/dev/random: Various questions, answered.

A useful Friday Five engagement for me:

1. Who made you feel good this week, and how? This week, anyway, there was a nice acknowledgment of the work that went into running the yearly writing, drawing, and photography contest, with the official kudos recognition coming from the manager most directly in charge of our community.
   


2. What did you do this week that moved you closer to reaching your goals? I finished a draft of a story that had been sitting in the back of my brain, waiting for me to figure out how to move forward on it. (It does not say which goal is in question.) I also went out raiding with friends this weekend and collected some of the rare, needs-your-friends and a few more people entries in the Pokedex for Pokemon Go.


3. What did you most enjoy doing this week? Hanging out with those friends and catching mons. There were a lot of other enjoyable things, stoo, but that's the thing I most enjoyed.


4. What did you learn this week? Less learned, and more remembered, that I have a Gravatar. Similarly that occasionally the management does notice when you're doing good things. Thing I learned this week is that just about everyone wants to blame our teenagers and the library staff for what they perceive to be noise and behavior problems coming from the teen section. Including police officers that have been summoned to help remove a person that has already been trespassed from our building.


5. What's the funniest thing that happened to you this week? So you remember that trend among people who were likely to have fragile masculinity issues to put a pair of rubber testicles off their truck's hitch connection? With names like Truck Nuts? I saw a relatively small truck today that had those adornments hanging down sufficiently lowly that I was actually worried this truck was going to drag its nuts on the ground at speed, which would be painful for any testicle-having entity.
   
   What made this funny rather than annoying (and possibly would lead to me making fun of the testicles of the person who actually hung them on the truck) was that these rubber testicles had been colored...blue.
   
   To explain the joke for anyone who doesn't understand, there's a colloquialism of at least United States English that a penis-and-testicles haver who has been excited sexually, often to the point where they would orgasm and ejaculate, but that doesn't actually ejaculate, has "blue balls." I don't think the truck owner realzied what they were doing, but their truck nuts indicated that the truck was getting close a lot, but not actually able to obtain sexual release. If I were feeling unkind, I'd say the blue balls designation for the truck also applies to the person who put the rubber testicles on, because someone with that kind of fragility is not someone I would expect to have a lot of orgasmic sexual encounters, but truthfully speaking, I don't know them well enough to be that kind of mean. And there's always the possibility of self-love.

And then there's this bit that's mostly trying to make people feel old for existing before the now.

1. Did you have a cell phone prior to your thirties? Sure. A prepaid bit, then a flip-phone, then at least one instance of smartphone.


2. Did they exist? Sure. Wireless telephones existed well before the advent of the tiny computer in the pocket. One of them, actually, was a car model a friend of mine had.


3. Did you have cable when you were a little kid? Not as such, no, but we did have a large-dish satellite with subscription descrambling. Took a little bit longer to change channels, but it had good things with it.


4. Do you know what 8-track tapes are? I do, yes. I've even seen them, although I haven't ever owned an 8-track player to see them work.


5. How about cassette tapes I had those, and players that could play them, both stereo and portable.


6. When did you get your first DVD player? It was my PS2, so it's been a little less than t[REDACTED] years. Not as long as the question-makers might think.


7. Did you learn to type on a typewriter? Ish. I had one as a child to bang on, but learning to type was a lot more keyboard than typewriter, so I never got the knack for figuring out the top speed of the typewriter so that I could clack along as quickly as I could.


8. What was the first computer you owned That I actually bought and built with my own money? A 486 that ran Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS like a charm. It has long since been replaced with many more computers, both portable and not, but it was a very good machine for the time.


9. What age were you when you first got e-mail? [REDACTED.] Because nobody admits that they flouted the rules about how old you have to be to get e-mail.


10. Was the Internet around when you were a kid? Yep.


11. What age were you when Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal, and Dreamwidth started? - That's mostly my collegiate experience, so somewhere between t[REDACTED] and t[REDACTED].


12. What was the first printer you owned like? The original printer was a dot-matrix ribbon printer, but the one that I bought after that was an inkjet that could do most everything that modern printers can do.


13. Collegiate papers: typewriter or computer? Computer. An entire fishbowl of them.


14. How old were you when streaming came into being? The idea of streaming content came in to being when I was t[REDACTED], with ideas like Quicktime and RealPlayer. So it's not as new as the question writers think.


15. What age were you when you got your first MP3 player? T[REDACTED]. It was a nice little Rio player, but the capacity wasn't big enough to keep even the carefully curated selection of material that I was interested in having.


16. Did you own a record player, cassette player, CD player, or MP3 player as a teen? Yes.


17. At what age did you start blogging on the Internet? Mostly t[REDACTED], because things started taking off in my collegiate experience.


18. What age were you when the e-readers came out T[REDACTED]. They're also not as young as the question-givers think, because the Kindle line is not the oldest reader.


19. How do you listen to music? Well, there's always radio, and there's also YouTube and other streaming services available on tablets, computers, and other Internet-capable devices. If all else fails, I can still play CDs in the player in the car. So there are a lot of ways that I can listen to music. Admittedly, they're mostly digital, so audiophiles that demand analog sound can be annoyed with me. I also do my thing of creating analog sound with instruments on the regular, so that's my out. Or my penance. Or something.