is Ed. I’m known by other names, both very formal in business and very informal around family. At the current time, as of the beginning of 2016, I reside in a small apartment in a building in downtown Portland, Oregon. I own a couple of motorcycles, but no car and I walk and take transit a lot around town. I’m in my mid-fifties and I’ve experienced a number of life changes over the last few years – like, I suspect, millions of other people.
“Neo-Digital Luddite” – what’s that all about?
My old career, for the vast majority of my adult life, was heavy on the technology side. I was a commercial television broadcast engineer for a very long time, and before that spent time in computer manufacturing – back in the early 80’s when computers weren’t something you stuffed in your backpack or back pocket, and long, long before smart phones, the World Wide Web and all the other things we take for granted today.
I don’t work in a high technology job anymore. My job does involve technology – after all, whose doesn’t today, really – but I’m no longer soaking in tech day after day 24×7.
But even back in my “old days” I never really ever embraced the bleeding edge stuff. I would never make a good tech entrepreneur. I tend to like tech that actually works well, isn’t “Beta version 0.9”, and doesn’t require a CS degree from MIT to figure out. So even when I was responsible for building TV stations, I still gravitated toward the stuff that would actually do the job needed without extra bells and whistles. The job was to produce product on air that makes money for the company, and that was it. If some piece of tech that was all flashy and shiny and fancy came along being touted as the next greatest thing, I was usually the person who was the biggest skeptic in the room, asking to be shown solid proof that the thing actually did what the hype said it would. I figure that this basic bar was not reached by a good 90% of tech we looked at.
So that’s where the Luddite thing comes from. Sure, I love good tech like everybody else. But GOOD tech. Not tech for the sake of tech. Not features for the sake of features. Show me that it does something actually useful that can’t be done by a simpler technology that already exists and we can talk about it. Otherwise, let it keep baking for a while until we’re a few versions down the line.
I’ve maintained some kind of web presence here at MisterEd.com since I originally bought the domain back in the mid nineties. It’s never been more than a hobby website for me. I’m glad if you enjoy what you find here.
Ed – 9 January 2016