Skip to main content

Head in The Cloud

Image
By

If there’s a 50% chance of getting a USB plug in the right way up, why do I get it wrong 80% of the time?

I thought it was all supposed to be wireless by now, anyway?

Apparently, we’re all heading into a bright new digital dawn, where we won't have to worry about actually owning or storing any physical or digital copies of music, films, photos etc. They'll all be in The Cloud. We won't even need to have software on our computers - it'll all be in The Cloud and you'll just access it from your teensy touch-screen wotsit via the kind of mega broadband connection that would make the channel tunnel look like an anorexic drinking straw.

Yes, the future is very exciting indeed. None of that hanging around when you’ve clicked on anything – it’ll be instantaneous. In fact, you won’t even be clicking, just touching the screen. Having said that, the finger mark mess on my screen in the office, caused by colleagues pointing at stuff with their unhygienic digits, would suggest that may not be the optimum approach. My computer isn’t even touch screen anyway.

Perhaps we won’t even need to touch the screen, just look at it in a funny way, much as people do in coffee shops when I get inexplicably excited about chocolate sprinkles on my cappuccino.

Or maybe there won’t even be screens! Maybe we’ll be part of the web ourselves, hooked into the non-stop, lurid, pulsating wonder of absolutely everything, ever, 24 hours a day, by the sort of technology that makes NASA look like me with a soldering iron in my cellar. (Please don’t tell anyone about my space programme though. Next door’s cat is already suspicious.)

Think about it... and it happens. You could be talking to someone on the other side of the planet, and they would seem to be right in front of you. Go to a gig from the comfort of your living room, with optional burger-based disappointment, £5 for a warm lager and that very tall guy right in front of you, for added authenticity. Absolutely anything you could possibly imagine (and quite a few things you haven’t) will be available instantaneously.

The glowing, inviting, wondrous warmth of a liberated technological future awaits us. Rejoice!

Except... we’ll probably all die before much longer, drowned in a maelstrom of squirming, tentacle-like cables, dragging us down into the cyber abyss. We all own a stupid amount of gadgets nowadays: laptop, phone, mp3 player, digital camera, games console, and they all come with a cable.

I have an entire drawer filled with bloody chargers, cables and connectors that I have absolutely no idea fit what, yet I dare not throw them away in case I need them. I swear to God that every time I open the drawer, there are more. The death of society is already underway – the cables of doom are multiplying.

Soon they will rise up in a tide of black, cabley malevolence and engulf us all with their interconnectedivityness. Assuming they don’t get hopelessly tangled up in the process.

Have a Cloudless weekend.

If you can.

This post first appeared in my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column in the North West Evening Mail on Friday 29th June 2012. This is the unedited version - you can view the printed/online version here: Guess what? THEY ACTUALLY USED MY TITLE!!!! Unfortunately, it got posted straight into the Column Archive section on their site. Ah well - 50% win. Interestingly, this one lost about 20% of it's word count, cut down to 423 from 527. Consider this the Extended Remix. It'd be grand to see some comments, so please go there and leave one. A nice one, if you like. Or a bad one. It's a democracy, after all.)

(Appropriately, this blog post has taken place to the sound of Kraftwerk's Minimum-Maximum album. Music Non Stop? Techno Pop.)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making an exhibition of yourself

By
Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Schaf Shuffle

By
The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...
Post a Comment
Read more

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

By
We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...
Post a Comment
Read more