It’s no secret that we here at Good Old Rock love tech. So it’s only natural that we keep a close eye on other tech bloggers. One of our favorites is our dear friend, Jessica Fritsche, who is one of the geekiest girls to roll in the tech blogosphere. In addition to her two blogs, jessica fritsche (dot) com and Daily Tech Diva, Jess is an associate editor for So New Publishing, and has a Top Secret vlogging project in development.
You definitely rate highly on geek quotient. What is your earliest technology-related memory?
I remember my dad taking me to the high school with him one weekend in the small Iowa town where we lived until I was 5. He set me up on an Apple ][ to play Frogger…I had to be 3 or 4. A short time later, we got an Apple of our own that was our main family computer until 1995 when my parents bought an IBM PC and we got the Internets!
You’ve just been given $10,000 to spend on technology, but you have to spend ALL of it, or you get none. It’s Brewster’s Millions, but for nerds. What do you buy?
Oh man, that is tough. It probably changes from day to day. Today, I’d buy a 15″ MacBook Pro with the 2.93Ghz Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB of RAM ($2800), a 30″ HD Apple Display ($1800), a Playstation 3 80GB with the Bluray remote ($420), a Canon VIXIA HF20 camera ($1000), a Nikon D90 with zoom lens ($1150), a Runcore 64GB SSD drive (for my Mini, $220), a Drobo 2TB bundle ($1600), a white MacBook for my husband ($1000) and a $10 component cable (cause I need another one)!
What was the first Apple product you ever purchased?
Because I desperately wanted a Mac but couldn’t afford a new one, I purchased a used Blue & White G3 Mac for $40 IN 2004. Shortly thereafter, my Dell laptop died and Istarted using the G3 as my full-time computer. It worked like a charm!
When did you first start blogging?
I guess technically I started blogging back in 1995-1996 when we got our PC, the Internet, and I discovered Geocities and started teaching myself HTML. My website at the time was a journal of sorts, so kind of a prehistoric blog.
Who’s your favorite celebrity blogger?
President Obama passes an RSS Conservation Act which restricts all feed readers to no more than five feeds. Which make the cut for you?
Lifehacker, I Can Has Cheezburger, Slashfood, Gizmodo, and CRAFT Magazine.
Who’s nerdier – you or your husband?
It depends on what you are talking about. When it comes to technology, I am the nerdiest, though he definitely loves his tech. If you are talking comics, anime, and video games, then he is the nerd king. I am merely a nerd princess in those geeky genres.
Of all the technology you own, what do you think you will still be using (in its present form) five years from now?
That is hard to say…I keep my Apple products around a long time, though, so I would probably say my Apple TV. I can upgrade the hard drive if I need more room, and probably won’t feel a push to upgrade it unless the new version (whenever it comes out) is just so amazing and groundbreaking that I can’t handle it.
What internet meme needs to die a public, painful death?
The “getting to know you” forwards. If you are sending me an email, you should already know me. If you are sending me a forward, chances are you don’t know me well enough and an annoying email survey is not going to help you, or save you from my forward-hating wrath.
What website is your guilty pleasure?
Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Their romance novel reviews are hilarious, even though I don’t usually read what they are reviewing…my taste runs towards more mainstream fiction or sci-fi than steamy romance novels, though I have found and enjoyed some books on there that they have reviewed. My favorite feature is when they make fun of the ridiculous romance novel covers. Fabio is totally asking for it.
What do you think is going to be the next major change in internet-related technology?
That is a hard one. Things are changing so fast and so frequently that it is hard for me to make a prediciton. All I know is that we are going to get more and more connected as a society than we are even now. The stage is set for that. Maybe soon we will start to see Web 3.0, who knows? The computers will start reading our minds.
Please explain, briefly, the whole “Dawne-With-An-E” debacle. Follow-up question: How awesome is that?
Briefly? Hah, I will try! In 2005, I blogged about my favorite childrens’ TV shows growing up, one of which was Kids Incorporated (a cheesy show on the Disney Channel featuring children horribly mutilating the pop hits of the 80s and 90s). I wrote about it fondly but with my usual snark, and that garnered me a comment from the BIGGEST KIDS INC. FAN EVAR. She told me I should be shot for not getting the facts about the show straight. I followed her (vulgar) return email address back to her site, where she had erected a page in my honor and called me all sorts of names. This turned into an Internet battle the likes of which have never seen before, pitting this crazy chick against me and an entire army of swing dancers plotting her demise on Yehoodi. How awesome is that? Very, very awesome. You cannot MAKE that kind of stuff up.
(Interviewer’s note – use the Good Old Rock search box at the upper right of this page if you’d like to find out more about Dawne)
What is your mobile device of choice, and how has it changed your life? If it hasn’t, why not?
The iPhone is my life. Previously I used the Windows Mobile platform, and while it offered many great features, stability and speed were not among them. The iPhone allows me to do everything I did on the WM phone–make calls, email, manage my very hectic work schedule (I am a project manager), open documents, read eBooks, play games, and surf the Internet–in a much more user-friendly, stable, and fast environment. THEN to top it all off, it plays music and videos! I was originally against the idea of combining my iPod and phone, but now that I have I will never turn back.
I am also really into netbooks right now, and I don’t think I can live without one. I recently made the switch from the Eee PC 701 to the Dell Mini 9, and there was almost a 3 week stretch where I didn’t have a netbook while waiting for the Dell to arrive. I didn’t realize how tough it would be or how much I would miss having a very small, portable computer. There were many client meetings this month where it would have come in handy!
BlackBerry vs. iPhone – how would you recommend someone decide between the two?
I think that the BlackBerry is good for people who have more corporate needs–a lot of IT departments don’t want to support the iPhone yet. It is also more multi-carrier, so if you are locked into a non-AT&T contract it may be your only real choice. The iPhone, however, is great for people who want the connectivity but either don’t like the form factor of the BlackBerry or don’t have the need for enterprise-level tech. On a side note, my husband’s company has stopped supporting BlackBerry in favor of the iPhone! They also encourage Windows Mobile as an alternative. I think the iPhone is just a lot more friendly than the BlackBerry–the menus can be very convoluted. My BlackBerry loving friends have stumped me when they have asked me how to do something and I couldn’t easily figure it out because the menus drive me nuts. That puts the iPhone on top for me. It just works.
Boff, Kill, Marry – Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Robert Scoble?
Boff – Sergey Brin, Marry – Steve Jobs, Kill – Robert Scoble.
Jessica Fritsche is a tech blogger and writer living in Dallas, Texas. You can check Jess out online at jessica fritsche (dot) com, Paper Graffiti, and Daily Tech Diva.