The Modern Digital Age

After that last little condemnation of technology, it seems that - a recurring theme in the last month or so of my life - the machines have begun their uprising and have started to conspire against me. Since the machines don't have a consciousness of their own, however, they require human hosts to carry out their annoyance bidding; somehow, even though lacking innate intelligence, the machines are clever like that.

My father recently purchased a new laptop and for the weeks leading up to this event, as well as the weeks after it, I've been cast in the role of super-nerdy-genius-tech-expert-with-thick-black-rectangular-glasses-to-match. Dad's old laptop - i.e. my really old laptop - has fallen victim to one of humanities biggest downfalls: time. As it happens, even soulless technology can't escape the fact that it too has a predetermined lifespan on this Earth. Right now, the old laptop currently plods on akin to an 80-year-old human being: it takes its time getting up, moving around and generally doing things, you occasionally have to tell it the same thing seven times before the message sinks in and it's brain is full to capacity with things it can't forget which essentially clog up the memory so no more can be remembered.

The entire prospect of my father buying a new laptop essentially boils down to him having a multitude of perplexing questions about technology which stem from the fact that the world of technology is vast, ever-changing and new, whereas my father is neither of these. Now I'm not really one to speak ill of close relatives at the best of time, let alone in a public space such as this, so it is with only the greatest love and adoration that I make the following remark that while I wouldn't particularly call my father "old" as such, well... being my father, he is, in fact, older than myself. It eventually transpired that he wanted to transfer whatever pictures and whatever music files existed on the old laptop to the new one. Effectively this now makes the old laptop completely redundant that we might as well pop it in a padded box, switch on the electric oven, gather a small congregation of tablets, smartphones and handheld consoles to attend a small service led by an iPod, which will eventually close the proceedings by playing the X Factor's rendition of Hallelujah as sung by Alexandra Burke to fully epitomise it as an essential funeral song for the Modern Digital Age.

Dad also wanted to know how we could transfer his internet banking to the new laptop. I began to explain that this wouldn't particularly matter since this is achieved through the websites of whichever banking firm you happen to hold an account with. I tried to bring an explanation of the internet to a basic level using words along the lines of "the internet is everywhere in the whole world, not just on one computer" but this just served to worry him further that everyone on the planet was able to access his bank details.  In the light of the content of this particular paragraph, I'd just like to clarify that: Dad, if you've somehow managed to stumble across this bit of crap, no, I haven't just given out your bank details over the internet. Quite frankly, even if I did know what they were, I'm just about selfish enough and poor enough to keep them to myself.

Anyway, new laptop day came and with a new laptop comes a lot of new features. The laptop was manufactured by Dell, which still isn't enough information for people to hack into your stuff Dad. During setup and the laptop's first usage, extra toolbars and sidebars and weather reports and goodness knows what other extras appeared automatically. My father having adapted to basic Windows functions - and myself being something of a purist anyway - found this distracting, unnecessary and ultimately a pain in the ass. Somewhere in the teething problems, the barrage of questions and the disabling of annoying extra features which, quite frankly, hinder more than they help, relations between my father and Internet Service Provider (the cool kids call that the ISP, innit?) stumbled over an impromptu password reset.

Now the router's lost its password protection and my second technology gripe of the week lies within this unprotected mess. Signal, service, coverage, bandwidth... whatever you wanna call it; it's gone downhill since that day and my hunch is that people in the surrounding dwellings have clocked onto some free internet they can leech off of. YouTube videos now stop, begin to buffer and eventually crash some seventeen seconds in, and yes, I know I use the number 17 as a funny random number (along with the number 73 for reasons my brain still hasn't yet fathomed) but I'm not exaggerating here. Seventeen seconds is literally the point at which many video clips stop at now. Sometimes, if I'm really lucky, they make it to eighteen, but that's about it.

More time-based dramas exist inside my iPod Touch. Now this is one machine which seems to have grown consciousness and a severe dislike for me becoming an entity which likes to systematically piss me off. Being unlike many of my fellow kind, I like to listen to entire albums in tracklisted order; I deal with life better when things are organised and I know what to expect. Sure, putting it on shuffle feels more like an adventure, but I couldn't live like that every day. Long story short, I need to maintain regularity. However, I recently discovered that the iPod has spontaneously begun to skip parts of tracks and even whole tracks altogether. Upon further examination, the damned thing's unpredictability isn't quite as unpredictable as I'd first thought. However, it is pretty odd so bear with me.

Firstly, tracks one and two of any playlist, whether an album or completely random, will play through just fine. The third track will begin fourteen seconds in thus completely disregarding a kick-ass intro if the third track in the list just so happened to have an intro worthy of note. The next four tracks play fine. The iPod then skips to the last second of track eight. Doesn't matter what it is, doesn't matter how long it lasts, it'll play the last second and then buggar off to track nine. Tracks from then on play as according to schedule. This means that albums consisting of some 10-12 tracks now become pointless and the only way to truly enjoy uninterrupted walking around music is to put things on a random play all and skip the first eight tracks hoping that none of them are going to be any good. I expect such a First World problem to stick with me for at least the next two months as I await to be let back into my University home where my desktop computer is which has all the music on it, at which time I'll be able to reset the thing without fear of losing all the music from it. Apparently, the thought never occurred to me to keep a copy of it all on the notebook I bring with me when I'm banished from the learning place for several weeks at a time.

Finally, a look forward to the future, where the Digital Age will no doubt kick my ass something rotten until I learn my lesson not to have fun with technology. Many events - more specifically, TV events - have occurred lately, during which I've discovered the medium of liveblogging. This seems to fuse three of the things I enjoy in life: writing, watching TV, and frequently updating a piece of text in which I comment on what I've just watched on the TV. Okay, that last one is really a fusion of the first two, but mainly the point is I've seen it happen with so many TV events this year including, but not limited to, the final of The Apprentice, the final of The Voice, Eurovision, The Diamond Jubilee Concert, the entirety of the Diamond Jubilee weekend for that matter, every England match during Euro 2012 and probably an episode of Deal Or No Deal or something. Wanting to get in on the action, but using a blog-hosting site (this one!) which doesn't offer liveblogging services, I'm going to have to improvise by constantly updating a single blog post every few minutes or so much to the annoyance of all who bother to be able to see it. And what better way to attempt this than at the next TV event; the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics in ten days time.

Just thought I'd give some advance notice/warning that that's what I'll be spending my Friday night doing.