Posted on January 11, 2006 4:51 PM by chadley
I have told my wife that if we ever won the lottery, and I'm talking millions of dollars here, I wouldn't care if I ever used a computer again. She expressed her doubts. It is true; I really like all the different things that I can do with a computer. I can share pictures with my friends and family. I can edit videos taken with my digital camcorder and make them available through various means for home viewing or for sharing on the web. I can keep track of my finances. I can write little programs that make my life easier.But if you think that I love the computer itself, the machine with all its complicated systems and connections, you're wrong. If I won the lottery, I wouldn't have to do a lot of what I do now on the computer. If I really wanted all that, I could pay somebody else to do it for me. That somebody else could then be the guy who has to worry about why every so often Mozilla Firefox crashes when I try to print something. He'll be the guy to figure out why the wireless router isn't working correctly since the recent power outage, or why the installed firewall has started blocking print requests again. He'll be the guy wondering why the latest update for Microsoft Money seems to have broken the ability to synchronize with MS Money on my PocketPC. Maybe he'll be able to explain why the ftp server that has worked well for months and months seems to be somehow breaking the linksys router, causing it to stop allowing requests to the internet from the home network, while the internet requests to the web server still work.
Computers like to fail you when you need them the most. Here’s a scenario. My wife is sending some kind of document using snail mail. She wants to make a photocopy of the paperwork before she sends it out. “Honey, can you make a copy of this before I mail it?” “Why yes.” I reply. I sit down in front of the computer, put the document in the scanner, and click on the icon to start up iCarbon or some other graphics app that should be able to use the scanner. Of course, the scanner is connected via USB, and today of all days, doesn’t want to cooperate. It isn’t the scanner; it’s the USB connection or the computer, heck I don’t know. So I unplug the USB cable and plug it back in. It makes the little noise that USB devices make when coming and going. Still no response. I unplug it again, re-plugging it into a different USB port. Now, Windows thinks it’s a device that it has never seen before in its life and wants to know if it can look out on the internet for a driver. Why? You have the driver. Why can’t you recognize it when I plug it into a different port? Oh well, that’s life. Go ahead. Look for the driver for this “new” device. It finds something and like 5 minutes later, it thinks everything is installed. I go into the scanning application. Still no response. Argh! Time for a reboot. Meanwhile, my wife is patiently waiting. I have a mental image of a foot tapping in my head…
Technology also begets the need for more technology. I just got a really cool new cell phone. It has all kinds of features. It has an mp3 player, speakerphone, Bluetooth, and of course a camera that can do both video and stills (1.3 megapixels). I assume it also performs some telephonic functions as well, although the verdict is still out on that. Unfortunately, all these extra features require that I purchase more expensive accessories to take full advantage of them. The phone has a mini SD card slot. I have a number of regular sized SD cards, but I don’t have a mini SD card, so I have to buy one of those. The phone is Bluetooth enabled but of course to use that I’ll have to purchase a Bluetooth headset. It seems like most of the time you get something cool, you’re going to have to buy a few other things to take advantage of its coolness. I don’t even want to think about all the money I’ve spent on XBOX accessories.
Of course, being a multi-millionaire, I probably won't have much interest in websites and programming and wireless XBOX controllers and playing mp3’s on my cell phone. I won’t care about getting Yahoo! email to recognize that emails from my own email address are NOT bulk mail. I won’t be interested in writing .NET code to programmatically crop images and rotate them and make thumbnails. I guess what I'm trying to say is this. Anybody who enjoys all the different parts of this site: the football pool, the photos, the gift registry, the photoshop contest, the videos, and everything else... You should be hoping that I never win the lottery. If I were to do that, I might just walk away from all this technology and never look back.
“There is no spoon.”
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Tags: Lottery, Rant, Technology