UPDATE

Same old steam-powered gadget
The software update from hell
I'm having so much fun with it
Oh really? Couldn't you tell?

MONDAY BLEWS

So, Monday morning began in the darkness, and not only because the sun hadn't yet risen.

I got up, in that slightly unhappy state that a Monday morning can drag along with it, and headed downstairs to have my morning cup of tea and pills, made a couple of ultimately disappointing sandwiches for my lunch later on, carried my mug of tea through into the living room and flicked the light-switch...

Only for the bulb to immediately blow in a rather spectacular way and leave me standing in the pitch darkness with a mug of tea in my hand and nothing but the flashing digits of the ancient video recorder and the taunting glow of the internet hub to light my way.

Actually, I don't know why I said it was "spectacular" really, because it certainly wasn't, at least in the "Hollywood Special Effects" sense. It merely fizzed and spluttered and strobed a little before going "plink". There was no explosion, no sparks, and no shattering of glass, and I certainly didn't have to leap for cover in super slo-mo as a hot rain of both tea and glass shards showered about me in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

In fact the only reaction from me was rather static with only muted "Typical!" to mark the transition of states of being from optimistic anticipation of a nice warm cuppa to a person who was now mildly irritated at having something else to deal with.

Typically I hadn't the foggiest whether I even had any spare bulbs in the house, and there certainly weren't any in the usual spot because I'd changed the last one only a fortnight ago and made a mental note that I really needed to pick up some more before forgetting that I'd made that mental note, or subconsciously scrunching it up or, if it was a mental "Post-It" note (other self adhesive message pads are available) having it lose its tackiness and fall down the side of the fridge.

Luckily, I vaguely remembered that there were some more somewhere that I thought that I hadn't used yet, and I was right. In the damp, dark, condensation heavy places under the sink, where I seldom venture because of the general unpleasantness therein,  I found an aging plastic box of old electrical bits and pieces including a multi-pack of bulbs which I'd once bought in Asda, the cardboard boxes of which all seemed ever-so slightly soggy. Most of those seemed to be marked with the environmentally wicked "100W" but one damp old box still claimed to be 60W and so I grabbed it and, as the cardboard disintegrated around it, I found that I held in my hand one slightly wet lightbulb.

Well, I quickly dried this on a handy towel and manoeuvered a chair to the necessary spot and replaced the bulb by the light of a small lamp and a dazzling torch and, having negotiated my way back to the floor, was happily rewarded by the bright light of a bulb that was certainly far brighter than the one it was replacing, and probably was not of the type as once claimed by the remains of the box it was so recently inside.

Still, any week which starts out with you standing on a chair in the dark trying to put a damp bulb into a light socket can't help but improve… although how those first few moments are is possibly symbolic of how the entire week is likely to unravel, so I didn't take it as a good sign.

Perhaps ironically, or presciently, on Sunday afternoon I had ordered myself a new torch off the internet but, naturally, it hadn't actually arrived yet. This sudden consumerist leap was made because we'd bought a rather impressive one a couple of years ago for the beloved to carry about with her in her work bag for those rare occasions when she has to get herself home in the midwinter pitch darknesses.

After our recent blackouts, and the feeble failure of the cheap and nasty little torch which I usually kept in the car that evening, in comparison to the bright and steady beam which the Beloved's own rather marvellous light source had displayed during that minor crisis, I'd been thinking of getting myself one, only to not be able to find any on sale in the various supermarkets we'd been into since whilst failing to buy any bulbs.

In the end, as is often the case, the internet was my friend although, the one time this week that I might actually have been urgently needing it, whilst standing on that chair in the dark, it was still in a depot somewhere awaiting despatch, but next time, next time, I shall be, in the best tradition of Baden-Powell's finest, prepared...

Assuming I can find the thing, of course... because, some days, some days, the lights of my life really do seem to conspire against me...

POD OFF

So it would appear that the days of the iPod are now numbered. The white heat of new technology seems to burn out oh-so-swiftly nowadays and what was once an essential, "must-have" purchase is flung onto the scrapheap almost as soon as its guarantee has run out.

Apparently, we, the great purchasing masses don't want them any more and, having revolutionised the way that music is listened to, bought and sold, we've all now moved on and want all of our many devices all packed away into one device and run the risk of our entire lives falling apart when all of those iEggs in that one iBasket suddenly vanish due to the wicked doings of the iThieves...

It seems to me to be a bit of a shame…  but still, if that's what you want, oh wise world, who am I to argue...?

If a single use device seems redundant when you can do everything you wish to do in life through your one tiny screen, far be it for those who think otherwise to suggest that having a choice might be the better option, just because there might be times when a single use device might actually be more convenient.

Like, for example (although I don't indulge in such insanities myself), when training or going for a run. I've seen those eager young things trying to stave off the inevitability of decay by running up and down the streets, and they appear to have their tiny and feather-light musical devices strapped about their slightly-covered persons in a most convenient manner in such a way as to suggest that strapping a great big phone to their arm might not work quite so well.

And if that dobbing great slab of technology was to fall out, there's that whole "life falls apart" scenario to consider which might instantly slice off all of those theoretical years you've just added to it.

Just because a minority will never want an iPhone doesn't mean that they might not want the other shiny goodies that you sell, Mr Apple…

My Beloved still carries around her steam-age Nokia teffalone and is extraordinarily happy with it but, because she likes to listen to audiobooks on the commuter run, she bought the one version of the iPod which history now seems to try and imply never even existed, or at least seems to get missed out when you read those articles about the history of this ground-breaking device.

I'm not completely convinced that it is the one design variant that they seem kind of ashamed to admit to ever having produced but, when we were trying to find an accessory for it a few weeks ago, it was proving pretty difficult to trace.

You might not remember the iPod Shuffle circa 2009... The one with no buttons, no screen and looks a a bit like a paperclip, because, in the Great Big Constantly Generalised TwitWorld in which we live, "nobody" liked it and, more importantly "nobody" bought it.

Well, apart from idiots like us, of course.

The Beloved still appreciates its tiny magnificence (a feature of her personality for which I am eternally grateful), and uses her little iPod device nearly every single day (as long as we remember to recharge it), so there is still a market out there, Mr Apple, if only you'd take the time to listen to them instead of the giddy young things that you usually respond to...

PRODUCTIVE TOAST

Ah, you know how it is…

Ever since, courtesy of my employers, my teffalonic experience went towards the way of the larger, harder fruits, from the softer ones which my previous teffalone used to be made by, my predictive text appears to have gone positively doo-lally, offering me its preferred understanding of the English language rather than the things wot I wanted to have wrote.

This has led, courtesy of an apple core of your possible acquaintance, to some very unfortunate replacement words being chosen which have (because sometimes I don't check them carefully enough before hitting "send") slipped through the net inside texts and emails, when perfectly ordinary and respectable words are being replaced with random nonsense…

Here were just a few of today's more "helpful" corrections...

Doing = Coin

(Now, as far as I'm aware, "doing" is a perfectly ordinary and thoroughly useful word, so why on earth my teffalone took such a dislike to it is utterly beyond me. "I'll be doing that later…" makes perfect sense in almost exactly the same way as "I'll be coin that later" simply does not…)

Ill = I'll

("Sorry to hear that you're feeling ill" might not be the best sentence ever written, but that particular substitution just made it look as if I'd deleted half of whatever it was that I was trying to say…)

Partner = Parker

(That one, embarrassingly enough, went to my solicitor, as in "My parker, [NAME], has been dealing with this…" but will no doubt just end up in her SPAM folder alongside every other email which I send to her, including, no doubt, the corrected version of that one...)

Burbling = Bubbling

(Okay, I'll admit that "burbling" isn't the most commonplace of words - although I seem to use it a lot in these pages - but it is one which does at least work in context. However, admitting to someone that I've been "bubbling on" did rather suggest that something unsavoury was afoot or that I'd been eaten one or two too many sprouts over the festive season…)

Policy = Police

("With regard to my mother's insurance police…" 'Ello, 'ello, 'ello… What's all this then… Move along, sonny. Nothing to see here. Nope, still don't see where the algorithms got that one from…)

Now, you won't believe how much trouble I've had just writing this short piece for you this evening. Every time I tried to write something "wrong", the rinky-dinky little microchips have decided they know best and changed it back time and again, so, if this turns out to be complete and utter gibberish, for once I can put my hand on my heart and claim, without fear of contradiction, that this time it really wasn't my fault...

(Although we never used to have all this trouble with pencils…)

IT WAS "HILARIOUS"...!

It was “hilarious” they said...

No... No... Really, it wasn't…

I mean it was all right, and entertaining enough, but the funniest thing you’ll ever read…?

Please...

This is what I get for believing book reviews, but there you go. You really ought not to believe everything you read.

But, having made that evil leap across the great divide into the world of e-readers this year, I have found that I’ve been reading far fewer books than I used to. This may be down to the circumstances of this particularly difficult year where “free” time was precious and, due to the rearrangement of the interior spaces of our little abode, the stacks of unread physical books got put in the attic and jumbled up with the ones which had been read and so the “grab pile” became (and remains - for I am still a busy bee - or a lazy-arsed swine - depending upon point of view) less accessible than once it was...

Still, I did make the leap to e-readers as I said and now have a stack of unread digital files to add to those mountains of unread actual books and time continues to tick away far too quickly for my liking. 

At first I found it hard to adjust. In fact I think that I bought my first downloadable book just to see whether it worked... or maybe it was because it was a ridiculously cheap bargain price for something I had considered reading anyway.

It’s hard to remember now...

(I really MUST point you all in the direction of those articles on “Digital Dementia” that I’ve had pointed out to me... Now that IS scary reading...!)

Anyway, I found that the first read I tried in this format was very difficult. For some reason I found it hard to engage with the page in quite the same way as I do with an actual book, but, after a couple of days of fannying about and grumbling, I adjusted and was soon carried away by the plot as usual having, I think, got over the worries involved with getting to grips with the technique involved in reading on a device.

Perhaps you recognise the symptoms? Worrying about battery life, or tapping the page at the wrong moment, or hitting those invisible icons and finding yourself anywhere in the document and outside the story zone, or just shutting down the file for no very good reason.

Then again, perhaps it was just me. After all, all of you technophiles were probably already familiar with the techniques involved with touch-screen technology long before you tried reading on your device, and it’s people who come late to the party like myself who struggle to adapt.

But adapt I did and before long I had quite a virtual library building up, not least because it was far easier to deal with just one small device during all those hospital visits and picking up and half reading all of the paperbacks which are left in waiting rooms was beginning to become far too expensive when I had to track them down later in order to finish them.

And, after having adapted so utterly, that’s why I found myself reading those reviews one day as I found myself wondering quite what to read next and, stupidly, being persuaded that the book I had decided to consider, by a comedian whose performances I’d recently enjoyed on the radio, might be worth a punt, given that so many people were claiming that it was indeed the most “hilarious” thing that they had ever read.

As I said, really it wasn’t.

CHANGE IT HAS TO COME

An email from the "Powers That Be" at work recently announced that, after two years of less than robust service, our old personal teffalones were all going to be replaced with shiny new ones in the very near future, which prompted much chunnering from yours truly because, as you are no doubt fully aware, I'm really not good with change.

So, I fretted and I worried, because I can't remember all of the various passwords and addresses that I used two years ago to get the current one working, and I fretted some more and said strange things like "Can't they just leave us with these ones because I almost know how it works now...?" words not really designed to inspire confidence in my ability to seize the future and keep up with the white heat of new technology, I'll grant you.

But then I've always been rather perverse when it comes to blowing my old trumpet and will have a noisy meltdown whilst quietly and efficiently finding that I will get the thing to work fairly rapidly, despite a basic incompatibility between the two styles of devices meaning that the data transfer process is slightly more tricky than it might otherwise be.

Anyway, that's for the future.

In the meantime I had the rather strange and nostalgic experience of dragging my old data from within its circuits and, despite the fact that I seldom use it for that purpose, I found that my life over the last couple of years had been ever-so-slightly mapped out in a hundred or so photographs of things I'd largely forgotten because sometimes a "moment" will happen when you have no other camera equipment on you at the time and grabbing the phone to capture it is sometimes the only option.

So, amongst all of the strange pictures of knees and steering wheels which have been taken as I have pulled my phone from my pocket and hit the camera button whilst handing it to the Beloved when it's unexpectedly gone off in the car, or those pictures of elbows and knees when I think that it's switched off and accidentally catch that same button again, and all of the pictures of documents which I've had to photograph and then email to someone when the scanner has been playing up, there is a strangely eclectic mixture of moments from my life which had been stored upon it.

There are the "official" ones I take of our products as aids to the memory when we have to attend things like the annual trade show, and a picture of a rooftop taken when I was trying to work out how the camera function actually worked whilst I had an idle few moments to stand around and wait whilst we were at a Farmers' Market a couple of years ago, and odd little pictures which were obviously meant to inspire blog postings about thoughts which I then forgot about and never got back to.

There are, amongst others, also some strangely pointless pictures of tiles which I took because I was convinced I saw a face in one of them, a picture of the excitable (and usually quite friendly) dog that some former neighbours used to have which nipped at me one morning, demonstrations of lousy local parking, a vintage clothing fair I'd forgotten going to, several rainbows and clouds, the aftermath of the robbery at the office, and the reference picture I took of the replacement computers which then also got stolen a year later.

There are also images from an opening night at Manchester Museum (including that unexpected sight of the demolition of the BBC building on Oxford Road), various pictures taken in the hospital last year, some IKEA wardrobes which we wanted to remember the look of when we got home, several pictures of snow, Darth Vader with a banana, an apple, some things in shops which I needed to remember later, and, perhaps most poignant of all, a blurry picture of my late mother sitting in her chair in her flat.

Quite a bizarre selection of images, I think you'll agree, and all of which brought back a memory the instant I saw it which is, of course, almost incontrovertible evidence that life is indeed what happens when you're busy making other plans...

TELEPHONE WIRES

This was just an idea I had for something I thought might make a nice picture...

There are one or two strange things that strike me about telephone wires. We tend to take them for granted because, for the time-being at least, they are all over the place. It all looks very unpromising really, just a wooden pole and some wires and yet this very simple combination of wood and metal can connect you to pretty much anyone in the world, no matter how remote they might be.

Whilst in the so-called "first world" we tend to find that we also take for granted the ability to communicate with anyone at any time when they're anywhere, in some parts of the world, you still have to walk miles just to make the most basic of telephone calls and yet, even from those middle of nowhere places, given the right combination of numbers, you could even get through to me in Lesser Blogfordshire.

Whether I'll pick up, however, is, of course, another matter...

((This post was a thought from late summer which I never got around to either expanding upon or actually posting... until now, of course. There may be a lot of this sort of thing going on over the coming weeks as I struggle to find anything new to say, so be warned... Time Travel is indeed possible...!))

BT AND THE BEAST

Why is it that whenever I ring BT and am offered something "cheaper" I always suspect that it's going to end up costing me more...?

I only rang them because the letter they sent me said that I had to otherwise I'd start getting additional charges... although I did ring up intending to have a serious rant about this insistence upon "contracts" when I had absolutely no intention of moving to another company anyway.

I'm one of the "really can't be bothered with the hassle of moving such things around" brigade and have been for a very long time, so there really, really isn't any need for them to worry that I'm going to scurry off and join one of their competitors, but they do still seem to be unduly worried by this and want to be certain that they can tie me to things for whatever period of time seems necessary...

Anyway, I dialled the number and listened (with increasing irritation which eventually transformed itself into weary resignation) to the many recordings which played as I waited for my connection to Mumbai, shrill voices telling me that I didn't actually have to be on the phone to the phone company, and that I could try using their website. This was despite the fact that the letter didn't have any weblink details and actually specifically told me that I'd have to ring up in person to get this "personal offer" of this "incredible opportunity" to get exactly the same service that I was already paying over the odds for at exactly the same rate at which I already was, rather than the extra three and a half quid that they were threatening to charge.

Okay, it's not a huge amount, but it seemed stupid to be paying the extra if I really didn't have to...

Eventually a kindly sounding gentleman answered the call, telling me, in one of those "stock phrases" that they have to say, that  they were the "home of football" or some such nonsense, and I immediately decided that I really couldn't be bothered with ranting as it seldom achieves much anyway, in my experience, and it wasn't this particular person's fault that I had been put in such a mood.

In the end I just went with "terse..."

I gave one-word answers which I hoped would convey my ire to whoever it was who was eventually unfortunate enough to listen to my call which may have been recorded for training purposes, but, all-in-all, everything went through reasonably without incident...

Until THE observation was made, at any rate.

"You pay £XX for your broadband which has a monthly download limit... I can offer you unlimited broadband for about ten pounds a month less..."

So far, so good...

"But..."

Ah...

"You WILL have to also pay another £2.00 a month for the service you were actually ringing us up about to still get free evening and weekend calls with that option..."

Oh well... You win some, etc.

And, whilst I believe that I'll probably end up paying slightly less, or at least much the same as I already was, at least I've now got rid of that whole "download anxiety" thing that I was getting from watching TV on the exciting box device...

The problem is that I'm usually so very unlucky with these things that I still think that there'll be some kind of glitch and that I'll end up paying for all three somehow...

Meanwhile, I do wonder quite when BT are going to realise that I really, really don't give a stuff about their footballing television service...?

You see, all that I personally want from my telephone service is for the phone to actually work when it should, and for the internet to work when I want it to.

Everything else really doesn't matter to me.

Still, in the course of our negotiations, I did take the opportunity to mention that my home hub was very, very old (in modern day terms at least) and they actually offered to send me a new one, which was terribly nice of them...

This is why, a few days later, I found myself waiting for my brand new hub to arrive with a certain amount of trepidation given that I'd heard so many horror stories from other people who'd tried similar upgrades and found that they ended up having problems for days and even weeks afterwards.

The email I received "helpfully" told me that the delivery would be between 7am and 6pm that day, and that I shouldn't plug the shiny new hub in until I'd received an email telling me that the service had been activated... I did ponder upon how exactly I was supposed to receive such an email, given that I wouldn't actually have an internet service at that point, but I let it pass. You see, whilst I was pondering upon that particular little conundrum, I was simultaneously worrying about the many difficulties which I had had with the various devices which I have got to synchronise with the old hub across the years, and wondering quite how much "fun" my evening was going to turn out to be as I attempted to connect the latest incarnations to the new one...

I was particularly worried about my allegedly "smart" television box because that had been a major faff at the time, but I needn't have worried. There was a glitch or two along the way, and far, far too many wires had to be untangled in the vicinity of the old telephone connection box, but things generally went swimmingly which, of course, you probably knew already, given that you're able to read this nonsense today...

NEW KIT

I am becoming massively irritated at the modern tendency towards having to keep on getting new bits and pieces of technological guff just in order to get things which used to work perfectly well without such equipment to continue working, when things used to suit me just fine as they once were.

I have, of course (and after everything I said recently), now bitten another “new technology” bullet, and forked out for a relatively cheap blu-ray player to assist me with the viewing of TV shows via this new-fangled “remote streaming” mularkey which has been causing me such grief lately, but “thereby hangs another tale…” (which is something I might actually have said if anyone had asked, but, as was recently pointed out, “nobody notices” what I write, so I may as well lie through my teeth at you…)

Anyway, a tale does indeed hang thereby and, whilst it’s not necessarily the most exciting of tales to tell, I’m going to tell it anyway.

You see, I’ve already explained why our relationship with our online video rental company had started to crumble and that we had considered many options for solving the problem, and this was much on my mind when I “happened to” pop into a branch of one particular branch of supermarket one evening knowing full well that they sold the particular brand of disc player which I had found to be most likely to solve the worst of our problems with the brand new system.

As I grabbed the bread and the bananas and the milk which, of all our perishables, were the ones which were the most in need of urgent replenishment, I “just happened” to drift into the electrical department and had a bit of a disappointing mooch around.

I say “disappointing” because I simply couldn’t see the particular item I wanted, and I started to slink away with an air of resignation when I spotted a couple of tatty looking boxes on a high shelf around a corner at the end of an aisle marked with the very labelling that I was looking for…

After mere milliseconds of internal strife and deliberation, the least tatty looking of the boxes was in my basket and I was skipping merrily towards the checkout with the probability of being potentially a lot more skint than I planned to be suddenly an imminent likelihood, but happy in the discovery of a moment’s elation born out of the turgid soup of retail therapy.

As I got in the car a few minutes later, poorer and on the defensive, I was asked “What did you buy?” and I reeled off a list including bread, bananas, milk… and ended it with a rather lame and quietly muttered “…disc player…”

In all fairness, the roof was not hit, and my long soliloquy of justification was probably unnecessary as we made our way homewards, although eyes were beginning to roll during the remaining two and a half conscious hours left of the evening before I finally gave up and went to bed, after failing to find any way to get the link to one particular streaming company, which was, unfortunately, the main reason for buying that device, to work at all.

It didn’t help, of course, that I’d managed to choose the one night that their entire network crashed to make my purchase, so that even the website bearing the helpful hints for setting up my device was actually unavailable as I floundered around both looking and feeling like the useless idiot I usually convince myself that I am when it comes to such things.

I had a flash of inspiration (or explanation) overnight, of course….

Well, perhaps not so much a “flash” as a “slow burn” but I realised that I probably had to create an account with one company and then key in the mysterious digits presented me by the machine on one of the many screens which I had seen, although tracking the right screen down again might take some doing…

I set up the account on a decent computing device, but at that point I was far from home and didn’t have the vital digits with me (and they changed anyway next time I switched on) so, once again, everything ground to a halt as I pondered about the problem from a distance whilst I couldn’t actually do anything to solve it…

So, that evening, I got home with a spare half hour to fill, fully expecting to all be a breeze and then spent twenty minutes floundering around looking for the internet on my TV before realising that I could make the link via my computer, and indeed within moments I had the “congratulations, your device is now registered” message once I’d made the mental connections between the instructions.

Kids find this stuff so instinctive now, but I’m left feeling like a total prawn because it takes me so long to figure it all out.

Anyway, after having achieved a successful synching feeling, I then immediately had to go out, so I still didn’t know whether it actually worked or not…

But happily I can report that it did, although now I have developed a form of “range anxiety” with regards to my monthly download limits which meant trying to find out my account details from my telephone service provider.

And thereby, dear reader, hangs another tale…

THE LATEST THING

I am, I suppose, not the most “cutting” edge of people when it comes to matters of new technology.  I don’t go out and buy the “latest thing” because (1) I can seldom afford it and (2) I tend to think that these days the “latest thing” tends to hang around for about two months before being superseded by the next “latest thing…”

So why exactly am I mentioning this today, you are perhaps wondering…?

Well, boys and girls, today I am mostly annoyed with my online DVD rental company.

We’ve been with them for about five years now, if not longer. Ever since, in fact, we decided that our (or rather my) accumulation of bought shiny discs was bordering on the ridiculous and that renting instead of buying might mean that we didn’t disappear under a pile of shiny plastic once the shelf space started to run out.

“Oh yes… So how did that work out for you, then…?”

“Not so well”, he said, emerging from under that very pile… But I suppose it did take a little longer than it might have done and we were able to sort of at least some of the chaff before we decided to part with our hard-earned.

Anyway, that’s not why I’m annoyed with them.  No, I’m annoyed with them because yesterday we finished watching season three of an old TV show which lasted five-seasons, and I went to add year four to the rental list (because you don’t want the computerised selection process to ever send you the years out of order, do you?) only to find that it was now only available as a download.

It was year two of “Dollhouse” all over again.

Now I know that this is the modern way, just as I know that we’ve already looked into the possibility of going down the download route and chosen to reject it.

You see, we accumulate TV on our own apparently incompatible (because we bought it too early) digital recording device at an alarming rate as it is, and it just sits there, waiting to be caught up with at some, as yet undefined, future point. If we go down the download route, we’ll just accumulate more of that kind of thing whereas the arrival of the disc always used to prompt us to switch off, calm down, settle ourselves in front of the TV and actually watch the bloody thing.

More annoying, I suppose, is the presumption involved of the whole thing. We liked things to be on shiny disc. I still do, to be perfectly honest with you. Just as I still want to be able to buy my music in a physical form. Having those discs arrive through the post kind of worked for us. But the company we use seem to think that everyone must by now have a PlayStation or a Wii or a Smart TV or a Blu-Ray player or the latest in laptop or tablet technology and, you see, we actually have none of these things, and, the part of me which rails against the continuous march of new technology adding to the pile of crap we’re going to leave behind us when we go, why the hell should I have these things?

We did consider trying to hook up the laptop to the TV as per suggestion only to find that it pre-dates such exciting developments and was probably bought an entire three months too early (you never can buy a gizmo at precisely the right moment, can you?) and so will require many other bits and bobs attaching to it, none of which (if you read the reviews) are guaranteed to succeed.

There is one other option we have, although that too requires yet another lead to be bought, and that involves making a portable device unavailable for the duration of the film and taking out another brand new account which would then need combining with the old one and which, quite frankly is taking a bloody liberty.

I know that I really ought to embrace the future, but these people with their “one size fits all” notions of the world really, really annoy me, and I do think that cancelling the account might be the best way to go, after all, I don’t think that they want the likes of me as a customer any more anyway.

It’s not as if we haven’t got anything else to watch, after all…

EXPERIMENT

Here's a thing...

This is an experiment  because I  haven't tried writing on this before. Anyway, I've

been meaning to try this for a while - ting the blog  an rexternal device - just

to see how asy t is... and it's not and to see how I ight do f  i was out and

about

precise key strokes seem to be the  key to it and switching off the nternal he

lp

anyway back to a real keyboard I think

What I was trying to say was this:

This is an experiment, because I  haven't tried writing anything of any substance or quantity on this particular device before. Anyway, I've been meaning to try this for a while - writing the blog on an "external device" - just to see how easy it is - and it's not!!! - and to see how I might cope with writing updates to these blog postings if I was out and about and away from a "proper" keyboard for any considerable length of time.

Using precise key strokes seems to be the  key to it and switching off any and all of the internal "help" that the device itself offers when it comes to writing... All of that predictive text nonsense, and the "auto-correction" facilities hat somehow seem to either leap to electronic conclusions, or delete the letters you've already typed, like an impatient teacher with a child they've already decided is utterly useless...

Anyway, until I learn how to do it all a bit better, I think that I'll go back to the real keyboard (the "normal" one with all the symbols on it, and which doesn't require "alt" keys, and holding down "shift" keys and the kind of manual dexterity and slenderness of digits that might give the average ant pause for thought and make it think that it might need to lose a few grammes), at least for a little while.

However, I'm sure that, with a little practice and a bit of patience, as well as experimenting with some  keyboard technique, maybe things will improve. After all, practice, as they say does make perfect, or at least as close as I'm ever likely to get...

Still, it might be useful for making notes and getting the gist of an idea down before it flitters away into the vault of forgotten notions. After all, it doesn't take a genius to work out what it was I was driving at in those opening paragraphs, but sometimes an ingenious idea can slip away from you and lie tantalisingly just beyond your grasp for the rest of time.

Or maybe I should just carry a notebook and pen around with me instead...

A WAGON TRAIN TO THE FUTURE

There was an article or two which came out last week announcing that scientists had had some success in creating a “tractor beam” which, incidentally, isn’t a large piece of steel that you attach to a piece of farm machinery, but a abbreviation of “attractor beam” which is the kind of electronic super-gizmo Captain Kirk used to use to drag bits of space debris, random shuttlecraft and long-lost super-criminals towards his spaceship at the click of a big switch or twelve.

This, I realised, would no doubt go some way towards creating a whole slew of tiresome articles (not unlike this one), claiming that the world is becoming more like “Star Trek” every day and what “visionary genii” were involved in creating that show fifty years ago, and perhaps quietly forgetting that the narrative needs of a TV show which was set-up to be basically a “Western set in Space” (or “A ‘Wagon Train’ to the Stars”) required the characters to talk to each other over huge distances, land on planets, and zap things with space guns ,and so they would probably have had to have such things anyway.

The cleverness of the designers of that show was that they came up with relatively practical (if a little chunky) designs which generally stand up to closer scrutiny today than one or two of the other props of the time, although I still recall Mr Scott effectively talking into a silver toaster festooned with Christmas lights in one early episode, so they didn’t get everything right.

The “chunkiness” can be forgiven because props needed to be practical and had to fit the quite frankly enormous batteries of the time in or around them somewhere, and, to be honest, most of the “designers of the future” back then failed completely to predict the miniaturisation of such things and the coming of wireless technology.

Of course when people claim that the ascendance of the mobile phone into our everyday lives was predicted by “Star Trek”, albeit in a world 200 years beyond our own, it’s a very easy analogy for them to make but, as ever, things are seldom that simple.

After all, if there had never been a single episode of “Star Trek” ever made, wouldn’t we still have had mobile phones anyway…?

I do suspect, however, that they might have looked slightly different. I have this sneaking suspicion that a lot of the people working in scientific R&D and in design studios across the globe are the sorts of people who might also be “Star Trek” fans, and that more than a few of them are rather keen to shape the world into its image so that they can fulfil their fantasy of growing up to actually live in a “Star Trek” universe.

Perhaps that is why they called that discovery a “tractor beam” in the first place...?

Okay, Warp Drive and Matter Transporters might still be some way off, but today you can have your Communicators, Tricorders and “Phaser Beam” generators if you choose to.

So, perhaps designers are Trekkies in disguise all wanting to turn the world into “Star Trek” but many of the aspects of the world we live in fail to live up to its standards, and our willingness to reach to the stars seems ever more diminished by modern financial limits, so that houses that could be built with all the modern environmental concerns (like built-in solar panels) are prohibitively expensive, and the short term economic thinking is that houses need to be cheap and affordable and such add-ons are unnecessary…

But this is always a problem when it comes to real people and their own personal needs and ambitions. We might all accept that it is in the long-term good for the economy that we don’t get a pay rise again this year, but our own very personal short-term thinking about pay is that we don’t like that idea all that much when we struggle to buy the season ticket or the petrol that actually gets us to work.

It’s a very hard sell to tell us that we’re going to have to start paying now for a High-Speed train which we might not be able to use until twenty years from now, by which time we might just have invested the first teleporters anyway.

Although I doubt it…

The E.U. seeing the wisdom of investing billions of Euros into research into the fabulous new discovery of the material we currently call Graphine might well mean that those vast spaceships might one day be able to leap off the drawing boards and head out towards the stars, but it’s hard to persuade people of what a miraculous material it might turn out to be until they start seeing some practical uses for the stuff.

Unless they’re “Star Trek” fans, of course…

ESCAPE TO YNYS MÔN

So anyway, I recently spent a week away – as best I could - from all types of personal technology which, as we all know, these days is almost entirely the same as being dead in this great big modern world of ours, except of course that it isn’t.

In fact, being away from all those bleeps and buzzes and rings and little irritations that come along with those things made me feel rather more alive than I actually had in a long time. The only moment when not having access to eine electronischedevisen, öder ein “Gizmo” (as I suddenly feel the need to refer to such things for no very good reason) became a slight problem was when we arrived at a much vaunted restaurant at just after 1.30 in the afternoon only to discover that they served lunches until from 12.00 to 1.30, which, considering the three mile drive through a maze of side roads, I like to think that they could have mentioned on the sign pointing off the main road.

Obviously, looking up their website would have prevented that little irritation from occurring, but equally, it was hardly the most tragic occurrence, and we did find somewhere else to eat. Equally, being “on holiday” should mean that you have a more “que sera sera” approach to your days as you drift around in unfamiliar territory.

And my! Aren’t I getting all multi-lingual today? It’s all this travelling, you see…? It broadens even the narrowest of minds…

Granted there might be those who suggest that being on Ynys Môn for a week is almost exactly the same as being dead anyway, but I would say “Yah, boo, sucks!” to that sort of suggestion, even if it was coming from me, in a manner designed to prove that I’ve not quite yet managed to have my mind completely broadened.

I did, of course, find that I had accidentally actually taken an electronic device with me, because I realised that my “work phone” was still in my jacket pocket when we arrived, but when I was caught idly (or perhaps craftily and surreptitiously) trying to switch it on during a quiet moment as I was listening to the test match on Sunday evening, my “media disease” was swiftly frowned upon and it didn’t happen again, perhaps not least because the battery life in these things is appalling and I hadn’t forgotten not to take the charging lead along with me.

Actually, though, it was a blessed relief to be free of the things for a few days. I rather hope that you can’t imagine how invasive those things can be when all you want to do is get away from them. I know that if I had switched the wretched thing on at all at any time for the rest of the duration, one of those little red lights would have been flashing away telling me that there was a “notification” of some message or other that was probably being quite successfully dealt with in my absence.

Me being me, however, I would have fretted and flapped and focussed about it and would simply have HAD to go and read it, which would have left me stroppy and anxious and, in the end, would have completely defeated the purpose of being on holiday at all, which was, of course, a rather desperate need to get away from it all, stop thinking about it all the time and to do something else for a change whilst spending some quality time with my beloved and not have to share around pieces of myself with the rest of the world and all that it demands of me.

In fact I still struggle to come to terms with the amount of people I see sitting on beaches staring at their little boxes, still desperate to stay in touch with their home life. As a child, one of the utter joys of my holidays was the chance to get away from the everyday and those dreary mundanities of real life and the same old faces, but I suppose that the world has changed, even in those faraway places, and people want to be able to keep in touch with those very same people that I would cross continents to get away from for a while.

And, of course, despite all of my fears, being away from my little web-based world didn’t stop it from turning. The world managed to tick along quite happily without me for a week and, upon my return it became swiftly apparent that hardly anyone had even noticed that I’d been away.

This should, of course, have given me the final push to properly decide to stay away permanently, but a long afternoon of trying to upload my holiday snaps to some website or other soon pulled me back in to the twisted web of website checking, albeit with a slightly refreshed point of view.

After all, when the only person who seems aware of your absence is a Twitter acquaintance from half a world away, and your blog counter shows that you’re read almost as much when you write nothing as when you write something, and your little red flags on your social networking site number precisely one, and your personal email account contains – after you’ve sifted through all of the detritus – also just one personal message, it does tend to make you think about how important you are to it and, consequently, how much importance you tend to give it that it really doesn’t deserve. But then getting away from it all can do that to you and give you a fresh perspective on just about everything, really…

Anyway, my week on Ynys Môn was very pleasant, thank you for asking, and whilst it didn’t quite let me escape from my media disease entirely, and I didn’t quite manage to fully escape the horrors of the run-up to the Festival of Five Hoops and was therefore fully aware of the terrifying morning-time televisual resurrection of Sian Williams after I’d thought that we were finally rid of her, I was even relaxed enough to deal with that, too.

I’m sure I’ll be talking about all of these things in greater depth sometime soon, so, as ever, stay tuned…

SHUTTLING OFF

Of course, the “piggy back” fly-pasts were impressive, invoking the image of those very similar test flights with dear old “Enterprise” in its own Jumbo Jet Combo back in the 70s, and I’m sure that the exhibits at each of the three - or is it four? - destination museums will be suitably impressive and awe-inspiring, but there was something quite sad about the transportation to their final resting places of the remains of the once rather glorious fleet of Space Shuttle Orbiters.

The Space Shuttle Discovery’s last flight, and the similar one made by Enterprise to New York a few days later, really felt like they marked the very end of an era, or at least, the beginning of the end of an era, as the remaining shuttles have yet to be transported.

After its 39 missions in space, a short hop on the back of a jumbo jet to take it to its final resting place at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. was never really going to be quite as impressive or spectacular as any of its previous flights, of course, but still the crowds came out to see what was, in the end, at least in part the final act of a programme which, whilst it might not exactly have “thrilled” the majority of us, was part of life for over thirty years.

It was also, I suppose, likely to have been one of those “last chance to see” moments in life as, seeing as there are a limited number of Orbiters and a finite number of places to which they are likely to be taken, it’s fairly unlikely that anyone will get that many chances in life to see one of them actually in the air, albeit hitching a ride atop another aircraft and not travelling under their own steam.

Well, not unless a bloody great asteroid turns up on a collision course and a maverick group of Space Jockeys are needed to blow the thing to kingdom come and one of the retired shuttles is the only thing available, and, I suspect that’s a fairly unlikely scenario.

Well, getting the shuttle out of mothballs and making it airworthy again, that is. Give or take a decade and I’m not sure anyone will have the knowledge and experience to actually manage that. 

However, I’m not quite as convinced about the unlikelihood of the asteroid...

It used to be all so different. The shuttle program(me) once represented the great hope for cheap, efficient reusable space travel in the days when we all thought we’d grow up to see hover-cars and personal jet packs and clothes made out of tin foil.

I wonder what happened to all of those dreams?

When I was younger, I seem to remember (although I am willing to be persuaded that this is an instance of my increasing susceptibility to “false memory syndrome”) that the Space Shuttle “Enterprise” did indeed once do, at the very least, a “fly-past” of the Manchester area on one of those Jumbo Jets during the years it was being tested. It may very well have even touched down at Manchester Airport, but I’m less sure of my “facts” about that.

In some ways they were always slightly disappointing from a certain point of view. After all, didn’t evil  zillionaire Hugo Drax build his own fleet of space shuttles to assist him in his plans for world domination in 1979’s “Moonraker”...? Where’s a bit of private enterprise when you need it, eh? Obviously, the whole “wiping out most of the world’s population” part of the plan might meet with a certain amount of customer resistance, but somebody building a private shuttle fleet does have its plus points. In fact, just to show that I’m not as averse to appreciating the march of capitalism and the power of market forces as some might have you believe, I think that the shuttles he built in the “private sector” were far better than the ones which NASA were building with public funding. Drax’s did, at least have working engines which made the whole opening scene a possibility, otherwise that entire James Bond film would have to be dismissed as a lot of old tosh...!

Oh, right... I see where you’re coming from now...

Still, back in the real world, I’ve written at some considerable length about the “Space Shuttle Program” before, of course, so I’m not planning (you might be surprised to hear...) to go over any more of that well-trodden old ground today. I merely wanted to take a moment to mark the perhaps final passing into history of one of the greatest engineering and scientific projects of the age.

As a post-script, the link below will take you, if you are so inclined, to an article I found online about the various final resting places of all of the surviving shuttles, which I hope that you will appreciate, and it may very well persuade you to take a trip to go and see one or more of them some day.

I know that I would like to...

Enjoy!

http://www.collectspace.com/shuttles/

SOUND AND LIGHT

Less than one hundred years ago, someone managed to synchonise a soundtrack with the flickering images of early cinema film and the talkies were born. “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” as the line so famously went, and, of course, we hadn’t.

Well, obviously people had been seen walking and talking in reality for centuries prior to that, in full colour and in 3-D, sometimes even on a stage, but in terms of cinema and storytelling, a new medium was born and, once we’d got over the limitations of the technology that led to a certain amount of rather “stilted” and “over-emphatic” performances due to the actors needing to be very close to the primitive microphones, pretty soon the “talkies” developed the vocabulary to become the entertainment medium that has become so popular to audiences all over the world for almost a century.

A few years earlier we had finally achieved wireless telegraphy just in time to hear the Titanic calling out in her distress, and about fifty years before that, a Morse message was finally successfully transmitted across the Atlantic from southern Ireland to Newfoundland and the world got a little smaller.

That world was still mostly lit by candles, oil lamps and gaslight and remained a very gloomy place once darkness fell. Early experiments with the mysterious force known as “electricity” led to arc lighting in public places, but that remained far too bright, expensive and downright dangerous for the average domestic living room. Later on, the filament led to the lightbulb and all of our lives eventually got a lot brighter, but even so, in the early days, such things were objects of wonder and amazement and people would go out of their way to witness early public demonstrations of this new fangled electric lighting, and these so-called “illuminations” could refer to even something that we would consider very unimpressive in our modern world.

Electricity became eventually something that we could control enough to start lighting our homes with extreme comfort and safety and, whilst the lighting in the average home is still about 500 times less intense than that of the great outdoors, we were no longer tied to the seasons and the natural cycle of the night and day and so our lives got infinitely more complicated (some might suggest better...) as we had far more hours to get stuff done in.

In the 1950s technology had come on in leaps and bounds and whilst the two world wars had managed to develop huge leaps in the name of science, our control over electricity was still rather clunky, with all those dials and tubes and great big switches to deal with, but somehow the world managed to work despite the lo-tech nature of it as it may seem to those brought up in a world where wireless has a truly different meaning to the meaning it had to my parents’ generation. I sometimes think about the almighty leap between those wax cylinders and those tiniest of iPods and wonder whether such an object would really seem like magic to someone from the Victorian era.

Movie makers, of course, were quick to embrace the advent of sound when it came in, and yet, rather strangely, almost overnight, the universal language of the silent era was lost to the world. Before sound came in, with just a piece of celluloid, a piano and a few caption cards in the language of choice, film entertainments could be shown almost anywhere in the world and the same laughter and heartaches could be experienced by almost anyone, anywhere. This strangely tragic side-effect is something that it has taken the motion picture industry almost ninety years to finally address in the rather wonderful movie “The Artist” which won all those awards recently, but that was really only the beginning, and developments in the technology used to make the sound and light show that we now think of as being movie magic are, quite frankly, astonishing.

The young people of fifty years ago would be amazed if someone told them what we can now do with pictures and sound, and yet many of them have lived to see it. When you compare a modern television set with one of its forebears of only sixty or so years ago, they barely resemble the same technology. The same goes for home music which has moved on from wax cylinders to records to tape to compact discs to just sitting there in a tiny box without any visible means of transmission at all...

As I said... Magic!

Nowadays we can pretty much listen to our sound and watch our vision pretty much anywhere and it’s difficult to imagine just how much “better” it can get but I do wonder what people from fifty years from now would tell us, if they could, about the primitive devices that we’re all carting about with us...

And if I could even begin to predict what those devices might be and how they would look, or even how they might work, well, I suspect that I wouldn’t be sitting here droning on about the past, but I’d be out there conjuring up those next miracles which, I’m almost certain, won’t resemble the future as we see it in one way at all. After all, even the most forward-thinking minds of the last century would have struggled to believe that we could have music players with no moving parts that can be about the size of a tie-pin, carry a whole library of music and sound like an orchestra, or a television the size of a wall and about as deep as a small box of chocolates, or that we could pluck power from mid-air, or make ceramics and fibres that are stronger than steel.

It’s truly a world of miracles we live in, and, if we do all need to keep looking and listening to all that sound and light, sometimes we also need to stop and think, because it’s the thinkers and visionaries who will bring us the next big thing and when they do, I’m sure the rest of us will all still be wondering how on Earth they managed to come up with it.