Tag: Tech

Plug and sigh

Daily writing prompt
Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.
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Weird, I know. My first thought as I looked across my tatty desk. Cables are irritating. Even the alternative is irritating. Tapping away at this keyboard I’m tied by a slim black wire that runs off into a darkened place. If I had a wireless keyboard, I’d be doubly irritated. Sure, as eggs are eggs the battery would not be charged when I needed it to be charged. And I would have put the battery charger away in a box and forgotten where I’d put it.

They’re everywhere. Cables and connectors. This could be the century of the cable, much a the last one. Dam things are cash cows too. Companies like to extract the maximum consideration out of us. Our fantastically capable new tech is useless unless we dip into our pockets and buy cables with just the right connector[1].

Fine, there have been attempts to overcome this bond we have with wires. Wireless charging and wireless connections don’t always deliver what they say on the box. They can be as much faff as plugging in cables. Physics dictates those energetic electrons like conductors. When power is needed, travelling faster and further through wires. Whizzing along with the potential to do work wherever they end up.

If I take the bigger picture, the situation is not so simple. Wires dedicated to communication are going out of fashion. Once upon a time copper wires brough the telephone into the house. Now, that communication is optical. Light flashes to the tune of the ones and noughts we seek.

Getting power from A to B, storing it and using it as needed, there lies unending challenges. From the mega to the micro level. Controversies about huge electricity pylons straddling the countryside. To powering the lean electronics hidden in the plastic case of my keyboard.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of wires. And danced the earth on laughter-powered things.

To borrow a poetic line on flying[2]. If only we could loose this bond forever. Unlikely as it seems. In my profession we contend with the fact that civil aircraft, where lightness equals profit, there’s between 100 and 200 miles of wires.

Let’s think. Will this be perpetual? Put aside all the steps that machines may advance, at some level they come down to wires and multiple connections. In a way, lucky for us. That means there will always be an off switch.

[1] https://newsthump.com/2018/05/21/man-decides-to-keep-box-of-cables-hes-has-since-2002-for-another-year/

[2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/157986/high-flight-627d3cfb1e9b7

Time

My watch is playing up. It tends to freeze its screen. Any amount of pressing of buttons doesn’t have the desired effect. This is the third Garmin watch that has graced my arm. This one is full of smart features. Not, that I need a fraction of what it can do. Up until now it’s been faithful. So, I’m annoyed that it’s behaving badly.

These trails and tribulations led me to going back to a conventional watch. Dial and hands. A slightly more up-market Swiss watch that has been worn more on special occasions than the everyday Garmin. I like it. Only it’s metal, chunky and weighty. More of a real proper watch than the plastics of the Garmin. More residual value too.

This moment of reflection is about the demise of the traditional wristwatch. They haven’t gone out of fashion entirely. In fact, there’s more fashion watches displayed in shop windows than ever. But I wonder who buys them? I’m reliably led to believe that young people use their phone to tell the time. That simple but essential act. Since the mobile phone is almost inseparable from the human hand it’s pushed other devices into the wilderness. It does it all.

Maybe a couple of decades ago, I’d feel awkward if I’d forgotten to put my watch on in the morning. It would sit there expectantly. Its role was essential. Although timepieces were ubiquitous, around the house, car, and work, the only one that was personal was my own watch.

There wasn’t the necessity for a device to be “smart” either. A watch was a watch. A camera was a camera. A phone was a phone. A Walkman was a Walkman. The list goes on. Making this point makes me feel like a primitive relic from a long-forgotten past.

In the land that time forgot. No, not me. Time has always been important. If it’s not planning or scheduling, I’ve a fair amount of project management activity in my past. Deadlines, milestones, and critical paths coloured up on Gantt Charts[1]. Yes, time and tide wait for no man. A nice little idiom.

Time can be personal. At one time my mother had the kitchen wall clock set about 5-minutre in advance. The underlying idea being that if you were a moment or two late in starting or finishing a job then you were not late in reality. Even better when the deception instilled a bit of urgency into a task when in-fact there was time enough.

Going back further, I remember a childhood conversation with an ancient distant relative who lived in the shadow of a towering railway viaduct. Time then, in the small hamlet where he lived, was linked to the time of the steam trains on the Somerset and Dorset line. No need for clocks. Farm routines, like bringing the cows in for milking were arranged according to passing trains.

I expect I’ll get my Garmin watch, with its accurate navigation functions, up and running again. It may need a new battery. I do wonder if I need the precision or the range of its capabilities. Like the technology packed in my phone, its use is more habit than necessity, in a lot of cases. We are beguiled by “can do” technology.

[1] The first Gantt chart was devised in mid 1890s by Karol Adamiecki, an engineer who ran a steelworks in southern Poland.