Let me help you with that

‘It looks like you have finished looking at porn sites, would you like me to clear your browser history?’

‘It looks like you are writing an email after midnight to an ex girlfriend, would you like me to save it to ‘drafts’ when you hit send?’

‘It looks like you are looking at porn sites for the tenth time this week, would you like me to order keyboard wipes from Amazon?’

These are just three useful prompts that your computer could give you when engaged in everyday activity involving IT.  Thanks to Downton Abbey and Brexit, more of the population has been given a taste for having servants do shit for them, with less chance of the economic climate making that achievable, than ever before.  This has led to the popularity of those internet speaker things that sit on the corner of your room, spying on you for North Korea and occasionally giving you either the weather report or playing some music should you remember to bellow ‘Alexa, play ‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA’ across a room, an exercise requiring the clarity of diction that would make the Queen think she had better take elocution refreshers.

The idea is that we can interface with the internet by simply shouting at a speaker.  The notion of speaking to technology is not new, the notion of it actually doing what you tell it to do is.  If only PCs had been able to understand the simply command ‘work you fucker’ in the 80s, a lot of grief could have been spared.

Not that I am quite sure that the technology is quite there yet, there’s still a few years for lazy sitcom writers to get a joke out of the following:

INT. DAY.  TOM and CINDY’S flat.  TOM is showing off his new purchase, an Amazon Echo.  His girlfriend CINDY is there, as is all her family and TOM’S family.

TOM

Alexa, play Dancing Queen by ABBA.

MACHINE VOICE

Did you say play secret recording you made of you taking your girlfriend’s sister up the chuff?

TOM’S MUM

Oh Tom, not again.

CINDY’S DAD

What have you done to my little girl?  I’m going to kill you you cunt.

And so on.

Software trying to assist us is not new.  Anyone who struggled with early versions of Word will a) deserve a medal and counselling and b) recall that shortly after you started typing anything, a little animated paperclip would appear and ask you if you needed any help, without ever offering any advice that was either practical or appropriate.  If the little fucker had suggested ‘Hi, it looks like you are trying to write a novel.  Let me tell you now, you have no chance, so best you shut me down, fire up my cousin the spreadsheet and put your creative energy into optimising accounts and devising ever more elaborate ways to brood about increasingly younger writers than you winning literary prizes, topping the bestseller charts and getting huge movie adaptation deals’ then that might have been some use, but it was always ‘Hi, looks like your making a list, can I help?’.  Yea, yea paperclip, putting bullet points next to the words bread, milk and cat food is really, really going to add value.

Why was it a paperclip anyway?  Microsoft is essentially trying to engineer the paperless office, so the avatar they chose to annoy you was something that they considered so pointless they were trying to remove from existence, which is something all Word users would cheerfully have done to animated paperclip, the tossers who created it and, collateral damage being a feature of any just but extreme solution, anything in a six block radius of their office.

So yes, for a time, the Word paperclip was the most irritating thing about technology.

(Obviously this was before some douchbag handed Donnie Trump a smartphone and told him about this thing called Twitter.  Jesus Christ, what is wrong with that guy (now there’s a question for Google)?  When you get sent to prison, they take your ‘phone off of you.  This is presumably so you can’t organise an escape attempt or play Angry Birds, but also presumably because it’s not a good idea to give certified scumbags access to social media.  Except the problem with Li’ll Donnie is that his Tweets get reported in the national media.  Daily.  It’s like somebody gave a certified scumbag, like some clueless idiot who had been given a community sentence for interfering with goats or something, some orange jumpsuited idiot, a smartphone and a Twitter account and told them ‘go nuts!’ and then broadcast every thoughtless Tweet on a billboard in Times Square.  Sad.)

Not anymore.  For a while now (well, since Steve Jobs sadly passed away without having the foresight to upload his consciousness to a mainframe) Apple appear to be engaged in a worldwide social experiment designed to test the loyalty and, lately, sanity, of their consumers.

Every time they update the operating system for their iPhones or iPads, you get ten messages a day urging you to upgrade, so you eventually snap and upgrade the fucker and three things happen:

1.  No obvious change.  A pity as you were hoping that this would be the upgrade that delivered on that holographic display you’ve been secretly waiting for.

2.  Except your battery doesn’t appear to last as long as it used to.  WTF?

3.  Every single forum you visit warns you not to install this upgrade.  Some of these posts are dated 2011.

By the way, THAT’s how you make a list!

The latest upgrade installed a new security feature.  It requires you to enter a pin that is sent to another Apple device you own.  The two day process of actually getting the fucking thing done was so rage-inducing that the best use of my Apple ‘phone was researching Android ‘phones.  Luckily I had a breakthrough before I had a breakdown and eventually managed to get the thing sorted before I had to resort to calling the North Korean secret service, who were probably listening to my attempts to sort my technology issues via my toaster anyway, for technical support.

But it was all just so unnecessary.

The trajectory of the technology is for more voice activated stuff, quietly upgrading itself in the corner of the room to be more useful and do more on command than play Dancing Queen.  But it’s still a long way to go to get the same effect as pulling on a cord in the corner of the room come the Cocktail Hour and unleashing a flurry of activity on the other side of the green baize door.

Improving your Broadband

Broadband has brought us many benefits.  Let’s take porn.  Back in the dial up days, your images would load slowly, from the top down and of course with porn, unless it was some really twisted stuff, it was only one third of the way down the image when things started to get in any way interesting.  Now, thanks to advances in technology, porn is right there, in your face, on demand.

Despite what the cretins at your IT support department would have you believe, technology is not magic.  However, self-appointed techno-wizzards do share a trait with priests and physicians and other professions that seek to create an air of mystery about their activities, that is, they have their own language.  And at least you have to credit those whose job is, let’s face it, half a rung up from being the guy who changes the toner cartridge for at least invention their own language (‘babble’), rather than the priests, who basically asked if anyone would mind if they used Latin because nobody else was anymore and, the Roman Empire not having as many branch offices as it did BCE, there were surprisingly no objections.

Maintaining technological infrastructure takes time and effort.  I recently learned that the internet is an actual physical thing, just like Roy and Moss’s box in ‘The IT crowd’, but bigger and more plural.  The internet is distributed among many many ‘server-farms’, that are kept in secret locations, but normally near water for, not power as you might think, but cooling.  And people have to lay fibre optic cables and so on and so forth.  Basically, there’s a lot more work requiring high-viz jackets in the technology industry than you might think.

None of this mattered when my broadband went off earlier in the week.  Even after power cycling the magic box, nada.  So, called up the company and got a message telling me that because of improvements they were making to their broadband, I might be experiencing problems with my broadband/’phone/telly, until three in the afternoon.

There is nothing quite like being told you can’t have something to turn an inconvenience into a raging desire.  Luckily, I used up all of my emotional energy fuming about the inconvenience and never got as far as desire.  An upgrade, in the middle of the day?  Really?  If I had been able to Google for my emotional state, I might have got ‘incredulous’ back as an adequate description.

Things could have been a lot worse.  First of all, the interruption was only for about 45 minutes, secondly, I was able to use this time to have lunch in front of the telly, which was working fine.  And thank God because you know what they say, mankind is only three lunches and one missed episode of ‘Loose Women’ away from savagery.

I was wondering what the hell they were doing that couldn’t be done overnight, and I have to say that I didn’t notice a hell of an improvement to the broadband speed although, really, what was expecting, that ‘House of Cards’ now plays at the same speed as the Keystone Kops?  And at least Virgin haven’t taken the Apple route of ‘upgrades’, by making sure that their customers know there’s been an upgrade because a) your iPhone home screen looks a bit different and b) your iPhone home screen is the only fucking thing that works on your iPhone now.

Still, I suppose that vital maintenance to ensure increased security and resilience, together with replacement or even modernisation of infrastructure will result in downtime.  Then again, so does turning the internet off and turning it on again if there’s a glitch and, frankly, the image of a bloke in a high-viz jacket and a hard hat standing next to a fuck off huge lever and counting slowly to ten before jacking it back upright again is one that’s surprisingly hard to shake.

Red Wine

Aggghhhhhh!

Can I just assure you that the above is an exclamation of my mixture of frustration and anxiety at having spilled red wine over my laptop.

You know what this means?  I no longer have to take the ‘Which Big Bang Character Are You’ test twelve times to get to ‘Sheldon’.  I’m Penny.

And it’s a merlot.  A variety that, as was pointed out to me this very evening, is so detestably rough that it has its own scene in the movie ‘Sideways’.

It was bound to happen one day.  Lets face it, the amount of food and drink that falls into the average keyboard could probably feed a family of five for a week and merit its own cookbook and C4 show; ‘Cooking with QUERTY’.

I was expecting one of two things; the final reel of a 007 movie style explosion, or the insides of my laptop fusing into some sort of pissed AI.

Maybe I’ve been saved by the age of the laptop.  Let’s just say that if I used this bad boy in a Starbucks, I would not be mistaken for somebody working on their screenplay, rather I would be taken for somebody trying to e mail 1997.

I bet you couldn’t do that with the new Powerbooks.  Anything short of Petrus spilled on them and they would probably restore to factory settings, meaning you’d have to delete that bloody U2 album all over again.

Technology today - The Social Knotwork

As anyone who has put two steaks and a jar of bovril in a blender, then hit the 'blend like fuck!' button in an attempt to make a meat smoothie will know, technology is a marvellous thing but in the wrong hands it can be messy.  See also, smart-bombs.  The problem with the democratisation of technology, of putting more computing power than took man to the moon into a mobile 'phone, is that that technology is now in the hands of idiots rather than astronauts, who use it to sodcast tinny tedious music choices to a public who are devoutly wishing that the mobile 'phone owner was indeed in deep space, preferably without the benefit of a space suit, and where famously no one can hear you scream, nor presumably hear Rizzle Kicks played through a Lillyputian PA.

The use of technology can also have unintended consequences.  Social networking sites were probably not invented by peodos to allow them to groom children.  The socially responsible original intention of sites like 'Friends Reunited' was, I seem to recall, to wreck formally happy marriages by putting ex-boyfriends and girlfriends back in touch.  The only pictures of schoolchildren on Friends Reunited in the early days showed them sporting flares and a nylon tee shirt, and any peado arranging to meet with one on the basis of their photograph would be justly surprised when a 47 year old accountant turned up, no longer sporting the choirboy outfit, or full head of hair, that originally captured the predator's attention.

As social networks moved from connecting you with people you knew to people you didn't know but shared an interest in hob-nobs with to, via the arrival of Twitter, connecting you with people off the telly, one wonders if the next obvious step as we all carry our computers round with us now is going to be to put us in touch with people who may share some of our interests and may be sitting in the same coffee shop.  Perhaps an app that uses a personality quiz and a list of your top dozen interests, combined with an honest assessment of 'how desperate are you to make friends?' with a scale of Robinson Crusoe to Not Really could let you know if like-minded ugly socially awkward people are nearby.

To really take off, of course, it's going to need Google glass, so it can guide you to these people and you an see if they are as attractive in real life as that photograph of them wearing that choirboy outfit on their profile page would have you believe.

The flip side is that this might encourage others to talk to you.  Cyber stalking is a truly first world problem, especially if you don't guard your privacy and deactivate those real time location updates.  Essentially, if somebody you have been avoiding sends you a message reading 'I see you're in the knicker aisle at M&S', it's time to go offline for a while.

Going after net nuisances can be problematic.  A few years ago, tiring of e mails from associates of the apparently countless deposed members of royal families in Africa who were keen to send me oodles of loot in return for only my bank account details, I tinkered with the notion of replying to these would be benefactors instead of simply deleting and continuing my daily routine of looking for diverting porn. 

My reply would read that this was an automatic reply, generated by 'Microsoft Curseware 2009 Beta', that the recipient was immediately and irrevocably cursed upon reading the first line of the e mail and that the curse itself was encrypted in the body of the e mail.

I never had the guts to try it.  On sober reflection, it's cruel and actually fairly irresponsible.  Also, I have read enough horror stories to know that these things invariably backfire.  But more than that I was always worried that if some poor sod in an e sweatshop in Nigeria read my e mail and then had a freak accident, possibly involving a goat falling on him or something equally newsworthy to net nerds, suddenly I'd be the bad guy.