16 posts tagged “technology”
A pointer from Greg to this great Douglas Adams piece. It's so quotable, I can hardly stand it. I particularly enjoyed this, which I've heard before but never seen so beautifully summed up:
1) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
I am more than thirty years old. This may explain my aversion to using the camera on my phone.
And if you ever need to explain social media to anyone, you might try this:
We are natural villagers. For most of mankind's history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.
Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn't even know to have names for them.
I don't think the man ever wrote a boring word in his life.
Ours is a geekier-than-average household, but whilst I am a bit on the geeky side, it's B that really keeps the side up. One of the symptoms of this is a suspiciously elastic 'gadget budget' and a never-ending list of of 'upgrade projects'. Although I think I am reasonably tolerant of this, B has begun to try and save himself some earache by sneaking these projects past me - cross-reference his guilty look when caught attempting to smuggle a second Media Centre into the house ("It's not mine, I'm mending it" - which to be fair, he was).
So picture the scene on Friday evening - I am working from home and am still in the study when B comes home from work. He pops in to say hello and then installs himself in the kitchen, which I don't really notice until there is a series of crashes and bangs.
Me: "What are you doing in there?"
Him: "Nothing..."
<crash>
So being the nasty suspicious creature that I am, I go into the kitchen to see what all the noise is, where I find everything in disarray, some very sad looking speakers on the worktop, and some very new-looking speakers flanking the Soundbridge (used for listening to iTunes or internet radio).
Me <trying not to laugh>: "Why exactly do we need these?"
Him: "Ehm... well, it's so that the sound quality will be better and... ehm..." <has flash of inspiration> "I can spend more time doing the washing up".
Can't really argue with that, can I?
Distracted by the internet? Never... Well OK, maybe sometimes. Meg Rosoff asks a very good question:
Are there people out there, the mentally disciplined, who don't start at Wikipedia looking for the birthdate of William Shakespeare for a casual aside in a bit of dialogue and end up four hours later, via a wonderfully logical train of net-thought, booking a birds of prey day at Mary Arden's cottage for a child's birthday party four months from now?
There may be, but I'm not sure I'm one of them.
I have often heard it said that using a Mac is a more intuitive experience than a using PC. I couldn't possibly say if this is true or not - for one thing I think that one person's intuitive is another person's design nightmare - but it certainly isn't true if you have been using a PC for the last 12 years.
I was just trying to find out how you do 'print screen' using a Mac... On a PC this is pressing the Alt + Print Screen keyboard buttons (or Ctrl + Print Screen) - on a Mac, it's pressing Command + Shift + 3. The plus side is that the Mac then automatically prints the screen to a file on your desktop. The downside is that I could have sat here trying different key combinations for the rest of my life before I accidentally stumbled on that one... as opposed to pressing a button handily labelled 'Print Screen'...mutter mutter grumble grumble.
So how much does it matter if you are blogging, Facebooking, Myspacing - sharing the details of your life online in any way, shape or form? I imagine that for many people, they don't give a second thought to how it may impact their life 'offline' - right up to the point where they find their online life caused them to miss out on a job because they are 'ethically unsuitable' for the organisation.
Since Emily Nussbaum covered Generation Y's increasing willingness to share every detail of their personal lives online in her piece Say Everything, I've seen a number of interesting posts mulling over the consequences - is this something younger people will come to regret as they get older and grow more conservative, or is there going to be a cultural shift that will mean your youthful Facebook profile won't count against you, as the person hiring you has one too?
I'm inclined to think the latter, but I also couldn't agree more with Antony Mayfield, that managing your personal online reputation will become a core life skill.
I think my office is pretty nice. Big desk. Comfy chair. Nice lady that brings delicious pasta-based lunches. But it's not a patch on any of these.
When I wrote my first post, I said that one of the reasons I wanted to blog was so that I could keep track of all the interesting stuff I stumbled across as I wandered round t'internet.
I wonder if I would ever have started a blog if Tumblr had been around at the time. Is it greedy (or stupid) to try and do both, I wonder?
Lifehacker (yes, I know I'm obsessed) has a great post on how to tumble.
Bored of your plain-looking personalised Google homepage? Now you can dress it up in one of 6 different themes. I had to give mine a bit of a shove before the themes option appeared, but it eventually did, and I think I like it. Time will tell if the sunrise/sunset feature works outside the US...
(via Lifehacker)
Update: Guardian Unlimited's Organ Grinder and Valleywag are less than impressed.
