WhatIwantedtotalkaboutis

computers

and               their

profoundlyinhumanspeedofuse-it'snotthattheygoinhumanlyfastnecessarily-weexpectourtaskstobecompletedinstantly

but

whathappenswith  all     the             software           I've

everknownisthattheimmediatetasksyou'replacingonthecomputerareonlyonepartofthedemands
placedonthemachinessystems;theantivirussystemthepowermanagementsystemandfranklygodknowswhat
all

conspire to

createtheseburstsofnearinstantperformancecoupledwithstrangelullswhichhavenorelationtowhatI
Imightbedoingorthinking...andasaresultIfeelalternatelyrushedthenfrustratedinaclassic"hurryupandwait"
situation.Thisbleedsoverintomylifegenerally,andIfindmyselffeelingtheinternalpressurewhichseemstobe
referredtoas'paceoflife'-thisinternalpressure(maybethewordI'mlookingforis'stress')spikessuddenlyassoonasacomputerisswitchedon.

(I'm just listening to this program on Radio 4, about pace of life; ironically, I'm simultaneously writing a blog entry. 

It reminded me, though, to write the above, which is something I've been wanting to write about for a while now; the effect heavy computer use has on my perception of pace of life. Which, incidentally, is a very clumsy phrase for the feeling of internal pressure which I, personally, feel when I think of 'pace of life' - a perpetual driving force, an unease I feel when I'm sitting still. 'Pace of life' doesn't quite cut it, somehow; it feels a sufficiently important concept to have its own word. I bet there's a word for it in German, or French.)

Does anyone else feel this? I'd like to make a plea to OS programmers - investigate 'cadence' and please make an effort to make the actions your programs' users experience work at a more human speed. Let's face it, compared to computers we are pretty slow beings, and it seems to me that a truly elegant design would space out the things that people see with activities which the program undertakes, but the user doesn't see - and thus create a computer which works with a steady rhythm and cadence. This may just be my age talking, of course - I've notice even people only a few years younger than me seem to use their computers so much more quickly than I do. On the other hand, they do seem to miss when they try clicking icons, so maybe I just make them feel nervous. Does anyone else feel this, though? This high-stress feeling which coincides with the high-pitch, high-frequency whine of a computer fan? This lack of a human-sized cadence?

I have a confession to make.

At the beginning of the summer, I had cause to book some train tickets for a weekend trip to London. I booked them well in advance, via the website of the train company involved - the estimable but increasingly inaccurately named Great North Eastern Railway. The confirmation page poppeed up, complete with the reference number which I had to take to the station to collect my tickets. I duly printed this out, and thought no more about it - until the day I was due to travel. The timetable was a little tight, so I was going to the station straight from work - but that morning, I got to work and realized I had left the piece of paper (with the reference number) at home. With no time to go back and retrieve it, I worried briefly - but then I realized: all I had to do was log on to the GNER website, call up my account details, and the transaction would be recorded there. I logged on, found my account details, and inspected my list of recent transactions.

It was empty.

Huh?

"Okay," I thought to myself (and bear in mind, this was about three weeks after I'd booked the tickets), "maybe I didn't use the GNER website; maybe I used the trainline website." (For non-UK residents, thetrainline.com is a website devoted to selling train tickets. Hence the name.) So I called up the trainline website, and checked. But no! No recent orders there, either! My order had disappeared!

So I got onto their helpdesk, and received this advice: order more tickets, then apply for a refund on your old ones.

That was it, and in about as many words, too. No 'sorry we can't help', or 'you poor thing, what a terrible position'. In fact, it was more like 'we think you're probably trying it on, so buy some tickets you cheapskate and we'll consider whether to give you your money in our own damned time.' On the face of it, this advice, while irritating, stupid and rude, was not utterly foolish; but what got me steamed up was two particularly personal aspects. First, these tickets are not cheap, and if the refund did not arrive promptly, I was going to go over my overdraft limit and get charged by my bank for the privilege. Second, I had originally booked first class tickets (really, the only way to travel), and first class tickets bought 'on the day' are ruinously expensive, so I would be travelling cattle-class instead. Argh.

Anyway, I had a nice weekend in London, and wrote a rude letter to GNER's customer service explaining the situation and grousing about the abruptness of their support staff.

And waited.

Six weeks later (knowing that by now I was going to get overdraft charges two months in a row, and by a margin which a GNER refund would have cured), I wrote another letter, angrier and (um, much) more sarcastic than the last. I printed out the customer support emails I'd received, and was about to attach them to the latter as proof of abruptness, when I realized I'd actually emailed the support staff the thetrainline.com, not GNER. Oops. So now I was complaining about the rudeness of someone else's support staff.

And then several things happened at once. First, I got a nice letter of apology from GNER, saying they were sorry I'd been dealt with abruptly, and of course they were refunding my tickets, and here were some vouchers to spend on more train tickets. (The value of the vouchers didn't quite cover the overdraft charges, but hey ho).

The other thing that happened was that my girlfriend - who'd been living with me at the time, and doing all her internet stuff on my laptop - checked her email for the first time in several months, and discovered an email from GNER saying 'your tickets have been ordered and are ready to pick up from the station.' I'd accidentally ordered them on her login, and they'd been quietly sitting in her account waiting to be used.

So I'd been complaining to GNER and demanding an apology for a mistake I'd made, and topped it off with griping about someone else's support staff.

Bugger.

Here's a theory:

Technology is ultimately driven by anti-social tendencies.

I don't mean criminal tendencies - I just mean our reluctance to communicate with other human beings. Now, at a fundamental level, this is self-evidently true, because the inevitable alternative to using technology is to use more manpower (I use the term in a gender non-specific way, obviously). Ever since some guys sitting around a dusty river delta on the southern Mediterranean decided that what the skyline really needed was some really big triangles on it, the way to make things happen is either (a) use lots of people, or (b) invent some clever gizmo that means you need fewer people to do the job. If we were a species who genuinely and wholeheartedly revelled in each others' company, then why bother with technology? Every job would be a big party.


This tendency has become ever more obvious as time goes on. The Walkman, of couse, was perhaps the first technology which made the trend explicit, but it was going on for a long time before that. The invention of writing neatly circumvents all that tedious business of sitting around listening to old geezers sounding off about stuff (what overly-respectful anthropologists call the 'oral tradition'). Transport, in general, is devoted to getting you from where you are (where the people are dull) to where you want to go (where the people sound more interesting). Later on, the trend accelerates: the first web cam was invented because a bunch of geeks couldn't keep a coffee pot full - not in and of itself a technically demanding task, but one which required rather more communication than they were willing to partake in.


Now some might argue that certain technologies have enabled us to communicate over long distances - something which must surely be inherently social. I disagree. I would suggest that these technologies actually allow you to talk to people you already know but who are not within shouting distance, thus saving you from the terrible prospect of having to communicate and get along with strangers who happen to be within earshot. Thus you are mercifully spared the prospect of having to make new friends by being able to communicate with your few old ones wherever they may be. What's more, most of the so-called 'enabling technologies' that we're talking about here are ones which enable you to find and talk to people who share a similar view of life to yourself. That's great for making friends quickly; but it also requires considerably less social skill to talk to someone who basically agrees with you, than someone who doesn't. Someone once said, 'each generation is its own secret society'. Communication technologies seem to have the universal effect of exaggerating the barriers which set each group apart as different, simply by allowing us to indulge our anti-social tendency to ignore those with whom we might have differences.


I'm not saying technology is a universally bad thing. I just think we should be honest about our motivations.

Talking of narratives (well, I was), Sony has unveiled a new range of eco-friendly product concepts (check out the 'no photos' sign in the back of this, er, photo). Most popular seems to be the 'Spin 'N Snap' digital camera (it's the one that looks like a slightly flattened video cassette) - stick your fingers in the two holes and give it a twirl to power it up.


Personally, I'm a bit baffled as to why Sony unveiled this range (which is called 'odo'). From a styling point of view they're deeply unprepossessing, and let's face it, since windup radios have been around for a while, these aren't particularly revolutionary in concept. I'm normally a big fan of Sony's industrial design department, who do an excellent job in spite of being hampered at every turn by their bosses' insistence on lumping everything with a proprietary format... but this leaves me totally cold. I mean, what is that viewer thing?

Personally, my feeling is that somebody took their eye off the ball here. IMHO, there are relatively few people that actually need to watch a DVD in the bathroom; basically, it's a prop for your make-believe life where you live in the future. These gadgets do not, it seems to me, have that "just dropped in from 2059" look which is the prerequisite for this sort of gadgetry. They're clunky - even the camera, which is definitely the best of the bunch. They just don't fit into the 'living in the future' story that gadgeteers like to tell themselves. And maybe I'm missing something, but the technology, while admirable, doesn't seem to me to be sufficiently exciting to distract from the clunky design.

On the other hand, this is Japan we're talking about. Where even the trains have cute little ears. So maybe it's just jarring to my Western sensibilities.
A few photos here

At the moment Scotland is in the throes of an election, so on Saturday morning I had the joy of a big wodge of political junk mail being thrust through my door, all wrapped up in a pizza delivery leaflet.

One leaflet in particular caught my eye. It was from the Liberal Democrats, who I would normally vote for (being solidly bleeding-heart liberal and middle class). However, in a bid to encourage people to vote tactically, they included the following bar graph:

It's a two horse race: Tories and SNP have no chance of winning in this area, so vote Lib Dem or get Labour!

It took me a while, in my addled pre-breakfast state, to work out what was wrong with this graph, but when I did I was extremely irritated. The Liberal Democrats have a bit of a reputation for sharp practice in local election campaigns, but to me this is a vote-loser. The most charitable explanation is that it's a formatting error - they chopped off the top of the Labour bar to fit more stuff on the leaflet - but frankly, so what? As far as I'm concerned, this is a blatant and stupid attempt to mislead the electorate. Having politicians who lie to you is one thing - but you at least expect them to be good at it.

The ironic thing is that on the back of this self-same leaflet was a big blank area, headed by the question, "tell us about problems in your area" - so if anybody bothered to reply, the Liberal Democrat office will be awash with these bar graphs. Wonder if they've noticed. I wonder if they care.

Being savaged by a sociology professor might seem about as scary as having your ankles viciously drooled over by an elderly terrier, but Boston's recent (over)reaction to a viral marketing campaign is given the once-over here by Dion Dennis:
"Not surprisingly, there's been a steady outflow of educated Millennials from the Bay State to points South and West, where a younger, educated demographic is welcomed and treated with greater public courtesy. [7] The Bay State response to a benign set of LED graphics, when compared to how these crudely drawn Mooninites were viewed in other venues across the U.S., makes the point unusually clear."

Via Bruce Sterling.

I’ve just finished reading a truly terrifying article in this week’s New Scientist. Not the one about Ebola sweeping across Africa. Not the one about why the world’s poor will be the greatest victims of global warming. No. The really scary one is about home schooling. It’s scary because teaching your kids at home is an increasingly popular option in the USA, and it is strongly linked to the aggressive Christian organisations who are successfully lobbying nationwide against evolution and in favour of creationism.

Now I have no wish to upset anyone who might read this, but I absolutely draw the line at creationism, and so-called ‘intelligent design’. There are clearly a lot of very smart people (way smarter than me) who believe in it, but it simply makes my jaw drop that anyone can believe in the literal truth of the Bible. And the idea that the natural world somehow required an intelligent designer leaves me baffled. I regard it as intellectual laziness.

But enough of that - the ins and outs of the scientific debate are not scary. What I find truly scary, though, is the idea of places like Patrick Henry College, in Purcellville. It’s a college which requires its students to have a literalist belief in the Bible (even Leviticus? How?), and grooms them to be the next leaders of the country. And it does very well; in 2004, despite only being open for four years, it filled 7 out of the 100 internships in the White House, and provided six interns working for Congress and eight for federal agencies (including two for the FBI). Now this might be a flash in the pan, thanks to the religious fervour of the current incumbent at the White House, but I’m kind of doubting that.

On the other hand, the school clearly provides an excellent liberal arts education (with a strong emphasis on debating and rhetoric). These children are explicitly being groomed to lead the country. What’s wrong with having well-educated, focussed people running the country? Well, apart from the fact that it’s almost always people who are extremely well-educated but extremely narrow-minded that produce the biggest disasters in human history (Nazi Germany being the first example that springs to mind – extremely smart, extremely dogmatic, skilled in rhetoric and propaganda, democratically elected…), apart from that… apart from that, um… actually, do you really need an ‘apart from that’? Isn’t that enough? We’re talking about a group who are taught that global warming isn’t something to worry about because (a) God would never let something like that happen to his creation, or (b) it isn’t happening, or (c) it’s all part of the road to the Rapture, and should be welcomed (and maybe even hurried along a bit). And these are the people we want to lead the world’s only superpower? What makes me truly sick is the certainty that even if they did manage to wreck the world in search of the Apocalypse, and by some miracle we managed to get some precious few rockets off the planet to carry on eking out an existence somewhere else, they’d still find a reason to talk their way on board…

... holding cups, presumably.

Jessica Helfand rants about cupholders, and other decadent artefacts which are undermining our society's moral fibre (like manicures). It's a funny article, and I started out agreeing with her - my parents recently bought a new Volvo which had, if I recall correctly , SEVEN cupholders between FOUR people - but when she says that "it vexes me to think that design, in this context, is merely a support mechanism for increased comfort and added convenience" - I can't help thinking "well, isn't that what design is? A mechanism for making life easier?"

So anyway. I really just wanted to record the moment that the phrase "security beverage" entered the language.

1000 words of advice to design students, from core77's Allen Chochinov. And yeah, I said design, but some of it still applies to art students, I think. Particularly the stuff about getting off-campus and photographing your work.

Why on Earth am I here? What am I doing with my life? How the hell did I end up here, doing this? More to the point, who picked up my life, 'cause this one sure doesn't feel like it belongs to me. And whoever's got it, can I have it back, please?

...urgh. Not yet 9am, and already I'm riven by self-doubt. It's gonna be a bad day. Oh well - nothing for it but to crank up the Radiohead and knuckle down. Like the man said, some days you're the grasshopper, some days you're the ant.

Right now, though, I feel more like the slime left in the bottom of the washing machine drawer.

Are oranges the messiest fruit to eat, or what? I always make a complete mess of peeling them.