#oneaday Day 591: Proper Intarnetz Plz

You don’t realise how much you’re going to miss the “proper” Internet until you don’t have it. I’m writing this using a T-Mobile 3G dongle which, to be fair, works perfectly fine for the most part (except for the data limits, which make it impractical for use for anything more than fairly light web browsing) but it’s 1) not as fast as “proper” Internet and 2) rather more expensive at £2 per day.

Proper Internet for us is still about two weeks away. I’ve never quite understood exactly why it takes so long for Internet access (and a phone line, for that matter) to reach your house. After all, in most cases the infrastructure is already in place. Okay, sure, sometimes they have to “send an engineer out” but the last few times I’ve set up my own Internet access said engineer has done very little besides bring some equipment. While the personal touch is nice, I’d be happier with receiving it by post if someone can just flip a switch a bit quicker.

I know, I know, it’s probably considerably more complicated than that, and with all the households in the UK, the finite stock of engineers which can be sent out at any one time only goes so far. But have a heart; how will I watch endless cat videos, play stupid Flash games and indeed download the gigabytes of updates my reinstalled (again) Mac insists are absolutely necessary?

That said, where we are now is certainly a far cry from just five to ten years ago. I recall struggling on with dial-up Internet for a few weeks when moving in to a new place, and inevitably forgetting to disconnect it at one point only to confront the next person to pick the phone up with digital squealing. And even further back than that, I recall dial-up Internet being the only Internet. Getting some time on the Internet (after 6pm, naturally) was a real treat, and downloading a file of 1MB or more was something you had to plan ahead for.

In some ways, I miss those days. It made browsing the Web seem like a “special” experience — particularly with the pain in the arse it was to get some browsers working with certain ISPs. Nowadays, we just take our Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia for granted.

I guess it’s one way of the human race showing how adaptable it is. Give the people a new tool to use and it won’t be very long in the grand scheme of things before its widespread adoption worldwide. Perhaps our bodies have stopped evolving, and all future evolution will be done in the digital space?

Perhaps. It sounds like an exciting sci-fi future. But it’s all very well until there’s a power cut.

#oneaday, Day 238: Nerd Rage

As a new acquaintance from Twitter would say, nerd rage is one of the most formidable forces known to Man. It is a dreadful and terrible force, both specific and unfocused at the same time, often showing itself via the personification of inanimate objects who really don’t know any better and are just attempting to do their job and failing. Raging at said inanimate objects or poorly-constructed pieces of software rarely does any good, but it is commonly assumed that it makes one “feel better”.

As the years have passed, though, everyone’s bullshit-tolerance threshold has lowered significantly to the stage we’re at now, where if something doesn’t work immediately and instantly and then remain working 100% of the time, people blow their top and spew their vitriol to whoever will listen, which is usually the Internet. Assuming the Internet connection isn’t the thing which is causing the nerd rage, in which case alternative outlets have to be explored.

This is why issues such as the Xbox 360’s infamous “red ring of death” smart so much. Not only is it a shoddy flaw in the system which should never happen in the first place, but people’s tolerance for such shoddiness is far lower now than it would have been, say, twenty or thirty years ago. Hell, in the days of the NES, everyone was quite happy to accept the fact that if a game didn’t boot up first time, it clearly and obviously meant that you had to blow in it to “get the dust out” despite no actual evidence that it was actually dust causing the game not to work correctly. And no evidence that those tiny flecks of gob that probably got into the cartridge circuitry while you were blowing in it actually helped matters, either.

It’s also why we get such whingers in places such as Apple’s App Store. “OMG 1 STAR COZ IT DIDNT WORK ONCE THIS IS A DIGSRACE REFUND PLZ”. “Is it working now?” “Yes, but…” (etc.)

It’s fair enough to want things to “just work”. Apple in particular like to pride themselves on the fact that their products “just work” (which they do approximately 95% of the time, which means the remaining 5% incites nerd rage of a degree you’ve never seen before, particularly amongst recent converts and/or Android users). But it’s worth remembering a time not so long ago when we enjoyed tape load errors, boot errors, numerical error codes you had to look up in a book, garbled graphics, tape decks that chewed up tapes and then spat them out, CD players that seemed to deliberately wait for you to insert your favourite disc then sprout internal blades to scratch the crap out of it and dial-up network connections where it was possible to get a “busy” signal for hours at a time. And there was no Internet to spew your vitriol over back then.

Nowadays we have complicated devices and software that no-one except superhumans understand really, and established solutions such as blowing on it, shaking it, hitting it, shouting at it, turning it off and back on again and setting fire to it don’t work. So the only thing left to do is get frustrated. And possibly call up one of those superhumans. Because everybody knows at least one. (Note: If you don’t know a superhuman nerd or don’t want to bother them, you can save yourself a lot of time by referring to this chart.)

In other news, the router here is rubbish and crap and I hate it and it disconnects Xbox LIVE every five minutes when I’m playing Fable II and it doesn’t like WordPress and SRSLY who uses AOL nowadays anyway and… (repeat to fade)

#oneaday, Day 204: Inconveniences of the Modern Age

It’s difficult to argue with the fact that, on the whole, life is somewhat better now than it was in, say, the Middle Ages. People live longer, we have more things to do, we are healthier, we have things to keep us entertained and we can travel around pretty much the whole world on a whim.

So, unlike the Middle Ages, where inconveniences tended to be along the lines of “Agatha has consumption” (whatever that is) or “My liege! Thy oxen have run riot throughout the city streets!” or “My, verily that courtesan was riddled with the plague! Farewell, my sweet!”, we now have our own set of things to grind our teeth about. It’s something of a sign of the times. And living in the first world.

Peculiar Bureaucracy

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy,” said Oscar Wilde and possibly some other people as well. And indeed it appears to be true. When it is impossible to cancel one’s broadband contract in advance because “policy states” that they have a 14-day notice period, one naturally points out that it is well above 14 days before one will be leaving one’s property. But no, “policy states” that a 14-day notice period means exactly that: they will turn it off after exactly 14 days. And not only that, they will charge £26 for the privilege of a man flipping a switch.

This is Orange Home, incidentally. Don’t use them. They’re rubbish. And they have stupid policies. To put this in some context, I phoned BT to cancel my phone line the same day and they were quite happy to cancel it more than 14 days in advance.

Companies That Still Use Fax Machines

We’re in the 21st century! We have email on our phones! We have constantly-on Internet connections! We have printers! So why the bloody hell do I need to use a fax machine in order to send a timesheet to you? You know a scanned copy actually looks better than a faxed copy, right? And you can print it out and everything!

My Battery Is Dead

Have you noticed as phones have got more useful and multi-functional that their daily lifespan has shortened significantly? I remember having a shitty old Motorola brick that sent text messages and made phone calls and that was about it—this was pre-Snake days, even—and it would last about five years before needing a charge. Now? I have to budget my battery life.

Hai! This Costs Money!

Remember when stuff used to be free? You used to be able to get extra bits and pieces for games online courtesy of developers and mod communities. (I know you still can.) Now you have to pay to read The Times online.

There are some areas in which this is a good thing. Online journalists should be paid for their work, and if the stuff’s out there for free, then it’s not going to be easy for companies to pay them. But at the same time, that stuff which you pay for needs to be worthwhile.

When you have to pay an extra 50p to pay by card in the Chinese restaurant, or pay 30p to use the toilets at a railway station, you know something’s wrong somewhere.

We Will Get Back To You

Remember when email was mooted as the simple, almost-instant communication method of the future? Have you tried sending an email to your local council recently? “We will get back to you within 10 days.”

That’s a long time. I could have actually gone into the council offices several times during that time period. At least ten times, in fact. Given that my query wasn’t an especially complicated one, would it kill them to quickly turn around a reply? And not a copy-and-paste form response, an actual reply? Even if it’s just “Yes”. I’d be more than happy with that. (Assuming “Yes” was the answer I wanted.)